“Help you?” Hardy asked, then, as he looked more closely, the pieces began to fall into place. “Rusty?” The man let loose a low-watt smile that seemed to require an effort. He stepped closer to the bar. “Ten points.” He stuck his hand over the bar and Hardy took it. “How you doin’, Diz?” The voice was quiet and assured, cultured.

Hardy asked what he was drinking and said it was on him.

“Same as always.”

Hardy closed his eyes, trying to remember, then turned and reached up to the top shelf, grabbed a bottle of Wild Turkey, and snuck a glance at the man who’d shared his office back in the days when they’d both worked for the district attorney.

Rusty Ingraham had aged. There was, of course, the hair, or lack of it. At twenty-five, Rusty had sported a shock of orange-red hair and a handlebar mustache. Now, with no facial hair except the stubble, bald on top and gray on the sides, he looked old-handsome still, but old.

Hardy poured him a double.

“Prodigious,” Rusty Ingraham said, nodding at his glass.

Hardy shrugged. “You know somebody at all, you know what they drink.”

“Well, you found your calling.” He lifted the glass, Hardy raised his pint, and they both said “Skol.”

“So”-Hardy put down his glass-“you still a lawyer?”

Ingraham’s lips turned up, yet there was a gentleness Hardy hadn’t seen before. Before he’d left the D.A.’s, Ingraham might have had some sensitivity but it didn’t ever come out gentle. Now his half-smile was that of a man looking back only. The good times, whatever they’d been, would never-could never-return. He sipped slowly at his whisky. “You must have been out of the field a while yourself if you still call them lawyers.”