Hardy picked up his Guinness and downed the last two inches. “You think he really might do it, don’t you.”

“Yep. I’m afraid I do.”

“Jesus…”

“One other thing…”

“Yeah?”

“I thought you might recommend what kind of gun.”

Jane was in Hong Kong buying clothes for I. Magnin. She would be back this weekend.

They hadn’t quite formalized living together again, although some of Jane’s clothes hung in the closet in Hardy’s bedroom. She still had her house-their old house-on Jackson, and would stay there once in a while, on nights she worked late downtown. But three or four nights a week for the past three months she’d slept here, out in the Avenues, with her ex-husband.

Padding now from room to room, he realized how much he had come to need her again. Well, not need. You didn’t really need anybody to survive. But once you got beyond survival, you needed somebody if you wanted to feel whole, or alive, or whatever it was that made getting up something to look forward to rather than dread.

After he’d finished his shift and Moses McGuire had come in to spell him at the Shamrock, he shot five or six games of 301 to keep his hand-eye sharp. The newly formed flights worked well, and he held his place at the line until he was ready to quit, leaving unbeaten.

He drove home in darkness, parking his Suzuki Samurai, which he called his Seppuku, on the street in front of the only white picket fence on the block. Inside, he cooked a steak in a black cast-iron pan and ate it with a can of peas.

He fed the tropical fish in the tank in the bedroom, read a hundred pages of Barbara Tuchman and realized anew that the world had probably always been very much like the wonderful place it was today; he went into his office to open his safe and look at his guns.

He’d recommended to Rusty that he consider buying a regulation.38 police Special. It was a no-frills firearm that, using hollow-point slugs, you nicked a guy on the pinkie and he’d spin around like a ballerina and hit the ground.