“No, that’s just a bonus. We have a little job for you.”

“I thought I was on permanent disability,” I said. Ed Levine, our mutual boss at Friends of the Family, had officially declared me mentally ill. I knew Ed didn’t really think that I was actually crazy, just that I drove him nuts. Either way, it worked for me.

By the way, my name is Neal Carey. I don’t carry a badge.

Actually I never did. Even in the days when I was working I didn’t have a badge. Or a license or a gun or any of that private eye stuff. I just did the stuff that Friends asked me to do, and if that isn’t crazy…

“We decided that you’ve recovered,” Graham announced.

“No, I’m still crazy.”

“Don’t get your panties all wet,” Graham said. “It’s a short job. In fact, let’s not even call it a job. Let’s call it a errand.”

“What kind of ‘a errand’?”

Because this was no time for a job or an errand. Not only was I getting married in two months, I was also heading into the last semester of my master’s program at Nevada. I even had my thesis, Tobias Smollett and the Image of the Outsider in Eighteenth-Century English Literature, almost finished. Dr. Baskin, my old professor at Columbia, thought he could get me an assistantship in the Ph. D. program there, and Karen was cool about going to New York for a couple of years. So this was no time to get involved in some wacko job for Friends.

And Friends has some wacko jobs, all right. Friends of the Family is a confidential service that “The Bank” in Providence, Rhode Island, provides for its wealthier depositors. I had worked on and off for Friends since the day Graham found my hand in his back pocket.

Graham said, “This old guy wandered away from his home and ended up in Las Vegas. His niece has a couple of million in The Bank and is worried sick about him. Thinks maybe he has Alzheimer’s or something. She’s a friend of the family. We were wondering, what with you being so close, if you’d pick him up and take him home.”