I went back into the bar. The men looked at me, then at the door. They reached their own conclusions and went on with the poker hand. It was the usual crew, the kind of guys you didn’t even have to say hello to, even if you hadn’t seen them in a week. You just sat down and looked at your cards. I held a napkin over my eye to stop the bleeding.

“That clown must have stood there for two hours waiting for you,” Jackie said. “What was his beef?”

“Thinks I took his job,” I said. “He used to do some work for Uttley.”

“A private investigator? Him?”

“He likes to think so.”

“I wouldn’t pay him two cents to find his own dick.”

“Why would you pay a man to find his own dick?” a man named Rudy asked.

“I wouldn’t,” Jackie said. “It’s just an expression.”

“It’s not an expression,” Rudy said. “If it was an expression, I would have heard it before.”

“It’s an expression,” Jackie said. “Tell him it’s an expression, Alex.”

“Just deal the cards,” I said.

I played some poker and had a few slow beers. Jackie went over the bridge every week to get good beer from Canada, just one more reason to love the place. I forgot all about trailer parks and pissed-off ex-private eyes for a while. I figured that was enough drama for one night. I figured I was allowed to relax a little bit and maybe even start to feel human again.

But the night had other plans for me. Because that’s when Edwin Fulton had to come into the place. Excuse me, Edwin J. Fulton the third. And his wife, Sylvia. They just had to pick this night to drop by.

They had obviously just been to some sort of soiree. God knows where you’d even find a soiree in the whole Upper Peninsula, but leave it to Edwin. He was decked out in his best gray suit, a charcoal overcoat, and a red scarf wrapped around his collar just right. The suit was obviously tailored to make him look taller, but it could only do so much. He was still a good six inches shorter than his wife.