Karen’s blue eyes got serious as she tightened her grip on his shoulders.

“Neal Carey,” she said, “if a woman says she was raped, then she was raped.”

Not necessarily, Neal thought.

It was a little early for a beer, but it was also a little early to be taking on a new case, so Neal popped the cap with only a trace of guilt. Brezhnev, an enormous black dog of indeterminate breed, raised his head an inch off the floor and growled until Neal left a dollar on the counter. Brogan, the owner and namesake of the grubby saloon, snored away behind the bar in the old BarcaLounger he had rescued from the county dump. Neal hadn’t seen Brogan get out of that chair except to go to the john, and there were people in Austin prepared to swear, based on olfactory evidence, that he didn’t always get up for that.

Brogan started snoring. His head was tilted back and something kind of yellow dribbled from the edge of his mouth.

“Is he asleep or faking it?” Graham asked.

Neal looked over at Brezhnev, who kept one narrow eye on him.

“He’s asleep. They take turns when someone is in the bar. The dog won’t go to sleep unless Brogan is awake.”

“He can’t fake out the dog?”

“Nobody can fake out that dog.”

Neal opened a second bottle, hopped back over the bar, and sat down at a table next to Graham, who was busily wiping the greasy tabletop with a handkerchief.

“Isn’t there a clean place in this town?” Graham complained.

“It doesn’t open until dinner,” Neal answered. “So what does the bank have to do with Polly Paget?”

Karen had thrown them out of the house for a while so she could “get Polly settled.” Which, Neal figured, meant putting away her underwear, finding a place for her cosmetics, and pumping her for information.

“Can I have a glass?” Graham asked.

“Brogan probably has one somewhere, but I don’t think you want to see it,” Neal answered. You could pull fifteen years of fingerprints off one of Brogan’s beer glasses.