The young brown guy, the slightly older black guy, and the old white guy had been in the room for thirty minutes and now the sweat was running down their arms. They didn’t need to be reminded, but the black guy went and said it anyway.

“Damn, it’s hot.”

“It ain’t so hot,” the old white guy said. “Panama was hot. Somalia was hotter. Kuwait was really hot, but that was a dry heat. Now, you take your triple-canopy jungle in Laos…”

“Don’t start,” the black guy said.

The temperature in the windowless room had topped ninety degrees at ten A.M., and that was half an hour ago. The room was in a suite of unused offices in an almost vacant strip mall off Highway 12 on the western edge of the Detroit metro area. The building was deserted except for a one-room telemarketing sweatshop at the other end.

The white guy was closer to sixty than to fifty, and his shaggy white-blond hair was shot with gray, and he’d given up trying to hide the bald spot on top. Once he’d been cinched down tight all over. Now his skin and muscles were starting to look like they were a size too large. He shook his head, toed the dirty carpeting, and laughed.

“Figures. No A/C. No nothing. Lookit this place. Some op. Shows how much we rate. Where are we? Inkster? What kind of name is that?”

“Yeah, yeah,” said the black guy, who was in his late twenties. Unlike his older partner, he enjoyed looking in the mirror every morning. His skin fit him nice and tight.

They wore Nikes and faded jeans and oversized polo shirts that did not entirely conceal the holstered Berettas, the pagers, the plastic hand ties and cell phones hanging from their belts. They were obviously exhausted. They had not shaved in the last twenty-four hours.