By the end of the week I was practically using them as crutches. Then some fancy clinic charges me four hundred dollars to take enough X rays

to sterilize a thousand-pound gorilla and then tells me to breathe deeply and cough a lot. I didn’t even get a Band-Aid out of it.”

I wince, knowing Dan doesn’t have insurance.

He was almost broke before he left and wouldn’t have gone if it hadn’t been a free trip.

Feeling sorry for him and guilty at the same time, I say, “I’ll buy you lunch. I’ve got a case to run by you.”

As I knew he would, Dan perks up at the mention of food. Gripping the armrests of the chair, he pushes himself up like an old man and looks around my office.

“Where did you get those prints?” he asks respectfully.

“They don’t look too bad.”

“Amy thought,” I say, standing up, too, “my office needed sprucing up.

I gave up on the plants since they insist on being watered.” “You gonna marry Gilchrist?” Dan asks as he follows me out.

“You could do a lot worse.”

“I have done a lot worse,” I remind him, but not responding to his question. Amy, Dan, and I were classmates and friends together in night law school, and he knows about some of the women I dated after my wife Rosa’s death. Actually, Amy and I are considering living together if I

ever get heat in my shiny new house from hell.

At the front desk, Julia grins at Dan.

“You couldn’t look any stiffer if you were mounted on the wall.”

It has taken me years to get used to Julia, a niece of the owner, and I have needed every one of them. She has lifetime security in a job she despises. If that isn’t a prescription for hell on earth, I don’t know what is. As usual, Dan regresses in her presence.