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the street, passing businesses that looked like they’d been dying since the 1970s—Blue Star Auto Store, Super Deal Food & Liquor, Giant Slice Pizza. The two men stayed across the street, where developers had knocked down old buildings and built gated condos and landscaped high-rises. The one in the black coat talked on a cell phone.
    At the corner of Cermak, I went left and they trotted across the street and followed me under the El tracks. At Wabash, a plastic sign advertising MUFFLERS 4 LESS banged in the wind. I crossed, passed a place that sold POLLO AL CARBON through an outside walk-up window, and slipped into the Velvet Lounge.
    If the guys from the SUV wanted to join me for a drink, I would buy them a round. If they wanted to shoot me, there wasn’t a lot I could do to stop them.
    At a quarter to seven on a cold November evening, the Velvet Lounge was almost empty. A recording of Coleman Hawkins played on the stereo. The room smelled like spilled liquor. The paneling on the walls was blond pressboard and the posters of jazz greats were framed in plastic, but the bar top was heavy oak covered with polished glass. Behind it, liquor bottles stood in an art deco display. The place put its money where it mattered.
    As I sat on a stool, the door swung open and the men from the SUV came in. They sat at a table facing me. A pistol showed on the hip of the guy in black, and, if you bothered to look, the camouflage jacket bulged over a shoulder holster.
    The bartender, a brown-skinned man in jeans and a black guayabera shirt, brought me a shot of Early Times and a glass of water. A waitress with blond, stringy hair took care of the men at the table. She had a low-cut blouse and leaned over their table like she expected them to tuck ten-dollar bills inside, but they kept their eyes on me.
    When we had our drinks, I considered leaving mine on the bar, going to the men’s room, slipping through a window, and catching a taxi for the airport. I had enough cash for cab fare and a credit card would take me the rest of the way.
    I stood with my whiskey and brought it to the table where the men were sitting. I sat down across from them. They didn’t seem surprised by my company.
    I drank the shot, let its burn warm my throat and stomach, felt the heat rise to my head. “Okay,” I said. “What now?”
    The man in black said, “We’re worried about you, Joe.”
    “My ex-wife’s worried about me too. Maybe we could start a club. Like a fan club but with hand wringing.”
    He shook his head. “Don’t be a smart-ass. It doesn’t work for you.”
    “I’m sitting at a table with two guys who put a bullet in the rear panel of my car, and I have the feeling these guys are cops who undoubtedly can explain why the bullet is in my car in a way that doesn’t involve them personally. Basically I’m screwed if you want me to be. So being a smart-ass is all I’ve got.”
    “The key is that we shot the bullet into the rear panel instead of your head. So you could try a little humility.”
    The bartender watched our table like he knew something was wrong, but he didn’t reach for the telephone. Not yet.
    “What do you want from me?” I said. “You want to scare me? You’ve done it and can go home. You want something else, you’d better talk fast because I’m planning to drink until I can’t hear you anymore.”
    I signaled to the bartender and tapped my shot glass.
    The guy in camouflage said, “You made a big mess at Southshore. It’s the kind of mess that you can’t clean up. So, you just need to build on top of it as if it isn’t there. You understand?”
    “Not in the least,” I said.
    He said, “If you want, we can forget about what happened at Southshore. We can start from here.”
    Nothing I would like better. “Why would you want to do that?”
    “Three good cops are dead, two wounded. Nothing you can do to change that now. Nothing we can do either. So why bother trying? We’ll move on.”
    “Three good