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the Golden Gate.
    Almost before he knew it, twenty years
slipped away, gone like a goddamned bullet. Oh, Lord, he had begun
sighing to himself whenever he thought about it, what the hell
happened to them?
    “Hey, fella. You know who you look like?”
    A voice behind Eddie shook him out of his
reverie.
    “That actor. You know…”
    Eddie had noticed the guy in the brown
leather bomber-jacket eyeing him, so he wasn’t particularly
surprised when he started in. Whenever Eddie saw somebody looking
at him like that, and it was way too often as far as he was
concerned, it always came down to the same thing.
    “You look like…” The man wiggled his left
index finger at Eddie and tossed in a little finger popping for
punctuation. “You know, that actor…Bruce Willis! Yeah, that’s it!
Bruce Willis! Anyone ever tell you that you look exactly like Bruce
Willis, man?”
    The guy grinned triumphantly at Eddie and
then he twisted around to a thin woman with a pinched face and tiny
lips who was waiting for him at a table and grinned some more.
    Big deal, Eddie thought as he always did. Big
fucking deal.
    He arched his eyebrows steeply and keeping
his face otherwise expressionless nodded very slowly a couple of
times over his shoulder before returning his full attention to his
Diet Coke. That just made things worse, he knew—it was exactly what
Bruce Willis had done a hundred times in the movies—but it was
still a look that Eddie particularly favored whenever the subject
came up. The ambiguity of it appealed to him.
    When he heard the stool next to him scrape
back a few moments later, Eddie glanced over and was surprised to
see Kelly Wuntz sliding onto it. It had been three days since Eddie
asked Wuntz if he could do something through SFPD to get a line on
Harry Austin and he had heard nothing from him since. He figured
that was a write-off, especially since his own efforts to locate
Captain Austin had come to exactly nothing either. As far as he
could tell, Austin had vanished cleanly off the face of the earth
after he left the marines in 1975.
    Wuntz had an odd look on his face, but before
Eddie could say anything about it Wuntz held a finger up to his
lips and shook his head vigorously to indicate that Eddie should
remain silent. Eddie looked around the bar, but there was no one
near enough to overhear them; and besides, he was only going to ask
Wuntz how he was doing.
    Wuntz eased up off the bar stool and walked
away, gesturing for Eddie to follow. Even for Kelly Wuntz that was
peculiar behavior so, half out of curiosity and half just to humor
him, Eddie did. He trailed along behind as Wuntz went up the stairs
at the end of the bar and disappeared into the men’s toilet. When
Eddie followed him inside, he found Wuntz checking under the stall
doors.
    “I’ve got something on your old captain,”
Wuntz said very quietly when he was satisfied they were alone. “But
first I have to ask you a couple of questions.”
    “Shoot,” Eddie answered, immediately
regretting his choice of word.
    “When was the last time you saw Austin?”
    “I don’t know.” Eddie thought about it. “Not
since I was discharged.”
    “Have you heard from him?”
    Eddie just shook his head.
    “You sure?”
    “Of course I’m sure. What is this,
Wuntz?”
    Wuntz was still looking at him in a funny way
and Eddie started getting a bad feeling.
    “You asked me to check on this Austin guy for
you and I did. There’s this DEA fruit I busted a few months ago in
a gay cat house over in the Castro and then cut loose, so I figured
he might be just the guy to poke around with the feds for me.”
    “If you’re going through all this just to
tell me that Austin’s gay, I don’t really care. I just want to talk
to him, not sleep with him.”
    “Look, Dare, you want to hear what I’ve got
or not?”
    Eddie nodded vaguely, trying not to look too
excited, which was fairly easy based on how the conversation with
Wuntz had gone up to that point.
    “Then