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shut the fuck up for once in your life
and listen.”
    Wuntz cleared his throat a couple of times,
giving himself a build-up.
    “Okay, the guy says he’ll see what he can do
and then today he calls me back. He sounds nervous and at first I
don’t get it. I’m not looking to bust anybody’s balls here, I’m
just asking this pansy to check around and see if he can get a
current address on some guy who was a run-of-the-mill marine
captain something like twenty years ago. Then he tells me that this
Austin has a DEA file and I start to pay real close attention.”
    “Harry Austin was a drug dealer?”
    “I don’t think so. This guy says a file was
opened on a routine investigation of Austin several years ago for
some reason he didn’t know anything about. Apparently it turned up
zip. That’s not the point.”
    “Then what is the point, Wuntz?”
    “My guy says the file was closed permanently
two weeks ago.”
    “Because they didn’t find anything?”
    Wuntz blew air into his cheeks, puffing up
like a chipmunk that had just found a particularly nice acorn.
“This guy faxed me a copy of the last document in Austin’s file.
You want to see it?”
    “Sure, let’s have it. After all the
dramatics, I just hope I’m not disappointed.”
    “You won’t be.”
    Wuntz was giving him the eye, Eddie noticed.
What the hell was going on here?
    “So all you wanted to do was to talk to your
old CO, huh?” Wuntz asked.
    Eddie knew that was an introduction, not a
real question, but he nodded anyway. More importantly, he noticed
Wuntz had just switched into the past tense so, when Wuntz reached
into an inside pocket of his jacket and handed Eddie a single sheet
of paper folded lengthwise, Eddie was pretty sure what he was going
to see on it, although of course he had no idea as to what form the
details would take.
    Eddie unfolded the sheet and studied the
smudged photocopy of a newspaper clipping while Wuntz walked around
behind him and stood looking over his shoulder. The clipping
appeared to be from an inside page of some newspaper, the right
side just above the fold. It was obviously a foreign paper since it
was printed in some bizarre-looking language that Eddie couldn’t
even hope to make any sense out of.
    Of course, he had been right about what to
expect. Both he and Wuntz stood silently for a few moments, looking
down at the copy of the clipping and contemplating the blood and
guts photograph that took up the entire top half of it: a man’s
battered body sprawled lifelessly in a muddy street somewhere.
    “Jesus Christ,” Eddie finally said in a voice
that was much smaller than he would really have liked, “look at
that.”
    The head of the man in the picture seemed
perfectly normal on one side. A dark eye stared so directly into
the lens of the camera you could almost imagine it was about to
blink. The other side of his head was something else again. It
resembled a ripe pomegranate that had been dropped onto the street
from a very great height.
    Recognizing Harry Austin after twenty years
would probably have been hard enough anyway, Eddie thought as he
examined the clipping, and having only half a head to work with
didn’t make the task any easier. Maybe this wasn’t him. Then Eddie
noticed two words in Western script that stood out quite clearly
among the monotonous lines of unfathomable print below the picture:
Harry Austin.
    “After everything he lived through, he walks
down the wrong street on the wrong day and dies in an accident. It
doesn’t seem right,” Eddie said, then he looked up and caught the
strange look on Wuntz’s face. “What?”
    “You’re assuming this was an accident.”
    Eddie quickly glanced down at the clipping
again to see if he was missing something, but nothing jumped out at
him and he shifted his eyes back to Wuntz.
    “It wasn’t?”
    “My guy says DEA thinks maybe it wasn’t.”
    “Why would they think that?”
    “He didn’t know. He’d just heard around that
some people