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you?”
    â€œNice as you are, it’s hard to. This nothing note. Your threatening calls. Phantoms on the street. From what window? Which dog lady?”
    â€œYou were staring straight out there same as me. You didn’t see her?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œAnd that street window across is for you to check. Rap on doors. Do what you’re paid to. I’m only giving ideas. But you figure out how they know when I’ve no customers here and am phoning when I do and so forth. But you’re not going to be any help.”
    â€œI’m not knocking it, and the lure would more than undo me, but maybe you tipple a little too much on the job when you shouldn’t.”
    â€œMe? Only just recently. Ask anyone. Tell them, Lance. You ever see me throw one down before I closed?”
    â€œI’m not sure what I should say for you after that last time, but no I never seen him drink since the mini one they almost had to force down his throat New Year’s or was it Christmas eve?”
    Police finish their drinks and get up to leave. “Anyway, you get something further on them, let us in on it quick. Otherwise, don’t crankcall Stovin’s anymore and subject yourself to arrest. They were being kind specifying us not to bring you in this time, not that you would’ve been held long, but next time on both you might.”
    â€œI get it. Thanks for coming.”
    I answer an apartment ad but then think I’m safer in the hotel. They want to burn me out again let them get past the desk and tobacco stand and all the traffic by the elevators and television lounge first. My room’s small, bed too lumpy and soft, furniture’s depressing, walls need mending, I miss my old things and parrot squawks and not having a refrigerator for early morning snacks and stove for breakfast and view of the planes and helicopters passing and sun rising and pigeons and sometimes gulls flying and tower tips of the lit bridge.
    For a few days I get calls at four or five a.m. from Turner or Pete just saying before they hang up “Sleeping late?” or “Rise and shine!” and once reveille blown on what sounded like a potato flute accompanied in the end by a humming kazoo. After the third call I phone the police and say “All right, you want to see who’s threatening who, start listening on my phone,” but they say there’s a state law forbidding them to tap hotels because they’d also be intercepting and snooping on other guests’ calls.
    So I tell the hotel not to put any calls through to me till eight a.m. But they still manage to get through with excuses to the nightclerk that my wife was just raped and is phoning me from a crisis center or some doctor from a hospital’s calling saying he has to speak to me because my sister just had a stroke in her sleep.
    â€œI have no sister, wife, child or anyone close enough like that to wake me before eight. Unless someone says my bar was broken into or is on fire, tell them to call back.”
    Next call to get through is from someone claiming to be a policeman who says my bar was just robbed. I say “I’ll cab right over,” hang up, call the precinct and find it’s another lie. From then on I don’t let any calls in of any kind till after I awake and phone downstairs and tell them it’s okay.
    Couple of weeks after I last see the police something’s slipped through the door. I’m bent down behind the counter looking for a dropped bottle cap when I hear the mail slot flap clink. I run around the bar to the door. Envelope’s on the floor. Same kind: my initials and address. I don’t even pick it up but run outside and look around. Only a kid on a tricycle and a dog lady but a different one from two weeks before.
    â€œNed,” I yell to the only customer in the bar, “don’t let anyone touch the till.”
    â€œSure, Shaney, but what about my potatoes and grilled