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counter.
    Lou walked through the front door and Joey Giordano rotated slowly away from a stack of pancakes dripping with maple syrup.
    â€˜Where the hell have you been?’
    â€˜Talking to a client.’
    â€˜Yeah, right.’
    Heshy Rigalski’s voice boomed from behind the counter, where he was making a pot of fresh coffee and dumping the remnants of the old pot down the drain. He stood in front of a large steel sink. He turned the water on full force and it sounded as if a pipe had burst in the basement. His balding head was dripping with sweat and the white apron tied around his waist had turned a dingy gray. His Russian accent was still thick, even after forty years behind the counter at the Regal Deli.
    â€˜You are late.’
    â€˜Nice of you to notice, Hesh.’
    â€˜I mean late with the money, Officer. You have balance due. You eat here every day and I don’t see no money. “Put it on tab,” you say.’
    â€˜You’ll get it, Hesh. Stop worrying. Have I ever stiffed you?’
    â€˜I do worry. Your father, he eats here every day, like you. He pays. Every time.’
    â€˜My father was a good man, Hesh, and a good cop. But he’s dead. So for now you’re stuck with me.’
    â€˜Stuck?’
    â€˜Yeah, stuck. It’s an expression, Hesh, like you can’t get rid of me, like I’m sticky with glue, never go away, difficult to peel off. You get it?’
    â€˜I got it. Like fly on flypaper. Flap wings but don’t go nowhere.’
    â€˜You got it, Hesh.’
    Lou cracked a hesitant smile and turned toward a set of swinging double doors where his daughter, Maggie, had emerged from the kitchen in a black apron and white shirt, a yellow pencil tucked behind her ear. She sped past them, grabbing a couple menus off the counter. An elderly couple had taken a booth in the back and Maggie approached them with a smile. She handed them the menus and they sat, squinting at the small lettering and glancing at each other over the top of the molded plastic as if they were still in love after a lifetime of late breakfasts at the Regal Deli. Maggie poured them each a cup of decaf coffee and turned, saving the tail end of her smile for her father.
    Heshy filled a cup of coffee for Lou and set it on the counter in front of him. Maggie slid behind the counter, smoothing back her hair and retying her ponytail. With her hair off her face and flat against her head, Lou thought she looked like her mother back in the day, back when they’d first met, when he believed he’d found a woman who wasn’t afraid of a little hard work, a woman who could deal with the daily struggle of being a cop’s wife. Those days were long gone and now as he took a second look at his daughter, he realized how startling the resemblance actually was. But it was a physical likeness only and as he sipped his coffee, he smiled.
    Lou had arranged for her to work at the Regal while she was in school. At first he’d asked Hesh as a favor, but it turned out to be a good arrangement for everybody. Maggie never had to ask Lou for money and she was typically too tired to do anything but work, study and sleep. Heshy had even offered her one of the apartments over the deli, a one-bedroom with an entrance on the side. She’d gotten excited about it and asked her father for his permission, though she was old enough not to need it.
    She’d been living with him and he’d hoped they would be comfortable together, back in his mother’s house, in the old neighborhood on Meridian Avenue where he’d grown up. The house hadn’t changed that much. The neighborhood had but he’d hoped since she’d come back into his life she could have learned to love the place as he had, let it become a part of her. But she’d found out what had happened there, knew of her grandmother’s murder, knew how long she’d laid there on the floor in the Philadelphia heat. Maggie