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why I didn’t like that kind of talk. Maybe I pictured my Dad as a gentleman. Who knew? I sure as hell didn’t. He might’ve been a foul-mouthed bastard.
    So here again I sat, smelling disinfectant and stale beer, feeling the crunch of peanut shells and the tacky pull of the floor. A waitress with battle hips and steel wool hair approached. Her aura of weary friendliness evaporated the instant she saw me.
    “Hey, Maureen,” said Bart.
    Maureen looked nervously over her shoulder at the man behind the bar, an old jock gone to seed. Clearly the new owner.
    “Listen, um, Bart,” said Maureen. “It ain’t me, but Frank don’t allow—”
    “It’s okay, Maureen. Tell Frank that Bart says it’s okay, this one time.”
    She gave me another look, some indecipherable mix of compassion and fear, and took our orders.
    A couple minutes later the beer was cold and good in my mouth. I fiddled with the edge of the bottle’s label. How many labels had I peeled in this joint?
    “Bart—”
    “Look, Paul. It’s not legal for reebs—I mean reborns—to serve as peace officers. You can’t return to the—”
    A wave of my hand stopped his floundering. “I know all that.” A silent beat. “You know what, Bart? You look great. For your age, you really look great.”
    Bart nodded with a strange smile. “Yeah, modern medicine. The juvie centers—”
    “You mean Juvie Hall?”
    Bart smiled. “No, juvie as in rejuvenation. You think I kept my good looks by doing yoga and drinking wheat grass?”
    I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.
    “I’m ninety-one, but I have the bio markers of a sixty-year old. Which is why I can still proudly call myself semi-retired instead of one of those decrepit shuffleboard addicts at Coney Island.”  
    “That’s great.”
    “Lots of people work into the triple digits now. Lots of them have to.”
    “Never figured to find someone still around that I knew.”
    “Yeah. Well, there was Baker. He revived ten years ago.”
    “No kidding. I remember him! Where is he now?”
    “Ate his gun.”
    We finished the first round in silence.
    “Who’d you partner with?” I asked. “After I was… gone?”
    Bart dug his nail into carved graffito on the tabletop. “Lazlo, the garlic-eating asshole. Stunk up the whole car.”
    “Shoulda worn your hazmat suit.”
    Bart nodded and laughed, almost drawn into the old camaraderie. Almost. But he caught himself, reddening.
    My face showed nothing. Keep moving. One foot in front of the other.
    “Look, I need a favor, Bart. One favor, then I’m gone.”
    All I got was a wary look.  
    “I want a look at a case file. My case file.”
    Bart didn’t even blink. I suppose he wasn’t surprised. I waited while he examined his sausage fingers. “Donner, odds are, the guy’s dead. Even if he’s back, the Fresh Start Act protects criminals from being prosecuted for their pre-Shift crimes.”
    “Fuck the Fresh Start Act,” I hissed.
    “Anyway, it’s a moot point, ’cause I don’t have that kind of access anymore.”
    I gave him a look.
    “Goddamn it, I know, okay?” he said, blanching. “I remember every goddamned thing you did for me.”
    We’d been recruits out of the same class. A year and a half on foot post at the 73rd in Brownsville. Then a sector car at the 94th in Greenpoint—back when they called it RMP for Radio Motor Patrol. Then to a plainclothes anticrime unit. It’d been hard for him. I’d grown up on the street, but Bart’d had a middle-class Long Island childhood. Learning the shelters, bodegas and pool halls, learning to blend in, cultivate snitches, work info from the skells—it’d taken him time.  
    “I almost washed out,” he said. “But someone told me to hang tough. That eventually I’d adapt.”
      After the Robbery Investigation Program, it had been a short leap to Homicide and the top of the pile for both of us.
    “Donner, look. You were good. This guy—find his records online. You can probably go