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me.’
    Danny nodded. ‘Thanks for the drinks.’ He kept his eyes locked on Evan’s as the foreman stood, paused, and then walked toward the door. For a moment, Danny felt an urge to call the guy back, but instinct kicked in, and instinct had only one rule. So he played it cool. ‘Buy you a beer?’
    Evan smiled thinly. ‘Same old Danny. Slick as shit.’ He pulled the stool out of his way and leaned on the bar. He looked awesomely fit, his movements spare but powerful, like inside he was all coiled springs.
    ‘So.’
    ‘So.’
    ‘Bad?’
    Evan shrugged.
    The granddaughter came over with beer and whiskey, her eyes framing questions Danny ignored. It was like that nightmare he had: One minute, he’d been in the life he knew, then without warning, here he was sitting beside his childhood friend and former partner. He didn’t know what to feel. He wasn’t scared exactly, but he had that knife’s edge thinness he used to get on the job, the sense that things could go either way. There’d been moments standing in some stranger’s living room, flashlight in hand, when it’d come on him, this sense that fate wasn’t a guide written in a celestial book, but rather a tightrope, a narrow and shaking line above the abyss. One wrong breath could overbalance you.
    ‘How about you, Danny? How you been keeping yourself?’
    ‘I’m good. Better than ever.’
    ‘Yeah?’ Evan glanced over with a smile. ‘You a millionaire, gonna remember your friends?’
    Danny grinned, surprised. The conversation came easier than he’d expected. It was almost fun, trading snaps and sparring. ‘Sure. I’ll buy you a house next to the mayor.’
    ‘Daley don’t live in Bridgeport these days. Left ’bout the same time I did. Different places, of course.’
    ‘I left, too,’ Danny said. ‘I’m on the North Side now.’
    ‘No shit.’
    ‘No shit.’
    ‘And you’re not in the game anymore?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Too bad.’ Evan took a long pull of beer.
    It wasn’t, but Danny didn’t see any point in saying that.So he reached for the whiskey, held it up to Evan. ‘Cheers. To being out.’
    They clinked glasses. Danny had always felt you could go too far trying to read someone’s soul in his eyes, but still, something he saw in Evan’s reminded him that they weren’t exactly buddies anymore. After all, the guy hadn’t turned up by accident. Danny thought about asking what he was doing here, decided he didn’t want to haul the answer out in the open, where they would have to deal with it directly. Sometimes a mutual lie was easier for everybody.
    ‘You still seeing that same woman, the one you were getting serious about?’
    ‘Karen,’ Danny said. ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Long time. Congratulations.’
    ‘Thanks.’
    ‘You know, I thought maybe I saw her.’ Evan took out a pack of Winstons, tapped one free, lit it with a shiny silver Zippo. ‘At the trial.’
    Danny’s heart went to his throat.
    ‘I’d only met her the once, but I’m pretty sure it was Karen. Yeah?’
    Danny had wanted to sneak in himself, one last gesture of solidarity, but couldn’t have imagined a more boneheaded play. So he’d cooked dinner, opened wine, and asked Karen for the biggest favor of their relationship. Her older brothers had been rough guys that had landed in County more than once, so it wasn’t a totally alien world. Still, he’d expected a refusal. Instead she’d just stared at the candles and asked, in voice so soft it was nearly a whisper, if he had quit for good.
    Until that moment, he hadn’t been sure. Not in his marrow. But when she’d asked him, this half-Italian bartendress with ambitions to manage the place, this woman who knew his past but still trusted in their future, that was it.
    He’d promised, and she’d gone to the trial. Watched the pawnshop owner testify from a wheelchair. Looked at photographs of the woman’s face, one eye swollen shut, nose broken, as the police described how they arrived just in time. And when