‘I read it somewhere,’ Angel continued. ‘This expert who was looking for it for years and years, he decided that it had died.’

‘Yeah, like two hundred and fifty million years ago,’ said Louis. ‘’Course it’s dead. The fuck else would it be?’

Angel shook his head in the manner of one faced with a child who can’t grasp a simple concept. ‘No, it died recently. Until then, it was still alive.’

Louis stared hard at his partner for a long time, then said: ‘You know, I think we need to set a limit on the conversations you can join in with.’

‘Like in a churrascaría,’ I offered. ‘We could turn up a green symbol when you can speak, and a red one when you have to sit quietly and digest whatever it is you’ve just heard.’

‘I hate you guys,’ said Angel.

‘No, you don’t.’

‘I do,’ he confirmed. ‘You don’t respect me.’

‘Well, that is true,’ I admitted. ‘But, then, we really have no reason to.’

Angel thought about this before conceding that I had a point. We moved on to the subject of my sex life which, although apparently endlessly entertaining to Angel, didn’t detain us for long.

‘What about that cop, the one who’d started coming into the Bear? Cagney?’

‘Macy.’

‘Yeah, her.’

Sharon Macy was pretty and dark, and she’d certainly been sending out signals of interest, but I had still been trying to figure out how to deal with the fact that Rachel and our daughter were now going to be living in Vermont, and that my relationship with Rachel was effectively over.

‘It was too soon,’ I said.

‘There’s no such thing as “too soon,”’ said Louis. ‘There’s just “too late,” and then there’s “dead.”’

A trio of young men in loose-fitting jeans, oversized t-shirts, and fresh-out-of-the-box sneakers oozed along Congress like algae on the surface of a pond, heading for the bars on Fore Street. They had ‘out of town’ written all over them – well, written anywhere that wasn’t already occupied by a brand, or the name of a rapper. One, God help us, even wore a retro Black Power t-shirt, complete with clenched fist, even though they were all so white they made Pee Wee Herman look like Malcolm X.

Beside us, two men were eating burgers and minding their own business. One of them wore a discreet rainbow triangle on the collar of his jacket, and a ‘Vote No on I’ badge beneath it, a reference to the impending proposition intended to overturn the possibility of gay marriage in the state.

‘You gonna marry him, bitch?’ said one of the passing strangers, and his friends laughed.

The two men tried to get on with their meal.

‘Fags,’ said the same guy, clearly on a roll. He was small, but muscled up. He leaned over and took a French fry from the plate of the man with the badges, who responded with an aggrieved ‘Hey!’

‘I ain’t gonna eat it, man,’ said their tormentor. ‘Never know what I might catch from you.’

‘Burn, Rod!’ said one of his buddies, and they high-fived.

Rod tossed the fry on the ground, then turned his attention to Angel and Louis, who were watching them without expression.

‘What you looking at?’ said Rod. ‘You faggots too?’

‘No,’ said Angel. ‘I’m an undercover heterosexual.’

‘And I’m really white,’ said Louis.

‘He is really white,’ I confirmed. ‘Takes him hours to put on his makeup before he can leave the house.’

Rod looked confused. His face fell into the appropriate expression without too much effort, so it probably wasn’t the first time.

‘So I’m just like you,’ continued Louis, ‘because you’re not really black either. Here’s something for you to think about: all those bands on your shirts, they only tolerate you because you put money in their pockets. They’re hardcore, and they’re talking to, and about, black people. In an ideal world, they wouldn’t need you, and you’d just have to go back to listening to Bread, or Coldplay, or some other maudlin shit that white boys are humming to these days. But, for now, those guys will take your money, and if you ever wander into any of the ’hoods they emerged from, you’ll get stomped and someone will take the rest of your money as well, and maybe your sneakers too. You want me to, I can draw you a map, and you can go express your solidarity with them, see how that works out for you. Otherwise, you run along, and take Curly and Larry there with you. Go on, now: bust a move, or whatever it is you homeboys do to help you perambulate.’

‘Bread?’ I said. ‘You’re a little out of touch with popular culture, aren’t you?’

‘All that shit sounds the same,’ said Louis. ‘I’m down with the kids.’

‘Yeah, the kids from the nineteenth century.’

‘I could kick your ass,’ said Rod, feeling the urge to contribute something to the conversation. He might have been dumb enough to believe it, but the two guys behind him were smarter, which wasn’t exactly something worth putting on their business cards. Already they were trying to move Rod along.

‘Yes, you could,’ said Louis. ‘Feel better now?’

‘By the way,’ said Angel, ‘I lied. I’m not really heterosexual, although he still really isn’t black.’

I looked at Angel in surprise. ‘Hey, you never told me you were gay. I knew that, I’d never have let you adopt those children.’

‘Too late now,’ said Angel. ‘The girls are all wearing comfortable shoes, and the boys are singing show tunes.’

‘Oh, you gays and your cunning ways. You could run the world if you weren’t so busy just making things prettier.’

Rod seemed about to say something else when Louis moved. He didn’t get up from his chair, and there was nothing obviously threatening about what he did, but it was the equivalent of a dozing rattlesnake adjusting its coils in preparation for a strike, or a spider tensing in the corner of its web as it watches the fly alight. Even through his fog of alcohol and stupidity, Rod glimpsed the possibility of serious suffering at some point in the near future: not here, perhaps, on a busy street with cop cars cruising by, but later, maybe in a bar, or a restroom, or a parking lot, and it would mark him for the rest of his life.

Without another word, the three young men slipped away, and they did not look back.

‘Nicely done,’ I said to Louis. ‘What are you going to do for an encore: scowl at a puppy?’

‘Might steal a toy from a kitten,’ said Louis. ‘Put it on a high shelf.’

‘Well, you struck a blow for something there. I’m just not sure what it was.’

‘Quality of life,’ said Louis.

‘I guess.’ Beside us, the two men abandoned their burgers, left a twenty and ten on the table, and hurried away without saying a word. ‘You even frighten your own people. You probably convinced that guy to vote yes on Prop One just in case you decide to move here.’

‘With that in mind, remind us why we’re here again,’ said Angel. They had arrived barely an hour before, and their bags were still in the trunk of their car. Louis and Angel only took planes when it was absolutely necessary to do so, as airlines tended to frown on the tools of their trade. I told them everything, from my first meeting with Bennett Patchett, through the discovery of the tracking device on my car, and finished with my conversation with Ronald Straydeer and the sending of the photographs from Damien Patchett’s funeral.

‘So they know that you haven’t dropped the case?’ said Angel.

‘If the GPS tracker was working, yes. They also know that I visited Karen Emory, which may not be good for her.’

‘You warn her?’

‘I left a message on her cell phone. Another call in person might just have compounded the problem.’

‘You think they’ll come at you again?’ asked Louis.

‘Wouldn’t you?’

‘I’d have killed you the first time,’ said Louis. ‘If they figured you for the kind of guy who walks away after some amateur waterboarding, they got you all wrong.’

‘Straydeer said that they’d started out with the intention of helping wounded soldiers. It may be that killing is a last resort. The one who interrogated me said that nobody was going to be hurt by what they were doing.’