EXCERPT FROM

I’m a sizable fellow, standing about six and a half feet tall in the shower and running enough above two-seventy that I don’t divulge it openly, but even so Reynard made me feel small. About twenty years earlier, Sylvester Reynard had been whacked across the throat with a beer bottle during a bar fight in Algiers. It did something to his thyroid, and he started gaining an alarming amount of weight. He had tried diets, surgery, pills -- nothing had worked, and he just kept gaining weight like those lab rats whose limbic systems had been ablated.

He sat on a loveseat set up on bricks behind his desk, because he could no longer find an office chair that could contain him. He wheezed all the time, as his overworked heart strained to catch up with his need for oxygen. His face was florid, and his nose was deeply crisscrossed with scarlet veins. His hands were like Italian sausages attached to birthday balloons.

As humans go, he was a real mess.

“Jesus, Sly,” I said as I sat down. “No more Twinkies for you.”

“Gallegher...” he said, as if he wasn’t at all pleased to say it. The sound came from deep inside him, like an echo off the Grand Canyon, and it rumbled around the room. “I ought to kick your ass.”

“I don’t think you can kick that high,” I said. I pulled the automatic from my waistband, and dropped the clip into my free hand. I laid the gun on Reynard’s desk. “I took this from Spanky. I hope you’ll understand if I leave the clip with the bartender downstairs.”

“You got a smart mouth, dickwipe.”

“It’s an accessory. It came with the first class mind.”

“You got a lot of balls coming in here like this.”

“It wasn’t something I preferred to do. What happened between us was a long time ago.”

“I lost a lot of money on that deal.”

“It wasn’t your money.”

“You stuck your nose in where it didn’t belong. You screwed up a sweet situation for me.”

“It’s over and done. Think of all the sweet situations I haven’t screwed up for you since then.”

“What are you doing with one of my girls?”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with you, Sly. It’s personal.”

He leaned forward. I could swear I could feel a shift in the tectonic plate underneath the city.

“Anything having to do with one of my girls concerns me,” he rumbled. He had that tone of voice that made it clear that he’d just as soon have zagged me. Given our history, I figured it was time to make a little peace.

“She’s been seeing the bartender over at my club. Several guys I know have told me she was hooking. I thought maybe I ought to check it out.”

“My girls don’t hook,” he said. “I catch them screwing the customers, they’re out on their ass. I don’t need that kind of trouble with the cops.”

“From what I hear, she might have been moonlighting. You might not have known about it.”

He nodded, fold of flesh beneath his chin wobbling obscenely.

“You might be right. What’d she tell you?”

“She said she was, but it was a long time ago. She said she stopped maybe six months back.”

“You believe her?”

I shrugged.

“I don’t have any reason not to. She admitted everything I was told. She was straight with me on that. I figure she’s telling the truth.”

“Well, then...” Reynard said, drumming his hammy fingers on the scratched desktop. He was wearing about fifty pounds of rings on that one hand. I wondered where he had found a Big and Tall jeweler. “So you got no more business here, then?”

I shook my head.

“None that I can think of.”

“Then you’ll be going now?”

“Works for me,” I said, standing. I walked to the door, where Spanky Gallo stood, still trying to kill me with his x-ray eyes. I turned back to Reynard.

“Hey, Sly, are we cool here?”

“What do you mean?”

“This thing between us. It’s over and done with, right? You don’t have any old contracts floating around on me out there, do you?”

He seemed to be laughing, but it was hard to tell under all that blubber.

“Man, I wouldn’t even put a Haitian kid on you, if he offered to do it just for the action. You ain’t that important anymore.”

“Good,” I said. “Just checking.”

I turned to leave.

“Hey, Gallegher,” Reynard called.

I looked back.

“You watch your ass. You could become important again, you know.”

I nodded, and decided to let him have the last word. I lumbered down the stairs, and handed the clip to the wide-eyed bartender as I passed by.

As quickly as I could, I walked out the front door into the piercing sunlight of Bourbon Street. It was still early in the afternoon, before the gutters had started to fill with beer. A cold front had laundered the air, which smelled like new-mown wheat. It felt good to be out of the bar, good to be alive.

I should have bottled that moment. I wouldn’t feel that good again for a long time.