2

       Mobile, Alabama. Mid May

      “Carson. Yo, brother. Wake up.”

      “Mmmf,” I said, trying to slap a big hand shaking my shoulder. I missed and slapped my own cheek.

      “Come on, Cars … time to get hoppin’ and boppin’.”

      The only reason I opened my eyes was because I smelled bacon. Say what you will about alarm clocks, bacon is better. I looked up and saw blue sky filtered through tree branches. I tried to sit up, made it on the second try. I was in a lounge chair on Harry Nautilus’s back patio. The picnic table beside me looked like a launching pad for beer bottles. A pedestal fan on the patio was blowing air across me. Harry switched the fan off.

      “Good morning, merry sunshine.”

      I studied the chair beneath me, gave Harry a look.

      “You fell asleep there, Carson. I kept the fan on you to keep the skeeters off.”

      “A polite host would have carried me to a real bed and tucked me in.”

      “A smart host would have coffee. And these.” His right hand held out a steaming mug and his left opened to display a half-dozen aspirin. I grabbed both, chewing the pills and washing the paste down with New Orleans-style coffee, brewed black with chicory and cut with scalded milk.

      “Want a bacon-egg sandwich?” Harry said.

      I shot a thumb up as Harry retreated into the kitchen and the previous night returned to me, the major scenes at least. Flanagan’s bar decked out for a party: blue balloons, two long tables weighted down with cookpots of chili and sandwich fixings – ham, turkey, barbecue, cheeses – plus bowls of chips and nuts and pretzels. A twelve-foot banner over the bar said simply, 436 is 10-7.

      It meant badge number 436 was out of service. Harry was badge number 436.

      It was his retirement party. A surprise, Harry lured there by me and Lieutenant Tom Mason, our long-time leader and apologist. I don’t often get misty-eyed, but when we’d walked into Flanagan’s and I saw the sign, it got a little blurry.

      Harry was my best friend and had been my detective partner for years. It was Harry who’d convinced me to join the force when I was a twenty-seven-year-old slacker wondering what to do with a Masters Degree in Psychology gained by traveling to every max-security prison in the South and interviewing homicidal maniacs.

      Harry was ten years older than me, a year and some shy of fifty. He’d started on the force young, and when adding in unused sick and vacation days, plus time credits when he’d been injured in the line of duty, it added up to thirty years in service, all but five of them in Homicide.

      The bash at Flanagan’s had been an alcohol-fueled semi-riot. Harry was a legend in the MPD, and his friends had come to see him off, his enemies to make sure he was leaving. We’d stayed two hours, neither big on shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, slipping away to Harry’s place on the near-north side of Mobile, a trim bungalow in a quiet neighborhood overslung with slash and longleaf pines and the snaking branches of live oaks. His back yard was slender and long and landscaped with dogwoods and banks of azaleas. It was centered by a looming sycamore, from which Harry had strung a half-dozen bright birdhouses.

      He’d fetched bottles of homebrew from his closet, channeled mix-tapes of Miles and Bird and Gillespie through the speakers, and we’d sat beneath a fat white moon and had our kind of party, long beer-sipping silences broken by stories from the streets, good and bad and blends of both.

      Harry stepped out and handed me six inches of warmed French bread filled with scrambled eggs, bacon, melted cheddar and heavy lashings of Crystal Hot Sauce, and I went to work supplanting beer with food, something I probably should have done more of last night.

      Harry’s eyes went to the bottle collection on the patio table.

      “Happy to see you liked my homebrew.”

      When I’d accepted the position in Florida, Harry’d started brewing beer, saying he needed something temperamental to work with now that I was gone. I’m pretty sure it was a joke.

      “Great stuff,” I said. It truly was, but Harry mastered anything he did. “How much kick is in that freakin’ stout?”

      “It’s about eight per cent alcohol.”

      I shook my head. My brain didn’t rattle, the aspirin kicking in, along with snatches of last-night’s conversation.

      “You’re really thinking about the job?” I asked, recalling one of our conversations. “You retire one week, take a new job the next?”

      Harry slid a chair near and sat. He was wearing an electric orange shirt and sky-blue cargo shorts. His sockless feet crowded the size-thirteen running shoes, yellow. The colors were strident to begin with, and seemed neon against skin the hue of coffee with a teaspoon of cream.

      “It’s hardly a job, Carson. I’ll be driving a lady around when she wants to go out. Sometimes her daughter comes along. It’s maybe ten hours a week. Did I mention the gig pays twenty clams an hour?”

      “For turning a wheel? Now it’s making more sense.”

      “Mostly it’s taking the lady shopping. Or to church, the hair stylist, doctor, stuff like that. The lady lives in Spring Hill, just a couple miles away. She calls, I’m there in minutes.”

      “You didn’t say who the lady was.”

      Harry’s turn to frown. “Can’t, Carson. It’s confidential, part of the agreement.”

      “She’s in the Mafia?”

      “It was her husband who hired me, actually. And no, he’s sort of on the side of the angels.”

      “Who you think I’ll tell?”

      “Sorry, Carson. I gave my word I’d be mum.”

      That was that. Harry’s word was a titanium-clad guarantee of silence. I switched lanes. “The wife unfamiliar with the operation of automobiles?”

      “I guess she can drive, but doesn’t like to.”

      “Damn,” I said, “Harry Nautilus, chauffeur.”

      “Driver,” he corrected.