turned away from him, never lingering long and never coming close to locking on mine. It had been ten, maybe fifteen years. If it was O’Shea, I couldn’t tell from here. I pushed off the wall and began to work my way toward his side. The room was smoky and a stereo was playing some kind of techno-country thing that was too loud for the space. I shuffled between the tables and the people standing. The place was at capacity, over if the fire marshal decided to come by.
The guy at the end never turned to watch a six-foot three-inch man move up next to him, but when I got to his elbow he turned before I could say a word.
“Hey, Max,” he said, offering a newly opened Rolling Rock that I had not seen him buy. “How ’bout those Phillies?”
His eyes were clear and gray with only the creases at the corners to give away his age. The pull at one side of his mouth, the Irish grin, had not changed.
“Colin O’Shea,” I said, accepting the bottle. “Wasn’t sure it was you.”
“Is that why you took fifteen minutes to get over here, Max? I thought maybe you were just casing the place for a quick robbery.”
“Didn’t think you’d noticed.”
“I might be old and off the job, Max. But I haven’t gone blind yet. I think I even saw you get a snootfull of Annette’s perfume over there,” he said without turning. “To be honest, it’s why I sit way the hell over on this side.”
No, I thought. You’ve still got your cop instincts, O’Shea. You’re over here because you always sit with your back to the wall and your eyes on the front door to see who walks into the place.
“So, how the hell you been? It must be, what, a dozen years?”
“Might have been that night they had us all on that fire at Methodist Hospital when they had us doin’ the evacuation,” he said.
The memory was vague in my head, a winter night, people in wheelchairs, firemen with crusts of ice on their jackets.
“I think I remember you hauling some old bird down the stairwell and he was already yakking in your ear about suing somebody.”
“Yeah, and you were probably escorting the nurses, O’Shea. Always the ladies’ man.”
For the first time, he snapped his eyes on mine, just for an instant, trying to find something there.
“So, you on vacation, or what?” I said, looking away.
“Yeah, sure, Max. This is part of a special Disney package.” He waved his bottle in a small circle.
I shrugged my shoulders. Let him tell it.
“Naw. I’ve been down here maybe three years now,” he said. “Got sick of the cold. Needed something new.”
I nodded again.
“I heard you were down here somewhere, though. Guys up in the district said you kinda wigged out after you took that .22 in the neck and dropped both of those skells in the Thirteenth Street robbery.”
My fingers started to go instinctively to the soft, dime-sized circle of scar tissue the bullet had left just below my ear, but I stopped myself. One of the suspects I’d killed that night was a thirteen-year- old who was unarmed.
“Hey, that was a righteous shooting, man,” he said, clicking the lip of his bottle against mine and raising his eyebrows in a conspiratorial expression. But he was stepping into a space where he had no right to enter and I felt a small sulfur flare of anger heat a spot between my shoulder blades.
I let it sit and O’Shea drained his beer and wiggled it at the bartender. He watched her walk to the cooler. When she bent to dig out a cold bottle from deep in the ice her short top slid up, exposing a tattoo of some kind low on her back and blooming up out of the waistband of her jeans. O’Shea watched without blinking, but so did I, and so did the mustache boys. She returned and put the beer in front of him.
“There you go, darlin’,” she said and looked over at me with a question. I waved her off.
“Friendly place,” I said. “Your regular stop?”
“Just one of many, Max. You know us Irish. But it is regular enough for me to know it’s not one of your stops, old friend.”
The tone had suddenly changed.
“Yeah, well, I was…”
“Asked to stop and check me out?” he said, interrupting. “By a long-legged blonde detective who doesn’t give an old alcoholic cop enough respect to know an undercover sting