Mercer had been gone six weeks and felt it could have been worse. At least Harry had gotten his mail and had taken his phone calls. There was only one message on the answering machine. He hit the PLAY button. “Dr. Mercer, this is Cindy from Dr. Cryan’s office.” Mercer’s dentist. “I’m just calling to remind you of your cleaning appointment Wednesday at ten.”
He ran his tongue around his mouth and decided his teeth weren’t in immediate danger of falling out. He’d reschedule for when he got back from Canada next month.
Sipping his coffee and thumbing through the stacks of mail, Mercer was grateful that Harry hadn’t repeated last year’s trick of putting him on a handful of pornographic mailing lists. He hadn’t been able to look his mailman in the eye until that mess had been straightened out. Delving deeper into his pile, he realized Harry’s distorted sense of humor had been in full swing after all.
Not only had he brought over junk mail from a half dozen of his cronies, he’d meticulously shuffled Mercer’s important stuff in with wads of credit-card solicitations and other garbage. The trade magazines were hidden inside catalogues for companies Mercer had never heard of. It would take an hour just to separate out his own stuff.
The phone rang. “Hello.”
“Hey, Mercer. You’re finally out of bed.” Harry’s voice, the result of sixty years of chain-smoking and hard drinking, grated like a diesel engine on a cold morning.
“Yeah, I didn’t get home until four. Wait, how’d you know I was asleep? Where the hell are you?”
“I came by a couple hours ago when you were sacked out,” Harry breezed, a lungful of smoke hissing past his lips. “I came back a little after noon. I’m downstairs in your office on line two.”
Mercer checked his phone and saw the light for the fax line was on. “I should call the cops and have you arrested as a Peeping Tom. Why didn’t you get milk, you bastard? You knew I was coming home today.”
“I did buy milk,” Harry protested. “To save time I got it two weeks ago and brought it over yesterday. It’s right in your fridge with the OJ you wanted.”
“And it was lumpier than my cereal.”
“Gripe, gripe, gripe.” Harry pitched his voice as high as he could. It still rumbled like a longshoreman’s. “This milk is too sour. This milk is too lumpy. Jesus, you’re worse than Goldilocks. Hold on. I’m coming up. I need a drink if I have to listen to you bitch about every little thing.”
Mercer was smiling as he set the cordless on the bar. In the ten years since they’d met, he couldn’t recall a single nice word between them. Nor could he recall a denied favor either. Harry was the other anchor in Mercer’s nomadic life, an unlikely friend who meant more to him than anyone he’d ever known. That one was more than twice the age of the other had never had a bearing on their relationship. Both had recognized early on that their personalities ran parallel and seamlessly transcended the generations. Mercer was very much the man Harry had been forty years ago and Mercer supposed, and occasionally dreaded, that in a few decades he’d be like Harry White.
In the moments it took Harry to climb the antique staircase that coiled up to the library adjoining the bar, Mercer had a Jack Daniel’s and ginger ale waiting.
The two men were the same height and roughly the same build, although gravity was shifting the breadth of Harry’s shoulders into a potbelly. Where Mercer’s eyes were sharp gray, Harry’s were a sarcastic blue. His face was as lined as a topographic map and his silver hair remained as stiff and full as a shoeshine brush.
Harry sported his traditional uniform of baggy pants, an overlaundered white oxford that showed the outline of the T-shirt underneath, and sneakers. A mid-March chill forced him into a light windbreaker.
“Welcome home,” Harry greeted, taking a seat at the bar in front of his drink. He hooked the sword cane Mercer had given him for his last birthday on the brass handrail. Although he’d lost a leg decades ago, the walking stick was still more of an ornament than a necessity. “Jesus, you look like the main course at a vampire convention. When was the last time you saw some sun?”
“I knew I should have gone on another diving trip rather than stay home and take your abuse-” Mercer paused. He heard a strange sound that seemed to be climbing the spiral staircase. A sort of click, click, shuffle, wheeze.
The clicking stopped while the wheezing continued. It sounded like something had reached the top of the wooden stairs and was moving slowly across the carpet in the library. Mercer looked to Harry. Harry swiveled to look through the French doors that separated the bar from the reading room.
“Come on, boy,” he rasped. “It’s okay.”
A moment later, Mercer’s eyes widened. “What the hell is that?”
“A dog, for Christ’s sake. What do you think it is?”
“If I had to guess I’d say an overstuffed sausage.”
The basset hound seemed to understand he was the center of attention. His tail gave a feeble wag before drooping back to the floor. He was as long and round as an old canister vacuum cleaner and so bowlegged his belly rubbed the floor. His frayed ears dragged like neglected laundry as he tottered into the room. The old hound’s bloodshot eyes complemented the gray fur on his muzzle and the silver string of drool coming from his slack lips. Mercer put the dog’s age somewhere between fifteen and fifty. “They say that people look like their pets, Harry. That poor thing’s gonna have to get a lot uglier if you two are gonna be twins. Where did you get him?”
“He was rooting in the Dumpster behind Tiny’s.” Tiny’s was a neighborhood bar run by a former jockey, Paul Gordon. Harry was as much a fixture there as the horse-racing pictures on the walls. “No tags, no collar. Tiny wanted to call the Humane Society, but I figured no one was going to adopt him so I took him home. That was just after you left for Canada.”
“My God. A kind gesture. From you?”
“Up yours,” Harry growled, but couldn’t hide his self-satisfaction.
“Have you named him?” The dog heaved himself onto one of the leather sofas.
“ ’Cause the damned thing never wants to go for a walk, I call him Drag.”
The basset heard his name, let loose a long bawl and collapsed in exhaustion. He was snoring in an instant.
Mercer smiled. Harry had spent a great many nights passed out on the very same couch. “You two are more alike than I first realized.”
“At least I still have my balls.”
“Even if you don’t need them,” Mercer teased.
Harry downed the last of his drink and lit a fresh cigarette. “Viagra, baby. Viagra.”
Shuddering at the image that conjured, Mercer mixed Harry another whiskey. Mercer had been awake for less than an hour, but with nothing to do for the next five days, he poured himself a vodka gimlet and turned on the commercial air purifier. The cigarette smoke was already becoming a noxious cloud.
“You sure you don’t want to go diving or something?”
“I’m sticking around,” Mercer replied cautiously. Harry’s tone put him on alert.
“In that case, I guess I have to invite you to the party I’m throwing here on Saturday.”
“Mighty nice of you.”
“Don’t mention it,” Harry demurred. “Least I can do.”
An hour later, Harry was on his fourth drink and Mercer his second when Harry hauled himself to his feet. “If I’ve got to pump ship, I’m sure Drag does too.” He had the dog’s leash in his jacket pocket. He clipped it to Drag’s collar and tugged gently to wake him. The basset snored on. “Come on, you mangy beast.”
Drag’s skin twitched like a horse shooing flies and he woofed in annoyance. It took Harry a minute to coax him down the stairs. Mercer went to the library balcony to watch the tug-of-war. True to his name, Drag slid onto his belly when he reached the tiled foyer, forcing Harry to pull him by his leash until he realized stubbornness wouldn’t get him out of the walk.
Harry looked up. “Told you so.”
The doorbell rang an instant before his hand touched the knob.
The two men standing on the doorstep were dressed in off-the-rack suits that screamed government employee. Their muscular builds, overly short hair, and expressionless faces narrowed the field to law enforcement or military. Startled that the door had opened so quickly, both reached inside their jackets. They stopped from drawing their concealed weapons a second before the pistols were shown, but there was no disguising what they’d almost done.
“Are you Dr. Philip Mercer?” The taller of the two men made it sound like an accusation.
