when I said this, not because it would mean anything to anyone else, but to impress the guy behind the stick. It wouldn’t get an answer out of him, but if Mick was in the back room, the fellow would find an un-obtrusive way to ring him on the house phone. When that didn’t happen I knocked back the rest of my Coke and left.

I could have spent an hour in a meeting, and it might even have done me good, but I didn’t feel like it. If I was going to kill time I’d sooner kill it in a bar. That’s not recommended, and I can understand why, but I didn’t give a damn.

I called the apartment and the machine picked up, which was as we’d arranged; Elaine would screen her calls, picking up only when she recognized the caller. I said a few words and she took the call, and I said I’d be a while. She said that would be fine.

I rang off and took a cab to Poogan’s.

They keep the place dimly lit, which is part of its appeal for Danny Boy, who has occasionally observed that what the world needs most is a volume control and a dimmer switch, that the damn place is always too loud and too bright. I let my eyes accustom themselves to the dark, and I didn’t see Danny Boy but I did see his table. Poogan’s, like Mother Blue’s, sells him his vodka by the bottle, and lets him keep it close at hand in an ice bucket. I think there’s a state law against that, but so far nobody’s turned up to enforce it.

I stood at the bar with a glass of soda water and ice—I didn’t want any more Coke yet—and one record finished its play on the jukebox and another replaced it, and I looked over to see Danny Boy returning from the men’s room. It struck me that he looked old, but I decided it must be my eyes, because lately I was starting to see age in every face I looked at, and I didn’t need a mirror to know I’d be able to spot it in mine.

He sat down heavily, took a glass, held it at a tilt the way you do when you pour a beer, and filled it halfway with iced Stolichnaya. He held it up and looked at it, and I remembered doing that with bourbon, and remembered too how the bourbon tasted when I quit just looking at it and did with it what one was meant to do.

My thoughts bothered me, and so did my actions, which felt oddly 194

Lawrence Block

like spying. I carried my drink to his table, and he looked up as I pulled over a chair for myself. He said, “Well, this is a treat, Matthew. I don’t see you for months and then I have the pleasure of your company twice in a single week. You’re alone tonight?”

“Not anymore.”

“No, now you’re with an old friend, and so am I.” He started to look for the waitress, then saw I already had a drink. He hadn’t done anything with his Stoli but pour it and look at it, and now he raised it and said, “Old friends.” I raised my own glass and sipped my soda water, and he drank half of his vodka.

He asked what had brought me, and I said I had a little time to kill, and he laughed and said we’d kill it together.

“But I was going to get here sooner or later anyway,” I said, and showed him a copy of Ray’s drawing.

“You showed me the other night,” he said. “At Mother’s. Wait a minute. Is this the same guy?”

“No, a different one entirely.”

“That’s what I was thinking, although I can’t say I have the other chap’s features engraved on my heart. This one looks menacing.”

“Part of that may be the sensibilities of the person who told the artist what to draw. This is the man who murdered a woman in the Village the night before last.”

“All over the TV,” he said. “Give me a minute and I’ll tell you her name.”

I supplied it myself, along with the fact that she’d been Elaine’s best friend, and Elaine had sold him the murder weapon. With Danny Boy, you could give him the first sentence and he had the whole page; what he said was, “I hope you put her on a plane.”

“It might come to that. I don’t know.” I detailed the security precautions we were taking, and that I was going to pick up a gun for her. He asked if she’d know what to do with it, and I said there wasn’t too much you had to know to shoot someone at close range.

He said, “All my life, all the players and hard cases I’ve known, I’ve never once fired a gun, Matthew. I’m trying to think if I ever even had one in my hand. You know, I don’t think I did.” All the Flowers Are Dying

195

“Well, you’re still a young man, Danny.”

“That’s what the Yellow Peril tells me. Jodie, you met her the other night. ‘Danny, you are so amazing!’ For a man my age, she means.

And as long as they keep making those little blue pills, I can go on amazing her.”

“Science is wonderful.”

“Yeah.”

Something made me ask about his health. It had been more than five years, and he hadn’t had a recurrence. So he was out of the woods, wasn’t he?

“Out of the woods? Matthew, you can’t even see a tree from where I’m sitting.”

“That’s great.”

“I beat colon cancer. That’s a funny expression, don’t you think?

Like I got in the ring with it and kicked the shit out of it. Cancer of the colon, off its feet and down for the count. I didn’t have much to do with it, to tell you the truth. They cut me up and stitched me back together and filled me full of chemicals, and when they quit I was alive and the cancer wasn’t. ‘I beat colon cancer.’ It’s like saying you beat a slot machine, when all you did was pick the right time to drop your quarter in it.”

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