Alphonse, the basketball held easily against his hip with one hand, pointed his other hand in toward himself. “Hey, what am I?” he said.

“No offense.”

Alphonse offered her his white teeth. Except for some acne, his long, smooth face was not unattractive. His skin was very black, his nose was thin. His lips were sensually thick. There was a light sheen of sweat from the workout, and his longish hair, which Linda thought his worst feature, was held in by the net.

“No offense,” Alphonse repeated.

Linda sighed. “So what happened to the papers?”

Alphonse began dribbling again, walking next to her. The papers weren’t his problem. “Ain’t too many anyway.”

They rounded the building. In front of the warehouse, Linda could see the morning newspapers, still wrapped from their publishers. Without La Hora, they made a pitifully poor pile in front of the corrugated iron door.

Linda drew up again and sighed. “So I guess that’s really it,” she said. She threw her head back, looking to the sky for help, and finding none, she moaned, “I wish Daddy’d come in.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m waiting for.”

“And Eddie didn’t come in at all? Did he call?”

Alphonse smiled again. “I don’t do the phones, sugar.”

They had come to the glass front doors. Linda got out her keys and let them in. Alphonse followed her across the small entryway into her office, which was in front of her father’s. She went behind the desk and sat down.

Alphonse dribbled on the linoleum floor. The sound of the ball bouncing, flat and harsh, was interrupted by the telephone ringing.

“Maybe that’s Daddy,” Linda said.

She answered with a hopeful “Army Distributing” and then said “Yes” a couple of times. When she hung up, the terminal illness had progressed.

“That was the police,” she said, and Alphonse felt an emptiness suddenly appear in his stomach. “They want to come by here and ask some questions.”

Alphonse plumped heavily, quickly, onto the arm of the leatherette sofa. “What about?”

“They said Eddie…” She stopped.

“What about Eddie?”

“They said he’s, like, dead.” She fumbled at the desk for a couple of seconds, then reached into her purse for a cigarette. “I’d better call Daddy,” she said, mostly to herself.

The cigarette was misshapen and half burned down. Alphonse nodded knowingly to himself as she lit the end and inhaled deeply, holding it in. He got up, crossed to the desk, and held out his hand.

“Cops be comin’, they better not smell that.”

Linda still held her breath in, handing him the joint. She let out a long slow stream of smoke. “So we’ll open the windows.”

“You callin’ your daddy?”

“I’d better,” she said.

“Yeah, you better,” Alphonse said. “I gotta talk to him, too.”

The police had already arrived at Frannie’s-one black-and-white and another supposedly unmarked Plymouth parked closely behind it. The light over the doorway was on. Hardy and Moses could see shadows moving in the corner window. Hardy had decided he wouldn’t go in. He left Moses and drove on home.

He let himself into his house, pushing hard, swearing, against the stuck front door. The house had been cold. The only light came from the muted glow of the aquarium in his bedroom.

He must have stared at the fish awhile, sitting on his bed, his Greek sailor’s hat pulled down and his coat collar up. He didn’t remember.

All he knew was that now it was morning. Bright sunlight streaming through his bedroom window was falling across his face. The coat was bunched under and around him, the hat flattened under his neck.

Hardy rolled onto his back, staring at the ceiling. It came back to him in a flood-the vision of Eddie on his side three feet from some nondescript China Basin building, a black pool under him.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. This wasn’t Vietnam anymore. Eddie wasn’t into anything heavy. He was a regular guy, a kid, and this kind of stuff didn’t happen to regular guys.

Before, sure. Hardy had lived for a while in that life-and-death reality, where things happened all the time. Vietnam, partnering with Glitsky on their beat, even his short time with the D.A.’s office. But he’d passed on all that. A long time ago.

Now his life didn’t need any adrenaline kick start. You cared too much and it came back and got you. Now you had your job- not your yuppie “career” that ate up your time and your insides -but someplace you went and did reasonable work and got paid and came home and forgot about. You had a couple of buddies- Moses and Pico did just fine. You drank a little and sometimes a little more, but it was mostly top-shelf goods or stout and you kept it under control.

Everything else-ambition, love, commitment (whatever that meant)-was kid stuff. Kids like Eddie, maybe, who essentially didn’t get it the way Hardy thought he now finally got it. Hardy had been through it. The kid stuff elements weren’t real. They were crutches, blinders, to keep you from seeing. Hardy’d proved that by getting away from all of them and surviving. He got along. Okay, maybe he skimmed over the surface, but at least he avoided deep shoals, hidden reefs, monsters lurking in the depths.

Sure, Diz, he thought, that’s why you went to Cabo, ’cause everything was so peachy, ’cause fulfillment was the very essence of your existence.

“Goddamn it.” Hardy laid his arm up over his eyes, shielding the sun. “Goddamn it, Eddie.”

The problem was, why was he feeling now like he had to do something, anything at all, to make some sense out of this? He shouldn’t have let Eddie, or Eddie and Frannie, get inside of him.

He hadn’t seen it coming, so hadn’t been prepared for it. He’d thought he’d kept them outside enough-acquaintances, not friends.

Eddie was gone, and nothing was going to change that.

Still, something nudged him, hurting, almost like a cramp, or a screw turning in his heart.

He moaned and sat up in bed.

The beginning-

Four and a half years before. New Year’s Eve. Frannie McGuire, still a few months shy of the legal twenty-one but damned if Hardy was going to card her.

With madness raging all around and only swelling as the night wore on, Frannie nursed a few rum and Cokes at the bar. Hardy, in what he called his fun mode, pounded down everything in sight-beer, scotch, tequila, gin. Yahoo!

And nobody to drive that party animal Hardy home except the quiet little redheaded very much younger sister of his boss Moses.

Sitting in front of his house, then, the party over-really over -and enough juice in him to forget that all of his own kid stuff was in his past, that he didn’t care about any of that. Not coming on to her, but spilling his guts-the whole thing-and finally passing out, he guessed, without so much as kissing her or even trying, waking up a cold dawn, his arms around her waist, his head cradled in her lap on the front seat of his old Ford.

And before he dropped her off back at her dorm, she said, “I hope I meet someone like you, Dismas, before life eats him up. I’d marry him in a minute.”

She did.

His name was Eddie Cochran, and after about three dates she appeared with him at the Shamrock. Took Hardy aside and whispered, “Remember what I said,” as though she’d only said one thing to him before in her life.

But he’d known what she meant.

One Sunday afternoon, a barbecue at Moses’s apartment, up on the roof looking over the Haight-Ashbury.

“The what?” Hardy had asked. “Get out of here!”

“Big Brothers.” Frannie telling Hardy.

It wouldn’t have been like Eddie to mention it. He didn’t preach-he just did. “Hey, it’s one day a week, Diz,” Eddie had said in defense. “Gimme a break. Maybe do some good. Couldn’t hurt, anyway.”