He hated to admit it, but with Louis Baker no longer threatening him, the facts of the matter didn’t point all that more strongly to him than to, say, Ray Weir, the jealous husband, or even to Hector Medina, who had had a hard-on for Rusty for years.

Also, Abe had written ‘Johnny LaGuardia’ with three exclamation points after his name, with a notation about his prints being on the fallen lamp. Hardy had never heard the name Johnny LaGuardia, even from Abe, and he wondered what he had to do with anything three exclamation points’ worth.

But then he reminded himself that Louis Baker’s prints were also found on the barge, in the galley, and if Baker was there, then he did it.

Didn’t he?

He stood up, wrapping the comforter around him, and paced from the window to the hallway door and back. The fog seemed to glow in the streetlights, eddying gently now before him as it drifted down the hill.

It came back to him, then, the feeling of seeing Abe loom out of that same fog. Of almost shooting him in the back. Or not almost. Already his memory was getting selective about it. He hadn’t really been going to shoot if it had turned out to be Baker-had he?

Abe kept getting mistaken for Baker, didn’t he? Maybe, on some level, even for Hardy, they all did look alike.

Well, he wasn’t going to lose any sleep worrying over the fate of Louis Baker, who’d been at Rusty’s, had broken into Jane’s house, who for sure was the same badass he’d always been.

“What are you thinking?”

Frannie was wrapped in a white terrycloth robe. She had dried her hair and it gleamed like a red halo around her face.

Hardy walked back to the couch, avoiding her eyes. “Just pondering what Abe would call the moral ambiguities-”

“Of what?”

He motioned to the table. “This stuff.”

But that wasn’t all and he knew it. He sat down. Frannie leaned, arms crossed, against the doorjamb.

“Dismas?” she said.

He knew if he looked up he was in trouble, so he reached out and started arranging papers in the folder. Frannie came and stood next to him. He raised his head and she put her hands in his hair and pulled him into her. She opened the robe and his face was against her belly, the smell of powder and woman, her skin warm and tight, her heart pounding under it.

“Come on,” she said, and he followed her into the bedroom.

Lace was at the Mama’s putting up some plywood over the hole where Dido had broken the window.

The fog, which had come in late the night before, was already lifting. A light breeze fluffed at Lace’s flannel shirt. As far as Lace knew, no one in the cut had seen or heard anything about Louis Baker since two nights before, and Lace was figuring Louis ought to show up soon if he had any notion at all of claiming the cut, because it was slipping away fast.

Last night, Dido not yet in the ground, and Samson who ran the next cut over was seeing that no one worked out of this one. Lace and Jumpup, they’d laid low, letting things shake out.

He felt bad about Dido. Dido had been like his big brother, his protector. Lace wasn’t sure how he was going to handle Louis Baker when he came back, but the first thing was to get his confidence, make him think he’d change allegiances like the wind blew. He didn’t want Louis Baker feeling like he had to kill him the way Louis had had to kill Dido to secure the cut. So he’d make up to Mama, keep close and informed, fix the window and bide his time. Then when Louis came back and wasn’t looking, something bad would happen to him.

The Mama stuck herself out around the back of the building, a mountain of a woman in a multicolored caftan. She had cooked up a pan of cornbread inside and had butter and honey to go on it. Lace drove in another nail and let himself into the kitchen.

The Mama sat at the table, cutting into the pan. The cornbread smell filled the room.

“Sit down, child,” she said. “Eat up.”

Lace obeyed her, savoring the flavors, the butter melted into the bread, a little honey over the top. Mama poured him a glass of milk.

“Police brought back my car,” the Mama finally said. “Louis didn’t do it no harm.”

“They find him?”

“He got shot,” she said. “Everybody always wants to be shooting.”

Lace just nodded.

“Probably now he go back to the House. Police say it might be better if he don’t live now, what they might fix to do to him.” She cut another square of cornbread and put it on Lace’s plate. “They’re saying he killed Dido, you hear that?”

“He did kill Dido,” Lace said.

The Mama nearly exploded. “Why you say that?” Then, more quietly, “What make you think that trash, boy?”

Lace had to chew a minute before he could swallow. His mouth was dry and he took a gulp of milk. “Dido’s shot and he runs,” he mumbled out.

“You thinking like the police now,” she said. “Running don’t make you guilty. Running keep you out of the way, that’s all. First thing the Man do is look for somebody like Louis, maybe done some bad things before. Easy to lay it off on Louis, then.”

“Maybe.”

“Okay. Why Louis want to kill Dido?”

It was so obvious he had trouble saying it. “He want the cut, Mama.”

“You think Louis that dumb? He shoot Dido and run away from the cut he wants?”

“He didn’t do it, he shouldn’t have run.”

The Mama shook her head. “Child, child, child. Where you comin’ from? He gotta run. He got no choice.”

Lace went back to his cornbread, thinking that the Mama maybe made some sense… Louis had fought with Dido and the war was still going on with Dido breaking the window, but it would have been plain stupid to kill Dido, especially to get at the cut. Be like putting up a flag saying you did it.

Be more like it if somebody used the fighting between Dido and Louis to get rid of one and set up the other. Free up the cut, too. Lace needed to think on that.

Hardy ran his hand along Frannie’s side before he slipped out of bed. She stirred, made a noise in her throat and settled back into sleep. Hardy pulled the blanket up over her, moving her hair away from her face.

They had been awake most of the night, talking and loving one another. Like old friends in one way, but in the other-Hardy was amazed at what had gone on. Now, showering, the images of Frannie over him, under him, things they’d done the second and then third time, he found himself getting excited again and turned up the cold water so he could get on with the day, with his real life.

His real life.

He put on a pot of coffee, wondering what his real life had become lately, ever since Rusty Ingraham had walked into the Shamrock. Until then he’d been doing okay-in some ways, he thought, better than okay. Certainly better than the sleepwalk he’d been in before he got back with Jane. And things with Jane were at least steady. He worked bartending with easy hours doing something he mostly enjoyed.

And then-it was like the question you sometimes heard at parties-what if somebody told you that you were going to die in three days, or six months? What would you do differently?

And of course the ‘right’ answer was “I’d just keep doing what I’m doing.”

Well, somebody had made Hardy believe that he might die in the very near future, and he hadn’t done anything like what he’d been doing. What did that mean? That he hadn’t been happy with what he was doing? And how did he feel about what he was doing now? If he had one day left, would he choose to spend it with Frannie or Jane? Or alone?

Well, if he was lucky he had more than one day left, and didn’t have to make that decision. The sun was high. The fog was mostly burned off. Hardy thought that when he moved back into his house-whenever that happened-he’d start going down to Graffeo’s for coffee. It really was better than his canned espresso.