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He was angry. Maybe, like the short cuckold on Staten Island, he was always angry. But I believed this passion was anchored in fear.

“If that’s true,” I said, “then why are you here?”

It was an honest question, and how he answered would inform my next moves.

“Don’t fuck with me,” he said.

“The fact you’re sitting in front of me with a bodyguard a few tables away means I’m already fuckin’ with you, brother. What I want to know is why Paul Convert framed my ass. What I want to know is why you motherfuckers tried to murder me—twice.”

The inspector’s hazel eyes were suddenly filled with questions and revelations.

“You’re crazy,” he said in a voice that was trying desperately to take the higher ground.

“Why go through all this shit?” I asked. “I mean, okay, ten, twelve years ago I was on a case. I might have been bullheaded and tried to take down whatever you had going on the docks. You felt that you had to stop me. I could see that. But now that I know the game and the players, why don’t you just let me back in?”

Asking these questions, I realized that this was what was most important to me.

Keeping me in the dark, maybe even putting me in the grave, was what was most important to Natches.

I looked up and noticed that Mel had gotten to his feet. He walked over to Natches’s gray guardian and took the seat across from him.

“You don’t know a thing,” Dennis Natches said to me. “A little man like you could go out like a candle sitting on the windowsill. We should have taken care of you back then, when you were a cowboy.”

“Why didn’t you?”

The answer was in his eye, but it wouldn’t make it to his lips.

“I’m finished with you,” Natches said. He pushed his chair back from the table.

“You should finish your tea,” I said.

“You’re dead and don’t know it,” he said with a grin that couldn’t help but be evil.

“You mean like your friend over there does?”

Natches glanced over and saw smiling Melquarth Frost and his own man looking both serious and defeated.

“I learned a lot since I was a police detective thinking he could do it on his own,” I said. “I learned that reading is important, that law is an ever-changing variable equation, and that a man is a fool if he works alone.”

Natches settled back into his chair.

I continued, “I learned that anyone can be brought low no matter how high or powerful they are. I know that if I die you will too. You should know that, Dennis. Your man over there with my man’s gun on him should know that.

“Now get your ass outta here and remember that your heart can stop beating too.”

He took his time standing from the chair.

I looked over to see that the bodyguard was also on his feet.

They both tried to intimidate us with their stares, but we knew that two cops couldn’t open fire in a New York place of business, and they couldn’t trust that we wouldn’t. After all, there was already one dead man across the river in Queens.

When Natches and his man were gone, Mel got up and sauntered over to me. I told the straw-headed, zaftig waitress to bring the bills for Mel and the bodyguard to me.

“You think they’re laying for us out there?” I asked Mel when the waitress went away to do my bidding.

“I hope not,” he said, “for them. But it doesn’t matter anyway.”

“Why not?”