The place was medium to crowded. Just about everyone wore a baseball cap, even those who I assume were women. A few people had mixed drinks, but for the most part, this was Budweiser country.

We walked up to the bar and folks went back to what they were doing, or pretending to.

The bartender was a young guy, good-looking and bleached blond, but a townie if he was working this place. He gave me a slight smile. Then he gave one to Angie that, in comparison, looked as if his lips exploded. “Hi. What can I get you?” He leaned on the bar and looked into her eyes.

Angie said, “Two Buds.”

“My pleasure,” Blondie said.

“I’ll bet,” she said and smiled.

She does this all the time. Flirts her ass off with everyone but me. If I wasn’t such a rock of self-confidence, it would annoy me.

My luck was good tonight, though. I felt it the moment the Bon Jovi song ended. While Blondie went for the beers, I looked at the stairs. In what passes for a moment of stillness in a bar, I could hear people moving around overhead.

When Blondie placed both beers in front of Angie, I said, “Is there a back door to this place?”

He turned his head slowly in my direction, looking at me as if I’d just bumped his knee stepping onto the bus. “Yeah,” he said with extreme slowness and nodded in the direction of the pool table. Through the smoke that hung over the back I saw the door. He was looking at Angie again, but out of the corner of his mouth, he said, “Why, you planning on sticking the place up?”

“No,” I said. I flipped through all the cards in my wallet until I found the right one. “I’m planning on citing you for building code violations. Lots of them, asshole.” I flipped the card on the bar. It said, “Lewis Prine, State Building Inspector.” Lewis made the mistake of leaving me unattended in his office once.

Blondie stopped looking at Angie, though I could see it hurt. He stepped back a bit and looked at the card. “Don’t you guys have badges or something?”

I had one of those too. Good thing about badges, most of them look pretty much the same to the untrained eye, so I don’t have to carry fifty of them around with me. I flipped it at him, then put it back in my pocket. “All you got’s that one back door?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. Nervous. “Why?”

“Why? Why? Where’s the owner?”

“Huh?”

“The owner. The owner.”

“Bob? He’s gone home for the night.”

My luck was still holding. I said, “Son, how many floors you got here?”

He looked at me as if I’d just asked what the atmospheric density of Pluto was. “Floors? Uh, two. We got two. Rooming house’s upstairs.”

“Two,” I repeated with an air of moral revulsion. “Two floors and the only exits are on the first.”