Jim had long ago decided that what Bobby had or had not done before he settled in the Park was none of his business. Bobby drank a lot of Kentucky sipping whiskey, he pirated a little radio wave, and, other than throwing an annual blowout for other Park survivors of the Tet Offensive, lived a quiet life.

And, Jim had enough of the outlaw in himself to recognize another outlaw when he saw one. "Hey, Bobby." He doffed cap and jacket and accepted a mug of steaming coffee from Dinah.

"Goddamn, Chopin!" Bobby said, executing a perfect turn on one wheel with no perceptible traveling. Five point nine, all judges. "How the hell did you talk Billy out of his new wheels?"

Jim moved over to one of the couches surrounding the big rock fireplace set between the ceiling-high windows and sank into very deep cushions. "Well, it's like this."

Bobby and Dinah listened with absorption, and when he was done, they exchanged one of those glances married people give each other, the kind that exchanges a wealth of information without a word being said, and at the same time casts the uncoupled people in the room into outer darkness. "What?" he said.

"Nothing," Dinah said, giving Bobby the look, it being another one of the shorthand methods of married communication.

"No," Bobby said hastily. "Nothing. No wonder Billy gave you his wheels. Anything that brings jobs into the Park makes him happy."

"Even if other people might not be," Dinah said sotto voce, as if she couldn't help herself.

Selective deafness was one of the more useful acquired talents in law enforcement, and Jim practiced it now. "Do you think it'll work?"

Bobby stared at him through narrowed eyes. "Shit. Why ask us—you've already made up your mind."

It wasn't a question, and Jim let a grin be his answer. It was a wide grin, one that could and often did, variously, mesmerize, intimidate, terrify, annihilate, or seduce. Dinah had once heard it described as "the last thing you see before the shark bites" and again as "You know that snake in the movie The Jungle Book'' and most recently as "When he's going out the door for the last time, it's like that Judy Garland song, 'The Man That Got Away.' "

As a female down to her fingertips, Dinah had always been relieved that she had seen Bobby first. Especially since she'd never been one for three-way relationships, and it had been clear from the first time she'd met him that any woman sleeping with Trooper Jim Chopin would be sharing that bed with a third person. It was only recently that she had realized that the third person had never changed, and only in the last year that she had learned to see Jim Chopin as a man instead of a caricature Don Juan. "Hungry?" she said to him. "I was just about to fix us some lunch."

He smiled at her, and she had to repress the instinctive urge to take a step back. Or maybe forward. "Sounds good to me."