After that display, no one in the place was willing to play her, at least not for money, and Charlie wasn’t interested in playing pool unless it was to make money.

On the car ride back to her apartment, he said, “So many things have changed since I last saw you.”

Charlie, driving in her typically controlled, intense manner, stared through the windshield at the passing city. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

Whitman sighed, but silently. He said, “Can we kill the foolishness?”

Abruptly, she pulled over to the curb. “Get out,” she ordered.

“What? Here?”

She leaned across him, opened the door on his side. “Out!”

“But this neighborhood is—”

“You’re a big bad boy. You can take care of yourself.”

“Charlie—”

Her voice got low, and he slid out of the car, stood on the street as the door slammed shut and she took off. A block away the car came to a screeching halt. It stayed there idling, in the middle of the street. Not that there was any traffic this time of the morning. But still.

Whitman loped after her, feeling as foolish and giddy as a high school kid with his first crush.

When he reached the car, the doors were locked. He bent down and peered in. She was staring straight ahead. He wanted to tap on the glass, but instinct warned him otherwise. In a moment, her head turned and she stared directly at him. He tried like hell to read her expression, without success.

Keeping her eyes on him, her left hand moved and the electronic locks disengaged. He opened the door, but did not get in. He bent down, peered at her. He could see a pulse beating a tattoo in her right temple.

“Is it all right, Charlie?”

“No, it’s not all right.” She had not blinked once since turning to look at him, another one of her mysterious tricks.

“Well, then.” He honestly did not know what she wanted, what he should do. This, he recognized, was a weakness in himself. The knowledge was an acrid taste in his mouth.

“You want to know how I did it?” she asked, after what seemed a lifetime.

Whitman blinked, as if coming out of a daze. “Did what?”

“Beat Milt.”

“You were better than he was.”

“No,” she said slowly, “I wasn’t.”

Surprise arose in him like a flock of startled birds. “Yeah, I do want to know.”

He slid into the bucket seat, closed the door quietly without looking away from her. She put the car in gear, stepped on the accelerator, and they sped off into the quickening night. To Whitman’s chagrin he was sporting a raging hard-on.

4

When King Cutler and Julie Regan weren’t making love at night, they watched DVDs of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. They shared a love of nostalgia, especially when it came to TV shows, as well as a penchant for insomnia. At three a.m., while Whitman and Charlie were on their way back to her apartment, Cutler and Julie were in bed, naked, amid rumpled bedclothes. While Cutler watched Carson doing one of his Carnac the Magnificent bits, Julie was in the shower, soaping off the smells of healthy sweat and sex. Cutler wished she wouldn’t do that; he liked the way she smelled after they had made love, but cleanliness was a kind of obsession with her. While he waited for her to return, he ate handfuls of mixed nuts, washed down with a bottle of Mexican Coca Cola, made with sugar, not high-fructose corn syrup, which Cutler could not abide. He had a closely held private opinion that America’s addiction to high-fructose corn syrup was draining its males of precious bodily fluids. He possessed a balanced enough mind to see how that idea might strike an outsider as nuts. Therefore, he had never mentioned it to anyone, certainly not to Julie Regan.