“All the way, baby.”

The women departed and I settled in, wondering about the word lifelong. This was not a Mouse word. I’d never heard him use it or any other word in that category. He was an intelligent conversationalist and most certainly a raconteur, but his language was stripped down and bare like our hardscrabble lives had been in the Fifth Ward.

But this meeting was not about vocabulary.

“You didn’t have any trouble at the door?” I asked.

“Trouble? There better not be no trouble. Shit. I fuck trouble in the ass and send him home to his mama.”

I laughed and said, “I thought that since you’re retired you might have lost touch with some’a the made men.”

“Lost touch? Retired? No, baby, that’s not it. I mean, I don’t do as much as I used to, but ever since Dearborn I get to run jobs . . .”

He went on to explain that he agreed to go with one of their heist bosses to Michigan to plan a hit on an armored car company.

“Mothahfuckah said he needed twelve men, three specialized cars, a mothahfuckin’ bulldozer, and on top’a that he wanted at least four months to plan the job. They were going to kill a few guards too . . .”

Somewhere in the middle of that our five-hundred-dollar bottle of Brut arrived. Mouse had a sixteen-ounce T-bone and I got a Caesar salad to offset the street chili.

“. . . you know me,” Mouse was saying. “I just stood back and listened ’cause it wasn’t my job. But then one day when we was scoutin’ I noticed this hale-lookin’ black janitor . . .”

Hale?

“. . . I called the overboss and told him that I could do the whole job for a tenth the cost in two weeks’ time. All he had to do was bring in a good-lookin’ woman from East Europe know how to talk good English. Three-and-a-half-million-dollar take and the whole thing took sixteen days with four men and Natasha.”

“Why a woman from Eastern Europe?” I asked.

“You know, Easy, a white woman from America try to be talkin’ like she liked a brothah but he might could see that she lookin’ at a niggah in her mind. And I needed our inside man to feel trust. Those European girls, especially if they wantin’ to move west, be happy for that dark meat.”

I laughed and Mouse appreciated the respect.

“So that’s why I call it semiretired nowadays,” my killer friend concluded. “But why you wanna know, anyway?”

“Etta seemed uptight, that’s all. And I know she wanted you to give the heavy shit up.”

Mouse’s eyes tightened a bit, making it feel as if a shadow had fallen across our pinwheel table.

A moment or two passed before he said, “Lihn. Vu Von Lihn. That girl make me feel sumpin’. I think I do her too.”