Now her hair was short and spiky and ink black and her skin was pale as bleach. She wore a sleeveless black turtleneck tucked into painted-on charcoal jeans, and a nervous, half-gasping sound, almost a hiccup, punctuated the ends of her sentences.

“Nice day, huh?”

“I’ll take it. Last October, we had snow by this time.”

“New York, too.” She chuckled, then nodded to herself and looked down at her scuffed boots. “Hmm. Yeah.”

I sipped some more coffee. “So how you doing, Kara?”

She put her hand over her eyes again, looked at the slow-motion morning traffic. Hard sunlight glanced off the windshields and shafted through the spikes of her hair. “I’m good, Patrick. Really good. How about you?”

“No complaints.” I glanced at the avenue myself and when I turned back she was looking into my face intently, as if trying to decide whether it attracted or repelled her.

She swayed slightly from side to side, an almost imperceptible movement, and I could hear two guys shouting something about five dollars and a baseball game through the open doorway of The Black Emerald.

She said, “You still a detective?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Good living?”

“Sometimes,” I said.

“My mom mentioned you in a letter last year, said you were in all the papers. A big deal.”

I was surprised Kara’s mother could climb out of the inside of a scotch glass long enough to read a paper, never mind write her daughter a letter about the experience.

“It was a slow news week,” I said.

She looked back at the bar, ran a finger above her ear as if tucking back hair that wasn’t there. “What do you charge?”

“Depends on the case. You need a detective, Kara?”

Her lips looked thin and oddly abandoned for a moment, as if she’d closed her eyes during a kiss and opened them to find her lover gone. “No.” She laughed, then hiccupped. “I’m moving to L.A. soon. I landed a part on Days of Our Lives.”

“Really? Hey, congrat—”

“Just a walk-on,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m the nurse who’s always fiddling with papers behind the nurse who stands at the admitting desk.”

“Still,” I said, “it’s a start.”

A man stuck his head out of the bar, looked to his right, then to his left, saw us through bleary eyes. Micky Doog, part-time construction worker, full-time coke dealer, a former local heartthrob from Kara’s age group, still trying to hold the line of his youth against the advance of a receding hairline and softening muscles. He blinked when he saw me, then stuck his head back inside.

Kara’s shoulders tensed, as if she’d felt him there, then she leaned in toward me and I could smell the sharp odor of rum floating from her mouth at ten in the morning.

“Crazy world, huh?” Her pupils glinted like razors.

“Um…yeah,” I said. “You need help, Kara?”

She laughed again, followed it with a hiccup.

“No, no. No, I just wanted to say hey, Patrick. You were one of the big brothers to our crew.” She tilted her head back toward the bar so I could see where some of her “crew” had ended up this morning. “I just wanted to, you know, say hi.”