“Hi, Gerry.”

“Patrick,” he said, confused but with enthusiasm. “What brings you by?”

He wiped his palms and offered me his hand.

I shook it and he pumped mine hard, looking me dead in the eyes, a habit of the older generation that reminded me of my father.

“I needed to ask you a question or two, Ger, if you got the time.”

He cocked his head and his usually kind eyes lost their softness. Then they cleared and he hoisted his bulk onto the cooler behind him and spread his hands, palms up. “Sure. You need a beer or something?”

“Don’t want to put you out, Ger.” I settled into the bar stool across from him.

He opened the door of the cooler next to him. His thick arm dug down inside and ice rattled. “No problem. Can’t promise what I’ll come up with.”

I smiled. “Long as it isn’t a Busch.”

He laughed. “Nope. It’s a…” His arm came out washed in ice water, dimples of cold jellied white against the flesh under his forearm. “…Lite.”

I smiled as he handed it to me. “Like sex in a sailboat,” I said.

He laughed loudly and sputtered the punchline. “It’s fucking too close to water. I love that one.” He reached behind himself and, without looking, pulled a bottle of Stolichnaya from the shelf. He poured some into a tall shot glass, put the bottle back, then raised the glass.

“Cheers.”

“Cheers,” I said and drank some Lite. Tasted like water, but it was still better than Busch. Of course, a cup of diesel is usually better than Busch.

“So what’s your question?” Gerry said. He patted his ample gut. “Jealous of my physique?”

I smiled. “A bit.” I drank some more Lite. “Gerry, what can you tell me about someone named Alec Hardiman?”

He held his shot glass up to the fluorescent light and the clear liquid disappeared in a shimmer of white. He stared at it and rotated the glass in his fingers.

“Now,” he said quietly, eyes still on the glass, “where would you come up with that name, Patrick?”

“It was mentioned to me.”

“You’ve been looking for matches to the MO of Kara Rider’s killer.” He brought the glass down and looked across at me. He didn’t seem angry or irritated and his voice was flat and monotonous, but there was a stillness to his squat body that hadn’t been there a minute before.

“Per your suggestion, Ger.”

On the jukebox behind me, the Pogues had at some point given way to The Waterboys’ “Don’t Bang the Drum.” The TV screens above Gerry’s head were tuned to three different channels. One broadcast Australian Rules Football, one what looked like an old Kojak episode, and the third showed Old Glory wavering in the breeze as it signed off for the night.

Gerry hadn’t moved, hadn’t so much as blinked, since he’d brought the shot glass back down by his side, and I could just make out the sound of his breathing, shallow and thin, as he exhaled through his nostrils. He didn’t study me so much as stare through me, as if what he was seeing was on the other side of my head.