“Best time to get to know a place,” Sweets said, stirring his coffee with a thumb, then sucking the coffee from it. “Plus, Comox don’t hardly get the winters Michigan gets hammered with. I’m just dressed for the drive, man. Got my little eighteen-hundred-square-foot shack, Lund Pro-V fishin’ boat, reels, poles, lures and line, ’bout three-hundred books, my granddaddy’s huntin’ rifle and enough Courvoisier and Coke to start my own niggah nation—which ain’t gonna happen, since I am true to my heart sick to death of Black folk, country-ass crackas, them racist-ass DC swamp rats and everybody inside and outside them three.”

I tried to keep from laughing, since Tatina was upstairs doing a grand jeté through the land of Nod. “So, what brings you by on a night not fit for man or beast?”

“Thought you might like to know ’bout some brothas just rolled in from Jersey,” Sweets said. “Seems they got a big blue-vein hard-on for you.”

“Any connection to Duke Ducane?”

“Not as far as I can tell,” Sweets said. “What’s weird is they ain’t locally connected, but they rumored to have a nasty track record in Jersey City, Brooklyn and Cape Cod—”

“Cape Cod?”

“Yeah,” Sweets said after a slurp of coffee. “Word has it they East Coast troubleshooters for off-book real estate deals. I mean big shit! Mansions with no addresses, high-rise apartment complexes with no numbers, beach houses with no latitude or longitude. You know what kind of juice it takes to flip a black-site real estate deal for any of that shit?”

“Major.”

“Mighty, mighty major,” Sweets said. “You gotta butter everybody’s bread on that one: tax rolls, politicos, police, power and water hookups, inspectors—even the goddamn US mail!”

“Hello?”

Tatina on the staircase.

Sweets didn’t know whom to gawk at—me or the beautiful woman with the long caramel-brown legs. She was wearing one of my Wayne State University T-shirts. Sweets settled on staring at Tatina. Who could blame him?

He rose awkwardly from his stool at my kitchen island and said, “Ma’am.”

“Sorry if we woke you,” I said.

“You didn’t,” she said, descending the steps with the same élan as Venus displayed emerging from her clamshell. She took a seat next to a mesmerized Sweets. “I turned and you weren’t there.”

“You can close your mouth now, Sweets,” I said.

“Your name is Sweets?” Tatina said.

“Uh—yeah—yes, ma’am,” Sweets said. “Least that’s what some folk call me.”

“Nice to meet you, Sweets,” Tatina said, shaking Sweets’s hand. “You two are friends?”

Sweets and I exchanged looks, assessing what exactly we were to each other: Associates? Friends? Confidential informant and client? Seller and buyer?

“We go way back,” Sweets finally said. “When he was a beat cop and then a detective.”

“What was he like back then?” Tatina said.