Walters reached into his pocket and removed the vial. These pills, he said, will cut down on your desire to drink. Not erase it completely but make it less. They block the interface between the alcohol and the chemical receptors in your brain.

The man’s eyes began to close. Walter’s escort shook the fellow in the chair; the eyes opened.

Walters went on: One in the morning, one at night. If you experience dizziness, a decline in sexual appetite, stomach troubles, you should contact me immediately. Here’s my number.

Walters wrote it down on a piece of hotel stationary. He looked at Mr. White and realized he would never hear back from this person. He held out the container of pills. The man leaned forward to take the vial, and the flaps of his vest separated to reveal a tattoo on his chest. It looked like an M pierced by an arrow.

Okay, let’s go, Mr. White said. He patted the man in the chair and turned on the television. You take care, he said. See ya later.

In the hallway, Walters protested. The man in the room clearly required more than a poorly tested drug. Sometimes a little is the absolute best we can do, Mr. White said, and, to tell the fucked-up truth, this guy is damn lucky. Doesn’t look it, but damn lucky.

Walters never saw Mr. White again. He never saw the man in the chair again. He never heard from him. A few days after the visit, he asked Killigren if he could conduct a follow-up session. Some meetings never really occurred, Killigren told him. Walters tried to argue, invoking medical ethics. It’s hard to be a doctor in the dark, Killigren said. But if that’s where your patient is …

Lancette realized she had scraped the label off her beer bottle. She gathered the pieces and placed them in the plastic ash tray on the table.

“In retrospect, seems hard to believe that I didn’t right away remember the tattoo,” Walters said. He sipped his beer. “But there have been even odder days.”

An Aretha Franklin song blared from the jukebox.

“Ever find out what the Gauntlet was?” she asked.

“No. But then I never went looking. I told you, I’m not a brave man.” He emptied his glass.

“And it was a dagger through an M?”

“Something like that. Can’t swear it, but … .”

“And the photographs—none looked like the man you met in the hotel room?”

“Not that I could see. But did that Max Bridge guy have a glass eye?”

Not as far as Lancette knew. But you could never be sure that all information was being shared.

The door to the bar opened, and light fell upon Walters’s face. Lancette saw concern in his eyes. She looked over her shoulder. A black man and a white man had entered. They sat at the bar.

“When was this?” Lancette asked.