“Thank you.” She didn’t. She was in a bathrobe, of course, and her hair was undone. She looked smaller and more round-shouldered than he remembered, as well as more gray. He had gray hair, too, but he wanted to think that he had not aged so badly. Insane! He knew that he did not care for this woman, or even want to be in her company, but he also told himself that he did not wish her ill. So why was he gloating? Death did not call only on those who seemed older. Maybe it was just his too human way of dealing with his own fear. He stepped into the apartment, which smelled almost suffocatingly of cats and their shit. “A couple of things happened today that made me want to find out why you wanted me to call you on a safe line.”

“Let me close the door. To tell you the truth, Frank, for the past several days I’ve been worried like hell about you. What the fuck is going on?”

The apartment was unchanged in the years since he had seen it last, the walls dirtier, the furniture even more threadbare. Some of the stuff in here went back to the forties, or even earlier, and the paint job could be twenty years old. She just didn’t care. In his life Devlin had met a lot of people who were like her in that regard. A cat jumped off the couch and trotted quickly into the bedroom. “Tell me what you know.”

“Figured … I knew I’d have to tell you first. Do you want some coffee?”