“The opinion is I think you should heed the message. Either I’m getting old in a hurry or this town’s gotten nastier in the past couple of years. People seem to pull the trigger a lot quicker than they used to. They used to need more of a reason to kill. You know what I mean?”

“Yes.”

“Now they’ll do it unless they’ve got a reason not to. They’ll sooner kill than not. It’s an automatic response. I’ll tell you, it scares me.”

“It scares everybody.”

“You had a little scene uptown a few nights back, didn’t you? Or was somebody making up stories?”

“What did you hear?”

“Just that a brother jumped you in the alley and wound up with multiple fractures.”

“News travels.”

“It does for a fact. Of course there’s more dangerous things in this city than a young punk on angel dust.”

“Is that what he was on?”

“Aren’t they all? I don’t know. I stick to basics, myself.” He underscored the line with a sip of his vodka. “About Dakkinen,” he said. “I could pass a message back up the line.”

“What kind of message?”

“That you’re letting it lay.”

“That might not be true, Danny Boy.”

“Matt—”

“You remember Jack Benny?”

“Do I remember Jack Benny? Of course I remember Jack Benny.”

“Remember that bit with the stickup man? The guy says, ‘Your money or your life,’ and there’s a long pause, a really long pause, and Benny says, ‘I’m thinking it over.’ “

“That’s the answer? You’re thinking it over?”

“That’s the answer.”

Outside on Seventy-second Street I stood in the shadows in the doorway of a stationery store, waiting to see if anyone would follow me out of Poogan’s. I stood there for a full five minutes and thought about what Danny Boy had said. A couple of people left Poogan’s while I was standing there but they didn’t look like anything I had to worry about.

I went to the curb to hail a cab, then decided I might as well walk half a block to Columbus and get one going in the right direction. By the time I got to the corner I decided it was a nice night and I was in no hurry, and an easy stroll fifteen blocks down Columbus Avenue would probably do me good, make sleep come that much easier. I crossed the street and headed downtown and before I’d covered a block I noticed that my hand was in my coat pocket and I was holding onto the little gun.

Funny. No one had followed me. What the hell was I afraid of?

Just something in the air.