“I’m sort of cutting back on it these days.”

“Oh yeah?” The gray eyes focused on me as he registered this information. He picked up his glass and drank about half of it, set it down on the worn wooden table with a thunk. “You got the right idea,” he said, and I thought he meant the ginger ale, but he had shifted gears by then. “Quitting the job. Getting out. You know what I want? All I want is six more years.”

“Then you got your twenty?”

“Then I got my twenty,” he said, “and then I got my pension, and then I’m fucking well gone. Out of this job and out of this shithole of a city. Florida, Texas, New Mexico, someplace warm and dry and clean. Forget Florida, I heard things about Florida, all the fucking Cubans, they got crime like you get here. Plus they got all the dope coming in there. Those crazy Colombians. You know about the Colombians?”

I thought of Royal Waldron. “A fellow I know says they’re all right,” I said. “He said you just don’t want to cheat ’em.”

“You bet your ass you don’t want to cheat ’em. You read about those two girls over in Long Island City? Must have been six, eight months ago. Sisters, one’s twelve and one’s fourteen, and they found ’em in the back room of this out-of-business gas station, hands tied behind their backs, each of ’em shot twice in the head with a small-caliber weapon, I think a .22, but who gives a shit?” He drank the rest of his drink. “Well, it didn’t figure. No sex angle, nothing. It’s an execution, but who executes a couple of teenage sisters?

“Well, it clears itself up, because a week later somebody breaks into the house where they lived and shoots their mother. We found her in the kitchen with dinner still cooking on the stove. See, the family’s Colombian, and the father’s in the cocaine business, which is the chief industry down there outside of smuggling emeralds—”

“I thought they grew a lot of coffee.”

“That’s probably a front. Where was I? The point is, the father turns up dead a month later in whatever’s the capital of Colombia. He crossed somebody and he ran for it, and they wound up getting him in Colombia, but first they killed his kids and his wife. See, the Colombians, they play by a different set of rules. You fuck with them and they don’t just kill you. They wipe out your whole family. Kids, any age, it don’t matter. You got a dog and a cat and some tropical fish, they’re dead too.”

“Jesus.”

“The Mafia was always considerate about family. They’d even make sure to arrange a hit so your family wouldn’t be there to see it happen. Now we got criminals that kill the whole family. Nice?”