Joe couldn’t refuse him now. “Okay, I’ll take a glass. Sure.”

It was readily delivered, upon which, Pete knew to ask, “Now that that’s done, why are you really here?”

This was someone used to dealing with a particular slice of civilization.

“Corey Browne,” Joe responded, taking a sip of his beverage. “He here?”

Pete pointed with a sausage-sized finger. “Corner booth. You can just see the top of his head. Should I be prepared for anything?”

Joe wrapped a napkin around his frosty glass and made to head for the back of the room. “I hope not. I’m only aiming for a conversation.”

“Have a good one, then.”

There’s a psychology to how and where to sit in a bar like Hughie’s. Someone like Willy, despite being a teetotaler, spent considerable time in bars, and always put a wall to his back and his eyes on the door. That usually meant near the bathroom or the kitchen. Others, too preoccupied by their own private miseries to care, settled for a stool, where continual lubrication could be maintained by rapping on the bar. People like Corey—more secretive, less watchful, perhaps as much in need of harbor as alcohol, tended to orient toward corners and relative invisibility. These were folks who saw each day as containing far too many daylight hours.

Joe stopped at the booth and looked down at the man whose face he knew only from a mug shot at the office that morning.

“Corey Browne?” he asked, placing his glass on the table, removing his coat, and sliding onto the bench opposite.

Browne stared at him openmouthed. “Who the fuck’re you? I didn’t say you could sit down.”

“I’m a colleague of Willy Kunkle’s,” Joe said, using a name that would certainly make more of an impression than his own.

Browne had both hands cupping his beer as if it were a small, nervous pet. “Well, you can leave and tell him to fuck himself when you see him.”

“He was telling me about your conversation the other night,” Joe began, ignoring the predictable bluster. “I thought we might keep that going.”

“You thought wrong.”

“The subject,” Joe went on, “is still Don Kalfus, and the reason for you to be cooperative remains the legal charges you racked up last time by not thinking before you acted.”

“He said those were dropped.”

“Actually, he didn’t. He just let you go. The charges haven’t been filed. Yet. And who knows? They might not be.”

Browne gave his beer a thoughtful quarter turn on the tabletop before sighing wearily. “What d’you want now?”

“There’s a feeling among my colleagues that you coughed up Darren Bader because you knew more than you wanted to tell, and Darren was a good patsy. But Darren was a dead end, as you knew he’d be.”

“That’s not my fault. I heard Darren was ticked off at Kalfus. I told Kunkle about it, just like he asked. How was I supposed to know how that would turn out? I’m no mind reader.”