The truth was, I didn’t know how to think about Sam and what had happened to him. When you know somebody as long as I’ve known Sam Riley, aka Advocate Angel Sammariel; when you’ve gotten drunk together, been in firefights together, and watched a few dozen human beings die in each other’s company, you kind of figure you’ve seen everything that other person has to show. So when I found out he’d been working for mystery-angel Kephas and the secret Third Way operation, essentially running a side game right on Heaven’s own turf, under my nose and everyone else’s . . . well, I still wasn’t sure how it all jibed. The last time the two of us had talked, just before he stepped through a shimmering door to somewhere I’d never seen before, he seemed pretty much like the Sam I’d shared all those breakfasts with in this very restaurant, watching the tourists get their money lifted by waterfront locals both legit and otherwise. But all that time, or at least the last couple of years, he’d been hiding the whole Third Way thing from me. It made a guy think, and to be honest, I really wasn’t too fond of thinking right at the moment. Still, I missed Sam and his big old country face. I couldn’t help wondering if we were going to see each other again and what that would be like.