My pancakes arrived. I doused them in syrup and got to work. Suddenly, I really was hungry. “No, you can’t afford to do that, Clarence. You’re right. But you can’t afford not to, either.”

“Damn it, will you quit calling me Clarence!” He said this so loudly that people at other tables turned to look. He blushed—how come my Earth body never does that?—and leaned close to the table, as if he was only going to talk to the catsup bottle and the napkin dispenser from now on. “What do you mean, can’t afford not to?”

“Because I’m going to go after it no matter what. And although I promise I would never voluntarily rat on either of you, if and when I get busted trying to do this, Heaven will probably squeeze every bit of information about the last few months out of me. Who knows what they can do to find things out? And that means they’re going to know that you should have blown the whistle on both me and Sam a long, long time ago.”

The kid was shocked. “Are you blackmailing me, Bobby?”

“No. Really, no. I’m just being a realist. You can’t play this game both ways, Clarence—or ‘Harrison,’ if you really, honestly like that better. Personally, I think that name sounds like someone should be arranging playdates for you after your Suzuki Method violin classes.” I poured some more syrup. “Clarence is way cooler.”

He seemed stunned, although whether it was what I was saying or the fact that I’d actually remembered his name, I couldn’t say. “I don’t know. I have to think.” A moment later he got up, fumbled out some money and dropped it on the table. “I have to go. I’m on call. I’ll . . . I’ll talk to you later.”

“There goes your ride,” I said as he left.

Sam snorted. “Are you kidding? I drove. Don’t you remember?”

“That was your car we came in? How do you have a car, living in a funhouse mirror?”

“Borrowed it from Orban. He sympathizes with people who are kind of stuck between the two sides.”

“Yeah, I guess he would.” I finished off the rest of my pancakes and downed my coffee. “You wanna drop me back at my place? I’ve got to start thinking about what I’m going to do next.”

“Aren’t you worried about the kid?” Sam stood up, jingling his car keys. “That he’s going to go drop a dime on you or something? Go right to your bosses?”

“Clarence? Yeah, right. That’s why he left five bucks on the table for his cup of coffee. He’s such an idealist, and he wants to hang out with us big boys so badly, that I’ll probably have to hold him back when he decides to storm Heaven itself with guns blazing—for Justice!”