“Colorful case tidbits?”

“If you think they’re significant.”

There was a wheezing sound on the phone. “I haven’t had my coffee yet.”

Gurney said nothing, knowing what was coming.

“So here’s the deal,” growled Hardwick. “You deliver a nice big Sumatra from Abelard’s and maybe I’ll be motivated to deliver significant tidbits.”

“Are there any?”

“Who knows? If I can’t remember any, I’ll make some up. Of course, one man’s significance is another man’s horseshit. I’ll take my Sumatra black with three sugars.”

• • •

Forty minutes later, with two large coffees in the car, Gurney was driving up the twisty dirt road that led from Abelard’s General Store in Dillweed to an even twistier dirt road, hardly a road at all—more like an abandoned cattle path—at the end of which Jack Hardwick lived in a small rented farmhouse. Gurney parked next to Hardwick’s attitude car—a partially restored red 1970 Pontiac GTO.

The sparse, intermittent snowflakes had been replaced by a pin-pricky mist. As Gurney stepped up onto the creaking porch, one coffee container in each hand, the door swung open to reveal Hardwick in a T-shirt and cutoff sweatpants, his shaggy gray crew cut uncombed. They’d seen each other face-to-face only once since Gurney’s hospitalization six months earlier, at a state-police inquiry into the shooting, but Hardwick’s opening line was characteristic.

“So tell me—how the fuck do you know little Kimmy?”

Gurney extended one of the coffees. “Through her mother. You want this?”

Hardwick took it, opened the flap on the lid, tasted it. “Is the mom as hot as the kid?”

“For Christ’s sake, Jack …”

“That a yes or a no?” Hardwick stepped back to let Gurney in.

The outer doorway led directly into a large front room that Gurney would have expected to be furnished as a living room, but it was hardly furnished at all. The pair of leather armchairs with a stack of books between them on a bare pine floor looked more like things about to be moved than a planned seating arrangement.

Hardwick was watching him. “Marcy and I broke up,” he said, as if explaining the emptiness of the place.

“Sorry to hear that. Who’s Marcy?”

“Good question. Thought I knew. Apparently not.” He took a longer sip of his coffee. “I must have a big blind spot when it comes to evaluating loony women with nice tits.” Another sip, even longer. “But so what? We’ve all got our blind spots, right, Davey?”

Gurney had figured out long ago that the part of Hardwick that went through him like a needle was the part that reminded him of his father—this despite the fact that Gurney was currently forty-eight and Hardwick, although gray-haired and roughly weathered, was not quite forty.