“Yeah, so? Every cop who retires does that. It’s part of the process of letting go of the badge. You think, Oh, well, I’ll just get a PI ticket and keep on catching the bad guys. My ticket is in a drawer in my house, Keisha. I’m not in business and I’m not working for anybody.”

“Okay, Harry, okay.”

“Thanks for the clips. I’ve gotta go.”

“Bye, Harry.”

I closed the phone and smiled. I liked sparring with her. Ten years covering cops and she seemed no more cynical than the first day I talked to her. That was amazing for a journalist, even more so for a black journalist.

I looked up at the building. It was a concrete monolith that eclipsed the sun from the angle I had. I was thirty feet from the entrance. But I walked over to a row of benches to the right of the entranceway and sat down. I checked my watch and saw that I was very late for my appointment with Nunez. The trouble was I didn’t know what I was walking into up there and that made me reluctant to go through the doors. The federals always had a way of putting you off balance, of making it clear that it was their world and you were only an invited visitor. I assumed that now without a badge I would be treated more like an uninvited visitor.

I opened the phone back up and called the general number for Parker Center, one of the few numbers I still remembered. I asked for Kiz Rider in the chief’s office and was transferred. She picked up immediately.

“Kiz, it’s me, Harry.”

“Hello, Harry.”

I tried to read something in her tone but she had flat-lined her response. I couldn’t tell how much of the morning’s anger and animosity remained.

“How are you doing? You feeling any . . . uh, better?”

“Did you get my message, Harry?”

“Message? No, what did it say?”

“I called your house a little while ago. I apologized. I shouldn’t have let personal feelings get mixed in with the reason I had come out there. I’m sorry.”

“Hey, it’s okay, Kiz. I apologize, too.”

“Really? For what?”

“I don’t know. For the way I left, I guess. You and Edgar didn’t deserve that. Especially you. I should have talked about it with you guys. That’s what partners do. I guess I wasn’t a very good partner at that moment.”

“Don’t worry about it. That’s what I said on the message. Water under the bridge. Let’s just be friends now.”

“I’d like to. But . . .”

I waited for her to pick up the invitation.

“But what, Harry?”

“Well, I don’t know how friendly you’ll want to be after this because I’ve got to ask you a question and you’re probably not going to like it.”

She groaned into the phone so loud that I had to hold it away from my ear.

“Harry, you’re killing me. What is it?”