Grimacing, he heard a series of sharp barks. The dog door opened with a click, followed by the scratch of tiny paws flying across the stones and a high-pitched yip. Hairy S, his wife Olivia’s terrier mutt, streaked across the veranda, sending a squirrel squawking loudly up the bole of a scraggly pine. Hairy, who had been named in honor of Harry S. Truman, Olivia’s grandmother’s favorite president, was going nuts. He leaped and barked at the trunk of the tree, his mottled hair bristling as the squirrel taunted and scolded from the safety of an upper limb.

“Hairy! Shh!” Bentz wasn’t in the mood. His head was beginning to pound and his pride had already suffered a beating with the fall.

“What the hell are you doing?” Montoya’s voice boomed at him and he nearly tripped again.

“I’m walking without a damned cane or crutch. What’s it look like?”

“Like a face plant.”

Bentz turned to find his partner slipping through the side gate and striding across the flagstones with the irritating ease of a jungle cat. To add insult to injury, Olivia’s scrappy little dog diverted from the squirrel to run circles around Montoya’s feet, leaving Bentz to dust off his pride. He tried not to wince, but his knees stung where his skin had been scraped off. No doubt bruises were already forming. He sensed the ooze of warm, sticky blood run down his shins.

“I was watching from over the top of the gate. Looked to me like you were attempting a swan dive into the concrete.”

“Very funny.”

“I thought so.”

Bentz wasn’t in the mood to be ridiculed by his smart-assed partner. Make that his smart-assed younger partner. With hair that gleamed black in the afternoon light, reflective sunglasses covering eyes that were as sharp as they had ever been, Montoya was younger and more athletic than Bentz. And not afraid to remind his older partner of it.

When he walked, Montoya damned near swaggered and the diamond stud in his earlobe glittered. At least today he wasn’t wearing his signature black leather jacket, just a white T-shirt and jeans. Looking cool as all get-out.

It bugged the hell out of Bentz.

“Olivia at work?”

Bentz nodded. “Should be home in a couple of hours.” His wife still worked a couple of days a week at the Third Eye, a New Age gift shop near Jackson Square that had survived Hurricane Katrina. She’d completed her master’s in psychology a while back and was considering starting her own practice, but she hadn’t quite made the transition to full time. Bentz suspected she missed the hustle and bustle of the French Quarter.

Montoya found Bentz’s cell phone near a huge ceramic pot filled with cascading pink and white petunias. “Looking for this?” He dusted off the phone, then handed it to him.