He didn’t. He’d never tasted tequila, barely knew it existed. Before he’d gotten serious about life, when he’d been living with Joanie and his infant son in a little dump of a town on the Hudson River and doing a less-than-credible imitation of a school psychologist, it had been well-brandy and a beer back, and if he felt adventurous maybe a screwdriver. He lifted the cup to his nostrils and took a tentative sniff. The odor was strangely soapy, as if this wasn’t liquor at all but a concentration of the stuff the janitors put in the dispensers in the men’s room.

“Don’t be afraid of it, Fitz, it’s not going to bite you—but wait, here, this is how you do it.”

He watched as Tim poured salt on the webbing of his left hand, licked it off, drained his own cup and bit into a lime wedge. “Woo!” Tim hooted, his eyes watering, “that’s the ticket!”

Everyone was watching, loopy grins on their faces. “You ready, amigo?” Tim asked, already pouring, which mooted the question. Fitz hadn’t planned on drinking anything—it was midweek, he was behind in his work and he’d only stopped by to welcome Tim home and hear the gossip, the gist of which had already reached him in bastardized form—but he poured the salt all the same, licked it off, threw back the liquor and sucked the juice out of a wedge of lime as if he’d been doing it all his life.

“Pancho Villa!” Rick Roberts crowed. He was perched on the filing cabinet in Hollingshead’s spot. He was drunk, his collar open and tie askew. “Remember the Alamo!” he added, then broke down in giggles.

Ken was slumped in the chair beside the desk, a frozen grin on his face, and Charlie sat on the floor at his feet, cradling a beer. “Badges?” Charlie said. “We don’t need no stinking badges,” and then Ken lifted his eyes to the ceiling and started singing “La cucaracha, la cucaracha, / Ya no puede caminar,” and everybody—even Fitz, though he was shy about it—joined in, “Porque no tiene, porque le falta / Marijuana que fumar!”

There was another round of tequila and then Tim hushed everybody and said, “All right, let’s get serious here a minute, because this is a commitment we’re making—we’ve already made—and I want to know who’s on for this.” He paused, looked pointedly at Fitz. “And who’s not.”