She seemed to notice it, too, and a curious curl formed in her lips.

“You okay?” she said.

Jay pushed himself off the wall. “Me? Fine.”

“Mr. Merriam,” the clerk said to Jay’s bail bondsman, “you’ll have to cosign here and here.”

Mr. Merriam was a middle-aged man in an off-white three-piece suit who tried to give off the air of the genteel southern gentleman, even though I picked up traces of New Jersey in his accent.

“Be mah pleasure,” he said, and Jay rolled his eyes. They signed the papers and Jay scooped up the last of his rings and his wrinkled silk tie, placed the rings in his pocket and the tie loosely under the collar of his white shirt.

We walked out of the station and stood in the parking lot to wait for a cop to bring Jay’s car around front.

“They let you drive here?” Angie said.

Jay sucked the wet night air into his nostrils. “They’re very courteous down these parts. After they questioned me at the motel, this old cop with a real polite way about him asked me if I’d mind following him down to the station for a few questions. He even said, ‘If ya’ll got the time, we sure would ’preciate it, yes sir,’ but he wasn’t really asking if you know what I mean.”

Merriam stuck a card in Jay’s hand. “Sir, if you ever require mah services again, why it would—”

“Sure.” Jay snapped the card from his hand and looked off at the soft blue circles that pulsed around the yellow streetlights fringing the parking lot.

Merriam shook my hand, then Angie’s, then walked with the stilted steps of the constipated or the practicing drunk to his Karmann Ghia convertible with the dented passenger door. The car stalled once on its way out of the parking lot, and Mr. Merriam kept his head down as if mortified before he got it going again and pulled out onto the main road.

Jay said, “If you guys hadn’t shown up, I would have had to send that guy to the Greyhound station. You believe it?”

“If you jump bail,” Angie said, “won’t that poor guy get ruined financially?”

He lit a cigarette, looked down at her. “Don’t worry, Ange, I got everything figured out.”

“That’s why we’re bailing you out of jail, Jay.”

He looked at her, then at me, and laughed. It was a short, hard sound, more bark than anything. “Jesus, Patrick, she give you this much shit on a regular basis?”

“You’re looking rough, Jay. Bad as I’ve ever seen you.”

He stretched his arms out, cracked the muscles between his shoulder blades. “Yeah, well, I get me a shower and a good night’s sleep, I’ll be good as new.”

“We have to go somewhere and talk first,” I said.