The crowd never seemed to change—broad Irish faces, a few narrow dark ones that might have been Italian, but could have been Welsh. Hookers, thieves, reporters, morticians, lawyers. Though it was in the financial district, well-connected people didn’t find it comfortable to stay in O’Donnell’s; the clientele, to put it bluntly, was made up of losers.

It reminded Robby rather strongly of Ireland.

She ordered a whisky and rocks and pulled a stool up to the counter, careful of the drips and stains on the old wood. The zombie-eyed bartender handed her napkins to clean it, and she sat down with a weary fulfilled sigh. She took her first nose-tingling mouthful of Bushmill’s, paused to crunch a stale pretzel between her teeth. An older man with defeated alcoholic eyes fed quarters into the jukebox, and a Chieftains ballad began to wail. Two stools away, a gentleman in a correctly tailored blue suit sipped canned beer and smiled when he caught her eye; Robby gave him a good long look and smiled back. There was an empty stool next to her. She patted it and raised her eyebrows.

The man—obviously in the wrong place, since one did not come to O’Donnell’s to drink canned domestic beer—had the tingle. No doubt he’d put it down to sex appeal. Her smile warmed as he stood up and started over.

Some days, she just couldn’t stop.

Someone darted in ahead of her mark—a young woman, blond, wearing a pale blue dress and a mink that looked as if it had been drowned, not skinned. She smelled like a wet dog, and her blue eyes had a dribble of mascara at the edges, like kite tails. She sat down heavily on the stool next to Robby and slumped over the bar, staring blankly ahead at her dim reflection in the mirror. A pretty face, too sharp at the chin, a shade too wide at the cheeks to be a model. Something fox-clever about her face. Her eyes were wide and as blue as a Texas summer sky.

“Scotch,” the hooker snapped at the bartender; he reached for a bottle in slow motion. “Double. Snap it up.”

Robby, about to give her a frosty send-off, closed her mouth and watched with morbid attention. She had no patience with hookers, none at all—counted them, in fact, one step below the homeless who smeared greasy rags on windshields—but this one was nevertheless interesting. Swimming with a mink? She supposed some—clients—might be perverse enough to request that, but she couldn’t imagine a hooker being accommodating enough to agree.

More than that, hookers never, ever bought their own drinks on duty. And hookers were never off duty.

Her mark, the gentleman in the business suit, leaned over Robby’s shoulder; she turned her head to smile at him, but he wasn’t looking at her anymore. The hooker. Of course. Where else?