The door to 2B was down a short hall to my left. I knocked, twice, hard. Nothing. But I heard movement within, so I gave the paint-blistered thing another couple knocks. Waited.

I was poised to knock again when the door cracked open. Not enough was showing of the face to confirm it as Johnny Hagan’s, but the eye that was part of that slice of flesh started out narrowed—at first he didn’t recognize me—and then widened. Now he did.

“Heller,” he said.

“Johnny. I was in the neighborhood so I thought I’d drop by.”

“Right. Go away. We got nothing to talk about.”

“There’s money in it for you.”

The eye narrowed again.

The door opened enough for him to step aside and me to enter. He was fleshier than I remembered, or maybe he’d managed to put on some weight, despite his obviously impoverished circumstances. But then starchy food is cheap.

He wore a sweat-soaked athletic t-shirt and baggy brown slacks and was in his socks, one of which was letting his big right toe out for some air. He reeked of beer and body odor with a hint of the hallway’s disinfectant.

Oh, and he was holding a .38 revolver in his right hand.

Johnny Hagan bared his teeth at me; he’d lost a couple of them, a canine on one side, an incisor on the other. Whether someone had knocked them out or bad dental hygiene had taken a toll, I never found out. He’d had that scar on his lip when we met. In any case, he certainly wasn’t the good-looking cabbie I’d known a few years ago in St. Louis—his five o’clock shadow seemed darker, a dirty effect, and his hairline was retreating, all those little soldiers heading for the hills.

“I’m not carrying,” I said, my hands up.

He kicked the door shut and patted me down. I hadn’t been lying—I’d seen no reason to come calling with the nine millimeter. But I was starting to question my judgment.

“What do you want, Heller?”

“Just to chat.”

The one-room apartment opened onto a kitchen area, where dishes in the sink had long ago given up on being washed; the only way it could have looked dirtier was if cockroaches were up on their back legs dancing on the linoleum counter. The ceiling was rather high, typical of such former mansions, but everything else was dingy—faded, curling wallpaper, a meager array of mismatched furniture, a metal frame single bed, its white paint flaking. The bed was unmade, crumpled pillow, fitted sheet, top sheet so twisted he might have been planning to make a break for it out a window. On top of a dresser, with the framework for a mirror but without one, was a cabbie’s cap on a folded jacket. They bore the Ray-D-O Cab designation.

An oscillating electric fan sat purring on a small beat-up table by the center bay window whose pale white curtain hung like a limp ghost, an occasional whisper of wind making it go “boo” half-heartedly.