Sly kissed the cigar again. It was funny seeing him on his feet like this. He always looked out of proportion—the height of him, those arms and shoulders, the gut pushing out his shirt—all of that gorilla bulk balanced on a pair of legs that seemed way too skinny. Calves and ankles like an overcooked chicken drumstick, bone and tendon and a few wormy veins. He said, ‘He came by the club this afternoon.’

Yeah, there you go: that would explain the injury. Maybe this surfer man specialised in noses.

Andre said, ‘What’d he want?’

Sly looked at him. ‘Asked about you, actually.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘Yeah. Had this theory about, you know. How it’s a small world, and maybe you’d know what’s happened.’

Andre didn’t answer. He felt like this surfer man and his ideas were going to be a real problem. And it wasn’t a good sign either, the way Sly was staring down into the pool. Intense and a little desperate, like he was running a movie in his head. The moral of the story being: save yourself.

Andre said, ‘All you gotta do is play it real simple. If the cops want you to sit down, only reason you open your mouth is to say I got nothing to do with it.’

Sly kissed the cigar again, and this time he had the courage to take a few wisps into his mouth, swill them around. He said, ‘Yeah. But is it something to do with you?’

Now they were getting into it.

Andre said, ‘The way you do it, you draw the smoke in real slow, so it doesn’t get you by surprise.’

Sly looked at the pool, studied the water lapping below his feet. A thin tracery of blue across the surface, like an electric current, all networked. He said, ‘What’ve you got going on?’

Andre waited a moment. He said, ‘Are you going to be cool, or not?’

Sly just closed his eyes, the cigar hanging at his side, wagging in two fingers, and for a moment he had a kind of peaceful, enlightened look.

‘Don’t tell me be cool. I’m the one being looked at for it.’ Saying it softly, almost a whisper, like the truth of inconvenience had a different kind of volume.

Andre waited, and when Sly opened his eyes again, Andre gave him a smile—a nice one, keeping the gold teeth out of it. He said, ‘We’ll figure it out.’

He felt like he’d struck the right tone, standing here in the quiet back yard, plush and sheltered with its palm trees and its high concrete wall. A path beyond the pool led across the lawn to a barbecue area, and he tried to picture Sly in an apron, tending the hotplate. Junior in the pool maybe, telling Sly to watch his body slams.