“Just to celebrate Saturday, I’m making mine Irish,” Collins said, pulling over a bottle of bourbon and splashing some in his mug. “You want?” Janson scowled, and Collins said, “Didn’t think so. You’re on duty, right?” He poured a dollop of cream in as well.

“Around you? Always.”

A resigned half smile. “The shrike we saw earlier—it’s a hawk that thinks it’s a songbird. I think both of us remember an earlier conversation we had along those lines. One of your ‘exit interviews.’ I told you that you were a hawk. You didn’t want to hear it. I think you wanted to be a songbird. But you weren’t one, and never will be. You’re a hawk, Janson, because that’s your nature. Same as that loggerhead shrike.” Another sip of his Irish coffee. “One day, I got here and Janice was at her easel, where she’d been trying to paint. She was crying. Sobbing. I thought maybe—I don’t know what I thought. Turns out she watched as this songbird, that’s how she regarded it, impaled a small bird on one of the hawthorn shrubs and just let it hang there. Sometime later, the shrike came back and started to rip it apart with its curved beak. A butcher bird doing what a butcher bird does, the crimson, glistening viscera of another bird dripping from its beak. To her, it was horrible, just horrible. A betrayal. Somehow she never got the nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw memo. That wasn’t how she saw the world. A Sarah Lawrence girl, right? And what could I tell her? That a hawk with a song is still a hawk?”

“Maybe it’s both, Derek. Not a songbird pretending to be a hawk, but a hawk that’s also a songbird. A songbird that turns into a hawk when it needs to. Why do we have to choose?”

“Because we do have to choose.” He placed his mug down hard on the granite counter, and the thunk of heavy ceramic against stone punctuated his shift of tone. “And you have to choose. Which side are you on?”

“Which side are you on?”

“I’ve never changed,” Collins said.

“You tried to kill me.”

Collins tilted his head. “Well, yes and no,” he replied, and his nonchalance bewildered Janson more than any emphatic, heated denial would have. There was no stiffening, no defensiveness; Collins might have been discussing the factors contributing to beachfront erosion.

“Glad you’re so mellow about it,” Janson said with glacial control. “Five of your henchmen who ended their careers in the Tisza valley seemed less philosophical.”

“Not mine,” Collins said. “Look, this really is awkward.”

“I wouldn’t want you to feel you owe me an explanation.” Janson spoke with cold fury. “About Peter Novak. About me. About why you want me dead.”