The wife, Brigid, her name was. There was something of the women’s libber about her style, the way she dressed and spoke. Were they even married? Yes, there were wedding rings on both their hands. She must be one of those libbers. Pretty old for that, he thought. At least she made the coffee, and brought two mugs out to them, and then went back into the house, leaving the men to sit on the back porch and watch Achilles sniff every piece of gravel individually. After a few minutes she opened the door again and let their dogs out.

“What kind of dogs are those?” Beaufort asked to be polite.

“Pugs,” the woman said.

At first the pugs seemed bent on driving the intruder from their yard. While keeping their distance they set up such a ferocious barking no one could be heard over them. The wife quickly went inside, and came back out with a piece of cheese she handed to Beaufort.

Alerting to the smell of the cheese, the pugs rounded back to the porch.

“Here, break that in half and give it to them,” she said. “They’ll calm down.”

They did, and went off to sniff Achilles, and that was pretty much that.

“I have to get used to gravel everywhere instead of grass,” Beaufort said, picking up the conversation where they left off. Beaufort would have liked to go inside the house, case the joint, but Carlo suggested they sit on the back porch, chairs facing a particularly craggy section of the Catalina Mountains.

“Ah, we’re connoisseurs of gravel out here,” Carlo said. “There must be a dozen different kinds, in different sizes and colors. That spot where Achilles is peeing now, that’s called pea gravel. Not because of what the dogs use it for, the size.” He took a sip of coffee. “Amazing how your dog gets around on three legs as if that were the natural way of things,” he said. “Al, stop that.”

“It’s okay. It’s just a dominance thing. This is Al’s territory. Nice place you have here,” Beaufort said, as he sipped from a mug with a red, white, and blue A on the side. He was careful to just touch the mug on the handle, and even then he rubbed his fingers back and forth discreetly to smear any prints left there. “Been here long?”

“Decades,” Carlo said. “Even so, we were the last house in the development to get this view.”

“It seems that everyone I run into asks the question ‘Where did you come from?’ like nobody is actually from Tucson.”

“That’s the case,” Carlo said. “I was born in Kansas, but came out here when I was still young. My wife is from Florida.”

Kansas. Right. But Beaufort didn’t follow up on that. Instead, though he had never actually lived there, he went with “Florida! What a co-inky-dink. I’m from Florida, too.”