Five people were staggered at intervals along the L-shaped bar. The floor tables were empty, booths along the wall were too. The room looked just as I remembered it – dark like an ocean storm. The wood scuffed, chairs wobbly. Every little knickknack was in its rightful place, which would have required Hollywood’s most meticulous set designer. The horseshoes bearing the names of regulars that circled the banister above the bar. The photo of Ronald Reagan sunbathing in a cowboy hat and boots by a pool. The topless lamp lady with her radiant boobs.

My eyes shifted to the front door, the stencil of that poor man getting mule kicked in the face on its frosted glass. Symbolic of how you feel after a full night at this place. I started toward it and no one stopped me. Grabbed the brass handle and shoved.

It didn’t give. The door – assuming it was an actual door, and not some perfectly rendered prop – was jammed.

“Hey, where you think you’re going, Jess?” I recognized that jovial voice. “You’re not trying to drink and dash, are you?” Scott Razetti. The man who’d never cried ‘last call’. “Get your sorry ass back over here, you scoundrel.”

It couldn’t be. Fucking Razz. The Mule Kick’s bar manager for as long as I’d been a regular. But his sister had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a couple years back and he’d gone home to Long Island to help her die. Shit was supposed to take you quick, but Lisa was a feisty woman. Tough as her brother, if not tougher. I’d partied with her a half-dozen times and she was a wrecking ball. Loud and brash. Shots every half-hour. Beer and coke after the bar closed. Bloody Marys in the morning. She was bald now, but still breathing. At least, last I’d heard. But Razz no longer worked the bar.

When I turned, though, there he was. That stupid Hawaiian shirt like he was at some sunset luau, not a slum bar in West Midtown. Shock of black curls sprouting through the open collar in front. Thing is, this was the Razz from when I used to come here. Forty-something-year-old Razz from when his sweaty black hair still came together in a widow’s peak, not the sixty-year-old diabetic bald man he’d become.

Hard to know how to play this. Like being on the outside of an inside joke where you don’t want to look stupid. But, here, I didn’t want to get hurt. Or worse.

Water dripped from my chin. My hair was soaked. I looked like I’d just walked in from a rainstorm while everyone else was bone dry.

The cokehead from the bathroom turned in his stool. “This guy,” he said, smiling, like I was there for comic relief. “Get him one on me, will you?”