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pockmarks was as spectacular as the smile. Wanting only to be seen. She touched the puppy's nose with her index finger.
    "Yeah." Bob felt crazed. He felt light as a communion wafer. "Yeah."

    At Cousin Marv's, where he tended bar 12 to 10, Wednesday through Sunday, he told Marv all about it. Most people called Marv Cousin Marv out of habit, something that went back to grade school though no one could remember how, but Marv actually was Bob's cousin. On his mother's side.
    Cousin Marv had run a crew in the late '80s and early '90s. It had been primarily comprised of guys with interests in the loaning and subsequent debt-repayal side of things, though Marv never turned his nose down at any paying proposition because he believed, to the core of his soul, that those who failed to diversify were always the first to collapse when the wind turned. Like the dinosaurs, he'd say to Bob, when the cavemen came along and invented arrows. Picture the cavemen, he'd say, firing away, and the tyrannosauruses all gucked up in the oil puddles. A tragedy so easily averted.
    Marv's crew hadn't been the toughest crew or the smartest or the most successful operating in the neighborhood--not even close--but for a while they got by. Other crews kept nipping at their heels, though, and except for one glaring exception, they'd never been ones to favor violence. Pretty soon, they had to make the decision to yield to crews a lot meaner than they were or duke it out. They took Door Number One.
    Marv's income derived from running his bar as a drop. In the new world order--a loose collective of Chechen, Italian, and Irish hard guys--no one wanted to get caught with enough merch or enough money for a case to go Federal. So they kept it out of their offices and out of their homes and they kept it on the move. About every two-three weeks, drops were made at Cousin Marv's, among other establishments. You sat on the drop for a night, two at the most, before some beer-truck driver showed up with the weekend's password and hauled everything back out on a dolly like it was a stack of empty kegs, took it away in a refrigerated semi. The rest of Marv's income derived from being a fence, one of the best in the city, but being a fence in their world (or a drop bar operator for that matter) was like being a mailroom clerk in the straight world--if you were still doing it after thirty, it was all you'd ever do. For Bob, it was a relief--he liked being a bartender and he'd hated that one time they'd had to come heavy. Marv, though, Marv still waited for the golden train to arrive on the golden tracks, take him away from all this. Most times, he pretended to be happy. But Bob knew that the things that haunted Marv were the same things that haunted Bob--the shitty things you did to get ahead. Those things laughed at you if your ambitions failed to amount to much; a successful man could hide his past; an unsuccessful man sat in his.
    That morning, Marv was looking a hair on the mournful side, lighting one Camel while the previous one still smoldered, so Bob tried to cheer him up by telling him about his adventure with the dog. Marv didn't seem too interested, and Bob found himself saying "You had to be there" so much, he eventually shut up about it.
    Marv said, "Rumor is we're getting the Super Bowl drop."
    "No shit?"
    If true (an enormous if ), this was huge. They worked on commission--one half of one percent of the drop. A Super Bowl drop? It would be like one half of one percent of Exxon.
    Natalie's scar flashed in Bob's brain, the redness of it, the thick, ropey texture. "They send extra guys to protect it, you think?"
    Marv rolled his eyes. "Why, cause people are just lining up to steal from coked-up Chechnyans."
    "Chechens," Bob said.
    "But they're from Chechnya."
    Bob shrugged. "I think it's like how you don't call people from Ireland Irelandians ."
    Marv scowled. "Whatever. It means all this hard work we've been doing? It's paid off. Like how Toyota did it, making