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hole.”
    “Twenty-five percent, bullshit,” I say. “Make it fifty.”
    “Sure,” says Mike with a curling grin. “Fuck it, fifty.”
    Damn, I got played by Mike Madden.
    “And what if I turn down your offer?”
    “You know what.”
    “Tell me. Spell it out, we ain’t got no wires in here, do we?”
    Mike licks the wrinkles in his palm and I see for the first time that the man is honestly grieving, in his own twisted way. When some guys are feeling blue they can’t feel better until everyone else feels worse.
    “If you don’t do this for me I’m gonna do something to you, or that nutcase Sofia that you got under your wing, or maybe that partner of yours. I don’t know. Something. I can’t really think about it now, but it will be totally out of proportion, violence-wise, to what you are owed. Nothing is more certain except those bearer bonds.” Mike’s pupils focus to pinholes. “So you guard those bonds like your life depended on it.”
    Which of course it does.
    He doesn’t need to say it, I can infer.

CHAPTER 2
    M Y DAY JUST GOT A WHOLE LOT MORE COMPLICATED AND I can’t help feeling that a large percentage of that is down to the poison chalice of friendship with Dr. Zebulon Kronski. But my own mouth has gotta shoulder some responsibility too. Every time I have a face-to-face with Mike, I find myself back talking and slinging zingers. When I get too anxious it’s like my mouth runs independently of my mind, which is shriveling like a cut of meat on a hot rock. Simon Moriarty, my sometime shrink, commented on this tendency during one of our sessions when I’d made a stab at humor to gloss over my shell shock.
    “You have two problems, Sergeant McEvoy.” He told me as I stood by the window looking out over the quad.
    “Only two,” I remember saying. “We are getting somewhere.”
    “You see that’s one of your problems right there. All the chatter. The verbal diarrhea.”
    “Verbal diarrhea gives me the shits,” my mouth said.
    Simon clapped his hands. “There it is again. The technical name for this tic is denial. You use it as a coping mechanism.”
    “Denial. That word is too complicated for a lowly sergeant, Doctor.”
    “Once upon a time you were vaguely amusing, but now you’re wasting your own time.”
    I relented. “Okay, Simon. Tell me.”
    “Denial is a classic defense mechanism. It protects the ego from things that the individual cannot cope with. So the patient will basically refuse to believe that he is experiencing stress, and I imagine you crack wise in any stressful situation without even realizing it. The more dangerous the situation, the more smart-assed you get.”
    I mulled this over. It was undeniably true that I often shot off my mouth and hit myself in the foot. I had thought this was bravado, something for other people to grudgingly admire.
    Something occurred to me. “Hey, Doc. You said I had a second problem?”
    “That’s right.”
    “You planning on telling me?”
    Simon scooted to the window on his office chair and lit a cheroot, blowing the smoke outside.
    “Your second problem is that you’re not very funny, and the only way people are going to tolerate a smart-ass is if he’s amusing.”
    This wounded me. I had always quietly thought myself reasonably witty.
    Zeb is in the corridor begging Manny to hit him in the stomach.
    “Come on, man, punch me,” he urges, yanking up his shirttails to reveal a stomach with about as much definition as a bag of milk. “Just do it. I’ve been working out with the Zoom Overmaster Trainer to the Stars DVDs. You couldn’t hurt me if you tried. These abs are like rocks.”
    I can see Manny Booker’s brain going into meltdown. People do not usually ask to be assaulted, and yet hurting people is what he is employed to do. I put them both out of their misery by jabbing Zeb in the solar plexus on my way past. He collapses in a breathless ball and I can’t say that I don’t grin a little.
    “You should ask for a