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wondering about the brain damage issue.
    “You all right?” Bob asked.
    “Yeah, you okay?” Marv stood up beside Bob, both of them bending at the knees by Rardy.
    “I’m gonna puke.”
    Bob and Marv took a few steps back.
    Rardy let out several shallow breaths, took in several shallow breaths, exhaled another round of them, and then announced, “No, I’m not.”
    Bob took a couple steps forward. Marv hung back.
    Bob handed Rardy a kitchen towel and Rardy touched it to the jellyfish of blood and raw flesh that covered the right side of his face from his eye socket to the corner of his mouth.
    “How bad do I look?”
    “You look okay,” Bob lied.
    “Yeah, you look good,” Marv said.
    “No, I don’t,” Rardy said.
    “No, you don’t,” Bob and Marv agreed.

CHAPTER 3
Drop Bar
    T WO PATROLWOMEN , FENTON , G ., and Bernardo, R., responded to the call first. They took one look at Rardy, and R. Bernardo keyed her shoulder mike and told dispatch to send an ambulance. They questioned all three of them but focused on Rardy because no one figured he’d last long. His skin was the color of November and he kept licking his lips and blinking his eyelids. If he’d never had a concussion before, he could check it off the list now.
    Then the door opened and the lead detective came in, his blank, disinterested face growing curious and then amused as his eyes landed on Bob.
    He pointed at him. “The seven at Saint Dom’s.”
    Bob nodded. “Yeah.”
    “Every morning we see each other for, what now, two years? Three? And we’ve never met.” He held out his hand. “Detective Evandro Torres.”
    Bob shook his hand. “Bob Saginowski.”
    Detective Torres shook Marv’s hand too. “Let me talk to my girls—wait, my officers, excuse me—and then we’ll all go over what happened.”
    He walked a few paces to Officers Fenton and Bernardo and they all spoke in low tones and nodded and pointed a lot.
    Marv said, “You know the guy?”
    “Don’t know him,” Bob said. “He goes to the same mass.”
    “What’s he like?”
    Bob shrugged. “Don’t know.”
    “He goes to the same church, you don’t know what he’s like?”
    “You know all the regulars you see at the gym?”
    “That’s different.”
    “How?”
    Marv sighed. “It just is.”
    Torres came back, all pearly white teeth and playful eyes. He had them tell him in their own words exactly what they remembered, and their stories were pretty identical although they disagreed about whether the one with the pistol had called Marv a “goof” or a “fuck.” Otherwise, though, they were in sync. They left out the entire part about Marv asking the chunky guy if he knew whose bar this really was and yet they’d never had time to consult each other on the issue. But around East Buckingham, the maternity ward at Saint Margaret’s Hospital had the words KEEP YOUR FUCKING MOUTH SHUT scrawled above the entrance.
    Torres scribbled away in his reporter’s notebook. “So, I mean, ski masks, black turtlenecks under black coats, black jeans, the skinny one more nervous than the other one, both of them pretty cool under pressure, though. Nothing else you remember?”
    “That’s about it,” Marv said, turning on his helpful smile. Mr. Well Meaning.
    “Guy closest to me,” Bob said, “his watch was stopped.”
    He felt Marv’s eyes on him, saw Rardy, an ice bag to his face, look over too. For the life of him, he had no idea why he’d opened his mouth. And then, even more to his surprise, he kept fucking talking.
    “He wore the face turned in like this.” Bob turned his wrist up.
    Torres held his pen poised over the paper. “And the hands were stopped?”
    Bob nodded. “Yeah. At six-fifteen.”
    Torres made note of that. “How much they take you for?”
    Marv said, “Whatever was in the register.”
    Torres kept his eyes and his smile on Bob. “ Just what was in the register?”
    Bob said, “Whatever was in the register,