Archive of Our Own

They made me pay for the things I've done
Now it's my turn to have all the fun
I feel so good I'm going to break somebody's heart tonight

—Richard Thompson, “I Feel So Good,” 1991

For Chicago lives like a drunken El-rider who cannot remember where he got on nor at what station he wants to get off. The sound of wheels moving below satisfies him that he is making great progress.

—Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make, 1951

When an individual plays a part he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. They are asked to believe that the character they see actually possesses the attributes he appears to possess, that the task he performs will have the consequences that are implicitly claimed for it, and that, in general, matters are what they appear to be.

—Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959

By the spring of ‘75, it was official, the institutional and ideological transfer complete. Vincent Hanna was no longer a student of the law, but its enforcement. When the time came, he would wear a uniform once more. He would see action. The city would be his adopted stronghold, his dominion to defend.

If the choice formalized a regression, then return was also a relief. The truth, after all, was liberating. And though he remained fond of the pen, in practice he was accustomed to the sword. It was the least he could say for himself that he possessed an honesty of insight, that he knew what he was and where he belonged. Even a good, expensive suit could not camouflage the essential nature. The body did not reconcile the impression of a valise under one’s arm where a headstock had grown familiar, its rigid contours like a misshapen crutch, hard and mean against the ribs. If he was to devote himself to moral ideals it was crucial to be a tactician, realistic about his specific talents. To say nothing of his limitations. He had the mark of Cain on him now, the frayed and frantic nerve impulses of a junkie. The solemnity and sobriety of the courtroom were no match for the high of the mean streets.

For the time being, however, the alterations to his habit were few. There was an almost suspect ease in the continuity of daily life, how rituals and rhythms got on substantially unchanged. His world still spun on the same axis. It was the end of his sixth week on O’Brien Street, and the same as he’d done at DePaul, he inaugurated the weekend with a trip to Frank’s place.

It was, as of late, a slightly longer journey. Enrollment at the Academy was for a term of 31 weeks, and while the government coughed up for his tuition, there were the usual bills to be paid. He had sold his car rather than take on part time work, scraping sustenance together from more intimate reserves. His father had left him a small stipend, which in occasional brief paroxysms he felt guilty for embezzling. Frank helped here and there, because Frank would not take “no” for an answer, even if it meant subsidizing Vincent’s ultimate factional betrayal. Of course Frank would never have characterized it in such a way, but he felt a little guilty about that, too. The “College Boy” moniker had been a nuisance until he stopped hearing it altogether. Lately he almost missed it.

At his apartment in Old Town, he showered and changed his clothes, scavenging dinner from takeout containers and a cereal box. It was dark and brisk by the time he boarded the L. Through the scratched plexiglass of the train window, a faded band of twilight gilded the teeming rooftops along the horizon. The wheels rattled loudly against the rails, skeletal and almost black in the night. Showers of sparks would fly out like billowing skirts, illuminating a patina of discolored metal, abused by the elements.

He disembarked at Wilson. In dark flared trousers and a flight jacket, he was not out of place on the Uptown scene, where hipsters and hillbillies mixed amicably with Harrison Gents and Latin Kings. Agents of every affiliation were on the prowl, on the make and on the take, buzzing with the twin promise of a Friday night and the free market. The night was young. The stores were closed, but the steel canopy of the tracks enclosed an ersatz bazaar of illicit commerce. As he turned off the steps on Broadway, Vincent was approached by a long-haired Puerto Rican kid, fearless but friendly, sharply dressed, who asked without asking if Vincent was looking to score. Always in the market for a good time, Vincent bought some black beauties off the guy and palmed one dry as he went on his way.

He pressed east toward Lincoln Park, across the diminishing gradient of urban decay, toward where the lakeside developments rose above the fray. Year by year, they expanded their ranks, and extended their sterilizing ward. Gradually, the cracks in the sidewalk lost their glittering caulk of shattered beer bottles and safety glass. Crumbling empty lots, piled with detritus and painted with gang murals, filled with fresh asphalt and manicured landscaping. Bars and pawn shops gave way to respectable business, and respectable patrons retired to their private quarters by this time of night. The throngs of pedestrians thinned out. The lively hum of weekend nightlife went dead as a telephone line.

He rounded the corner of Marine and a gust of wind rose off the lake to greet him. Here, the stately new condominium towers turned their backs to the chaos of the interior. The sidewalks were smooth and unblemished, the architecture unmarked by hoodlum inscription. The silence was disturbed only by the white noise of passing traffic.

There was motion amidst the row of parked cars on the opposite side of the street, along the median abutting Lake Shore Drive. Activity was sparse this late and this close to the water, so even the rather banal sight of a man going through the trunk of his sedan took Vincent’s notice.

It did not remain banal for long. His eyes were good, and even at a distance the sight of that gray Cadillac Eldorado was too familiar to escape immediate recognition.

He stepped into the shadow of a nearby tree and pressed close against the trunk. Just now the amphetamines were cresting in his blood, provoking that surge of giddy, high-voltage clarity. Amped up, boosted by adrenaline, his heart thundered double-time.

He peered around carefully, watching the stranger finish his business with Frank’s car. A hail of questions ricocheted inside his head. Frank never parked out on the street; there was a private lot under the building for the tenants of Imperial Towers. What was it doing out in the open? And what was the objective of this bold intruder? A common thief would have smashed the windows, stripped the hubcaps, wheels and mirrors. From the looks of it, all this perp had done was pop the trunk. Had he taken something from inside? When he pulled it shut and started out toward Vincent’s side of the street, he was empty-handed. There were no outlines in his pockets.

The man dipped down one of the hedge-lined paths that flanked the condominium tower, probably intending to cut across through the property to Clarendon. Vincent deliberated. Not long enough. He slinked out from the tree in pursuit, and when he crept around the hedge at the start of the path, was greeted promptly at knifepoint. His target had a switchblade. He was not happy for the company.

Vincent’s breath seized in his throat. He was not especially afraid, only aware that he should be, that it was his strange, inexplicable fate to have been wired all wrong. His assailant was astonishingly handsome. This, plus the shot of artificial valor from the speed, made quick work of survival instinct.

The man looked to be around Vincent’s age, and the tattoo on his exposed wrist suggested he might have done time—though Vincent couldn’t say for sure. A clear view would have required him to lower his chin. With a weapon a man could dictate his terms, refuse negotiations, but had this particular scoundrel accosted Vincent unarmed, he might still have earned himself a willing captive. Vincent was entranced. There was a seriousness about the man, an intensity that commanded regard. He had an archetypal, almost literary quality, the vivid assertive energies of a protagonist, appealing in his furies. Irreducible in his complexity. A Dostoevsky exiled to Chicago in lieu of Siberia could have dreamed him up. (This, again, was the speed talking.)

Their eyes met and held long enough to raise gooseflesh on Vincent’s arms and color to his face. The man’s gaze tempted with mesmerizing allure, danger and drama. It flickered with a moment’s uncertainty before he seemed to remember himself. When he finally spoke it was in a dark, even simmer.

“What are you following me for?”

Vincent swallowed, acutely conscious of every muscle contraction under the hovering knife point. “What are you going through my friend’s car for?”

This altered the nature of the man’s attention significantly. His posture relaxed and he appeared now less fearsome than frustrated.

“You must be his cop friend,” the man said irritably, withdrawing the switchblade.

“I must be?”

“Yeah. He told me about you.”

“What’d he say?”

“That you got a nice ass and a big mouth.”

If that was a smile Vincent saw, it was impressively subtle. But the remark was a clever one, strategy disguised for a swipe. It was clear now that Vincent’s new acquaintance was an esteemed and trusted associate.

“He didn’t mention anything about you,” said Vincent, trying very hard not to smile back.

“Good. That’s how I like it.” Those eyes remained intense. Even as he released Vincent and stepped away, they lingered a beat too long. He appeared to hesitate. “Enjoy the rest of your evening, officer.”

Vincent watched him turn and stalk back out toward the street, proud shoulders hunched, fists thrust inside his jacket pockets.

Smirking, he consulted the wallet in his hands. He was strategic, too, and quick-fingered. He counted several seconds before calling out to the retreating silhouette.

“I’ll be seeing you around, Neil.”

He heard footsteps scratch to a halt on the pavement. Neil pivoted, frozen for a moment in stern contemplation. He patted at his breast and his jaw shifted in displeasure. Then he was approaching stormily. Vincent grinned, his arm extended, wallet held jauntily aloft.

“I’m Vincent,” he said, when Neil snatched it back.

“You’re lucky Frank’s sweet on you.”

“You’re lucky a friend of Frank’s is a friend of mine.”

Neil’s eyes narrowed, but he inspected Vincent with a look that was more studious than suspicious. His curiosity had been piqued. Privately, Vincent congratulated himself. At commanding the attentions of dangerous, attractive criminals, he was batting a thousand. Either he was in exactly the right line of work or he was making a legendary mistake. But Neil, grumpy as he was, did not strike Vincent for mistaken encounter.

“It’s cool,” Vincent told him. “I’m not a cop yet. You’re off the hook.”

“Waste of talent,” said Neil.

Vincent shrugged. “I’ve heard worse.”

“And in any case,” said Neil, with a glance fired up toward the building, “he would never let you.”

Vincent didn’t know what to say. The balls on this guy! He laughed uselessly while Neil resumed his examination, slow and painstaking and thorough. He was being cased, Vincent thought, with a measure of uneasy humor. From the prickle on his face he knew he was blushing again.

“Would you?” asked Vincent.

“Would I what?”

“Let me.”

Neil puzzled the answer warily. Then, with a blink of comprehension, he stepped back. Vincent was appraised with a last summary up-and-down.

“So, what are you? Straight? Wise?” His shrug mimed hapless ignorance. “What?”

“I’m in a period of transition,” said Vincent.

He tried to steel himself, conceal his surprise, but it was too late. Neil had sensed the falter underneath. He had a clever little hook of a smile, a funny lopsided curl, barely there at all. There was no cruelty in it.

“You don’t know, do you?”

Vincent said nothing, conceding that at this point Neil more or less had him figured, and there was no dignity contesting defeat. He realized he didn’t entirely mind defeat, that with present company there was some pleasure in losing the game. Wasn’t that something.

Neil pulled himself away, setting off once more into the burnished city dark, its hard edges softened by the buzzing nocturnal tint of electric amber. There was a languor to his departure, perhaps reluctance. Man, those eyes could stick. Vincent himself was stuck to the ground.

Before he stepped into the street, Neil called over his shoulder. “Night, Vincent.”

He cut an angle across Marine, past a street lamp, where his figure threw a dramatic shadow. But he did not keep to the lights for long. Vincent watched his outline recede and grow indistinct. Shortly Neil had disappeared into the night, slinking comfortably under its dark curtain.

“Goodnight, Neil,” said Vincent at last.

But it was too soft, and by then the distance between them too great, for Neil to have possibly heard.

He loitered for a while after. An arcane force pinned him to the asphalt outside the building, some gravitational supplement. He chewed the hangnails on his fingers, smoking a jittery cigarette and pacing off the excess adrenaline. The breeze buffeted at him until his fingertips grew numb. He stewed over the metaphor, that he would always be left fumbling, insensate, around the slippery shapes of answers he could never securely grasp. He flicked the butt away and then headed down into the garage, hustling for the elevator bay, accessing it with the unregistered key bequeathed to him by Frank. From there he ascended to Frank’s bachelor pad in the sky.

He rapped the coded sequence on the door to identify himself. On the other side came the approaching sound of heavy footsteps. The slide of a chain, followed by the creak of a latch. It opened.

“You’re early,” Frank said.

“Is that a problem?”

“No. I was just finishing up here. You want it, there’s beer in the fridge—Jesus. You look like you busted out of Dunning. What’s going on?”

“It’s windy. I took uppers.”

Vincent followed him back into the apartment, acknowledging his reflection in the foyer mirror but too high for any real embarrassment to take. He smoothed down his hair.

Though its furnishings were spare, their austere modernism bordering on sterile, familiarity had warmed him to the space. It was spotless as usual, with the exception of a miniature workstation that had been improvised in the living room. There were tools and electronics cluttered all over the coffee table. Frank sank back down into the sofa, where he resumed his ministrations to the guts of a portable radio. Vincent knew vanishingly little about the mechanics of their operation, and it was unlikely that an inspection of Frank’s activities would have told him much of anything. Regardless, he tried not to look. His hands were on his hips.

“You keep jumpy company, Frank.”

“Say what?”

“I ran into a friend of yours out there on Marine. Neil McCauley.”

Frank shot out a look from under his brow, but said nothing.

“Nice guy,” Vincent went on. “Instead of a handshake I got a knife stuck in my face.”

“It’s Chicago,” Frank shrugged. “He didn’t mean nothing by it.”

By now they knew each other well, but Vincent would still find himself stupefied by the occasional institutional remnant, traces of an etiquette so far removed from normal life that it was reasonable to shrug off a little knifepoint parley. In Joliet it was probably “Hi, how do you do.” Vincent shook his head to clear the culture shock.

“All right,” said Frank, not looking up from his work. “What’d you do?”

“What do you mean, what did I do? I’m here, aren’t I? I de-escalated the situation.”

Frank’s eyes flicked up in a glance of long-suffering restraint. He could call Vincent on his horseshit and be well within his rights. In his principled generosity, he did not.

“I mean I know he didn’t jump out of the bushes at you. Either you scared him or you pushed him, one or the other, so what?”

Vincent threw his hands out. “You make it sound like I walk around town waving red capes at ex-cons.” Frank’s face was turned down, but there were muscles visibly shifting. “You think it’s funny. Jesus, I saw him going through your car—”

At this, Frank’s attention was captured fully. A snap of movement followed by eerie rigidity, a look of white and measured rage. A quick shiver of adrenaline, potentiated by the speed, electrified the surface of Vincent’s skin.

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Frank’s voice shook from the effort to keep it level. Somehow it was less intimidating when he hollered. “You see a stranger fucking with my car and you go up and get yourself involved?”

“You know, Frank, pretty soon it’s going to be my job to get involved.”

Frank stood from the table. On Vincent he had a good four or five inches, and in his surges of mood he could tower.

“Now? It is not. Right now, you see something, hear something? Maybe it feels funny, doesn’t smell right? You are gone. You turn around and you walk away. That is your job.”

Up to a point, Frank tolerated the odd wisecrack or loaded remark, coy allusions delivered with a wink, a jab of the elbow. You lived here and you worked here and inevitably you grasped the big picture fundamentals. So? Those deco spires gleaming along the shores of Lake Michigan had thrust themselves up from vital underworld, that sprawling fossil lattice of the old heritage industry. A man got his hands dirty making a living, and Vincent could not be faulted for attesting to certain truths, all very basic, universally acknowledged. No sense getting worked up over the obvious in the town that had, upon inventory of its corruption, proceeded to mint it into currency. For Frank it was the cost of doing his romantic business with an impulsive, ambitious police cadet who read invitations in chain-link fences, and took barricades more as suggestion than ordinance. Vincent had made it out of Huế in one piece, but his instincts were left dazzled by the hyperbole of its bloodshed. It was tough to recall the ordinary hometown fears. He had not yet learned to leave well enough alone, and least of all when it was not his place to ask. Grudgingly, he had received license to horse around in the yard of Frank’s patience. Up to a point. The way Frank was leering at him now, it was like he’d put a baseball through the window.

Vincent parked his hands on his hips again, glaring because he knew he had no recourse, that he would submit to Frank’s authority, and because he didn’t mind it all that much.

“You work together, then? Or he’s a friend of yours?”

In that instant, Frank’s demeanor transformed. His face lit up in wonderment verging on glee. Vincent had to clamp down a wince at his amateur blundering, nosing around, showing his hand like that. Stupid. He could admit that on the order of general etiquette he paid only selective regard for the rules—for him, this was typical—but he was rarely so gauche as to expose more vulnerable regions.

“You’re kidding me.” Frank’s laugh was a single clipped sound, its pitch unusually elevated. “That’s what this is about?”

“Don’t start.”

“Hey, I’m not the one starting up with nobody. That’s my man, Neil, I work with him. He’s a friend of mine.”

“How come I’ve never heard of him?”

“‘Cause he’s all the way out in L.A. and I don’t see him too often.”

“I see. Must be quite the occasion, then.”

“They got planes in and out of O’Hare every day, don’t they?” Frank gestured incredulously over his head. “He’s an engineer. Look, I got some equipment he and Sam been working on, all right? Stuff for the shop.”

It was the truth, or else honest in the spirit of the translation, insofar as Frank’s cover stories elided documentary facts. Vincent knew as much, and was only deciding whether or not to let it on just yet. Frank was not a man naturally inclined to dishonesty, least of all for subjects he would have considered so trivial. Even when circumstances required it, pertaining to proverbial wool and the matter of Vincent’s eyes, Frank was not happy for the need. He manifestly struggled to lie.

“And he’s your friend,” Vincent repeated.

“Yes. He is a friend of mine. Neil, he’s like a brother to me almost. But this is business, Vincent.”

Frank approached him. Vincent folded his arms. Frank’s face, beseechingly earnest, quirked a sudden sly expression.

“It’s cute you’re jealous.”

“Fuck off,” said Vincent. “Gorgeous guy shows up and has the keys to your car? What else am I supposed to think?”

“Anybody ever tell you maybe you think too much for your own good?”

“No, but they’ve spent the past 27 years implying it.”

“And hoping you’ll take the hint.” Frank’s hands came to rest at his hips, a fond and familiar weight. “Me, I don’t waste time with hints. I like a direct approach.”

Vincent loved it when Frank was teasing like this, flattering him with feints at the macho character, pantomiming a danger that was never present. The predatory vaudeville routine. With Vincent it was only ever self-deprecating joke, a role embraced at his own expense. Whatever truths it contained were concealed in a backstage life. Violence was an authenticity Vincent would never know, its methods set apart, a trade secret for which he did not merit disclosure. He could never qualify.

Pretend was the consolation prize. From anyone else, he would have felt the theater an insult. But with the charm turned on, Frank was an artisan of seduction. He was fiendish, frustrating, irresistible. He knew it, too. Vincent surrendered happily, slipping his arms around Frank’s waist.

“You can open me up like that radio down there. How’s that? Pluck those troublesome thoughts right out.”

“No,” Frank laughed. “I don’t got the schematics for that, that’s way over my head. I don’t have the skills for it.”

“You have more than you think.”

“There is this one other technique, though . . . at which I so happen to have some experience . . . and with very good results.”

“And it’s not brain surgery? Wow. I don’t know. This sounds too good to be true.”

Frank shrugged. “It’s similar.”

“Similar to brain surgery?”

“Sure. Well, you’ll be lying down for it.”

Vincent kissed the smile off his face. Pretty soon, Frank decided the radio surgery could wait. Like an impatient sheepdog he urged Vincent down the hall to the bedroom, hot on his heels. They made love, Frank worshipful and sweet and domineering as always, all rowdy talk and roaming hands, Vincent shuddering and pliant under his powers. Anxieties succumbed to the singing of his nerve endings. Orgasm flooded his senses, purging him of all thought but the ferocity of his devotion. Frank said, “Vincent, baby,” sounding nearly shaken. He came in a flood of heat and with a cry of ragged helplessness.

They lay together afterward, beside one another, on their backs. Flattened, but serene. Dazed, but content. Vincent didn’t understand how something so simple could be so good. Over and over and over again. With his fingertips he traced lazily down Frank’s forearm, across the back of his hand, over the veins and tendons raised under the skin. Long minutes passed, and then it was Frank who finally spoke.

“You have the hots for my friend, huh?”

“What?” Vincent whipped his head over, agape. “Where the hell is this coming from?”

“You said the man is gorgeous. I heard it. That is the word that I heard you use.”

Vincent bolted upright at the waist. “So what! I say the sky is blue, I say Gerald Ford is president! It was a statement of fact!”

“Bullshit!” Frank exclaimed, then erupted in cheerful laughter.

“Bullshit, nothing! Fine! Laugh it up, it’s so funny. Me and my big mouth. Yeah. What a riot.”

“You should see the look on your face!”

Vincent groaned as Frank cackled, gathering the linens around his waist. Naked in another man’s bed, only the symbolic defenses could be marshaled. Of course he was exaggerating the depth of his embarrassment, which in truth was not so bad, and well tolerated whether he was under the influence or not. But in Frank’s presence, a dramatic sensibility was encouraged. Since that night at the Green Mill, theirs was a long-running game of play-acting. The storybook conventions, to which Frank professed allegiance and arrangements with Vincent precluded, could be indulged in condominium cabaret. The Great American Romance. Middle Class Ever After. They were very good at it. Denied participation, lacking the credentials, crude parts and machinery, they performed instead from the sidelines. They demonstrated their fluency in the cultural standards.

On most nights the cold, blunt fact of his exclusion could be a relief to him still, affixed to his breast in a badge of honor. Vincent had always known himself to be an outsider. Before he possessed the language for it, he was aware of certain tendencies within himself, predilections, an inclination for the aberrant or irregular. Unusual tastes. And while he did not spurn conformity on principle, he detected in certain methods and applications the suspicious odor of captivity. Wanderlust was an ironic internal compass, a release valve for the psychic pressures of playing by the book. Time and time again he was drawn away, outside the natural category, beyond lines of demarcation, out of bounds and over thresholds. On its own, this rarely bothered him. It was the well adjusted outsider who cultivated some pride in his condition. After all, his was a condition of freedom.

Still, there were nights he had wept bitterly in his grief. They were always the happiest ones. Reality made a point to check in after exemplary episodes of pleasure. The better to stave off any dead end ideas, he supposed. He could not afford any spontaneous utopian delusions. The spells took him by surprise late at night, while shadows danced on the ceiling and Frank slept contentedly by his side. He would curl around his knees, eyes and nose streaming into the pillow, turned away so that Frank would not hear the soft hiccupping noises of his sobs. Though few and far between, these fits of despair illuminated undeniable complications, conditions to that condition of purported freedom. They troubled the founding narrative of his and Frank’s involvement. Deep in his heart, he yearned desperately, insatiably for the impossible, and the most impossibly ordinary. The nightmares of Huế were preferable to the torment of resignation, the knowledge that his romance with Frank could never amount to more than a dress rehearsal for superior billing.

He turned the ring around on his middle finger as Frank’s laughter settled, thumbing at the gem. For Frank, ordinary was a material endpoint, achievable by application of the necessary techniques, a matter of professional discipline. Pursued cautiously, patiently and diligently, it was the culmination of an orderly, sequential process. He’d run the numbers a long time ago. He had it all worked out. He kept a small collage in his wallet, fashioned in Joliet from photographs and magazine cut-outs, as a totem to the future which would be fashioned in kind.

And so the mysterious Neil McCauley was here on commission, or perhaps just a favor called in, summoned up from sunny California on demand, his unique talents enlisted in service of the grand design. Whatever those talents were, Vincent thought dryly. Whatever “engineering” amounted to in underworld jargon, in practical translation.

“That’s great, you know,” said Frank. “I bet he’d get a kick out of it.”

“Thanks,” groused Vincent. “Glad I can make myself useful, boost the gang morale. This means you’re gonna be out of pocket next week, doesn’t it?”

He felt the weight of Frank’s hand against his back, stroking up and down along his spine. Frank would never confess the true nature of his work, but he acknowledged the concern it aroused, that with each passing week on O’Brien Street it achieved more intimate and tangible dimensions in Vincent’s mind. There was a score in the works. It was a big job, and thus Neil was in town to facilitate. Vincent had been close enough for long enough that sufficient details could be tabulated, the shadow of Frank and his crew arranged into a rudimentary picture. From this he had amassed some osmotic assurances, sensed the subtle air of experience and expertise. On the basis of Frank’s approach to legal affairs, his attitude in the realm of the mundane, Vincent made inferences. Like a responsible citizen, he kept himself informed. He watched the news, read the papers. Between the lines one found plausible testament to a tradesman and his work ethic. It helped him to sleep on the nights Frank was traveling. “Away on business,” he said.

At his craft Frank was without parallel, in his process exceedingly careful, rigorous in preparation and execution. Of this, Vincent was confident. But a master thief was still a thief, a renegade knight up against the dragon of civil society. The fortresses of capital were well defended. Each incursion was a gamble against harrowing odds. The price of one mistake, if contemplated in any detail, made Vincent lightheaded.

“I’ll be out of town for a few days,” Frank admitted. “Wednesday night I’ll be back. You can come see me at the Green Mill. When you’re done with class or whatever. Maybe I’ll bring back something nice for you.”

Vincent pushed the offending details out of his mind, simultaneously relieved and ashamed by his unwillingness to confront them. McCauley’s question, which had pierced him in its simple candor, returned as an echo in his skull. Are you straight, or are you wise? And who the hell was he kidding?

“Yeah,” he said. “OK.”

“Come on, baby, let me hold you. It’s cold. I’m so lonely down here.”

Vincent scoffed good-naturedly and rolled his eyes. The bedroom was perfectly cozy. Frank would do this from time to time, when Vincent had failed to bury his pain at sufficient depths and it was visible, even obvious, floating along the surface like debris. Frank would make like he was the one who needed comforting, imploring Vincent for the tonic of his physical contact. For closeness, not for sex. Vincent smeared a hand up and down his face and retreated to Frank’s arms. Doctor’s orders.

Frank hummed gratefully, pulling Vincent tight. His rugged chest with its pelt of curls was too potent, virile but therapeutic, and Vincent’s eyes fluttered closed as his head was cradled there, against the steady resonance of Frank’s beating heart. Nerves were soothed, the prickly aloofness that was their product. Vincent turned his face into Frank’s sternum and pressed a kiss to him there. Then he lay still, clinging to the ex-con who kissed his temple and murmured endearments and stroked his head. It would be a long time before he slept, but he would have laid awake all night, just like this, and never uttered a word of complaint.

Vincent fell by the Green Mill the following week, where an ordinary Wednesday night was getting warmed up. He entered to a thin crowd and the low thrum of their oblivious energy. He was alone, and alone in his anxiety.

His eyes scanned the dim interior. Its dark mahogany was always polished to a shine, rich with golden lamplight, reflecting splashes of neon in the gloss. Like its owner, consciously and perhaps stubbornly old-school. Fashionably retro. By now, the place was as familiar as his living room. The ambient perfume of beer, wood varnish, and cigarette smoke maintained a stable ratio. Blindfolded, he could have picked it out from any watering hole in the city.

The jukebox flared in his ear as he shouldered past the patrons at the front. Get back to where you should be. Jackie Lomax. “Sour Milk Sea.”

There was a man stationed at the far end of the bar, enjoying a beer by his lonesome, dressed in a smart but self-effacing gray suit. Because of this, Vincent’s eyes had skipped over him on the first pass. But then he stopped, and smiled in recognition.

He was eager to pick up where they had left off, brash with excitement. He made his way over with a friendly but challenging grin, and every intention of saying something clever. But the encounter did not go to plan. He felt his heart like a stone whipped out over the lake, skipping cheerfully until it sank. Finding Neil was a pleasant surprise. But what about Frank? His eyes darted around the bar, in search of its proprietor. Frank wasn’t here.

A terrible fear descended like a sickness, torquing his insides. An icy wave of nausea upended his stomach. It was as if the ground beneath his feet had tilted out from under him. He went pale and was suddenly dizzy. He heard his name.

Neil took him by the forearm. Vincent’s head snapped over at the touch, and Neil read the panic in his face.

“Whoa, hey. He blew a tire on Clark. He called from the payphone ten minutes ago. He’s running late, that’s all. He’ll be here.”

Neil’s delivery had a pacifying authority. His presence was solid, self-assured. Vincent sagged against the bar in relief. He realized that he had been clinging to Neil’s jacket and unlatched himself awkwardly. He watched Neil make urgent eye contact with whoever was working the bar. A raise of the hand summoned for a drink.

Turning back to him, Neil said, “You thought something happened to him?”

“I don’t know,” Vincent said honestly. He was still shaken. “I don’t know.”

“But you know what he does. So he tells you he’s gonna meet you somewhere and he doesn’t show, that’s where your head goes.”

“He won’t tell me about what he does.”

“Don’t take an Einstein to figure it out, though, does it? Don’t even take a detective.”

Vincent stared at him. This was more than Frank had ever directly acknowledged. By now most of the fear had abated, and there was room enough for intrigue.

“You care about him a lot,” Neil said.

Vincent blinked. He felt himself to have surpassed a key threshold in the domain of Neil’s approval, that he had achieved registry in the rarefied ranks of Friend. In accordance with what calculus, he couldn't fathom, but the outcome was a welcome one. He was confident that Foe was not a list you wanted to be on.

Beside him, a highball glass was delivered atop a cocktail napkin. Vincent polished half of its contents off before he could tell what they were. Straight scotch, he realized, when the burn kicked in. He squinted at Neil through the wince.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I care about him, too. We look out for each other. Me and Frank go way back. You know Okla?”

“Yes, I know Okla.”

“Before Okla came here and started up with Sam, he and my friend Nate were business partners in Encino. This was going on twenty years ago. So I know Frank since we were kids. We’d go back and forth along Route 66, couple of times a year. Wherever the work was.”

“All in the family, huh?”

Vincent smirked at this sparse, unwieldy story, its clumsy circumspection. Somehow it was easy to imagine a teenage Frank and Neil taking scores together, a couple of talented young delinquents, hungry and ambitious. Hotwiring cars, raiding coffers from the L.A. desert to Lake Michigan, smuggling contraband across state lines. Of course, provided close quarters and an open road, one had to wonder.

“Then Frank got busted again. Me, they nailed me on a parole violation a couple of months after. After a two-year bit in Chino I decided I’d take my chances with Uncle Sam. But Frank was having none of that. We hooked up again when he got out of Joliet.”

“You guys are close, then.”

Neil laughed. It was the first time Vincent had heard him laugh, and the sound made his insides feel pleasantly funny.

“No, not how you think. Or, well . . .”

“Well?”

Vincent’s eyebrows shot up. Off the look on his face, Neil elaborated, motioning gingerly with his hands.

“Yeah, I tried it on him once. Sure. But he laughs me off. Either way it wouldn’t have gone nowhere—it’s like you said. To me, Frank’s family.”

“How Faulknerian of you.”

Vincent found it difficult to believe that anyone with functioning eyeballs and downstairs equipment, if presented with the advances of a Neil McCauley, would pass up the opportunity.

“He wasn’t in the joint with me, but he’d been there. Done his own time. He knew what it was like inside.” Neil shrugged, as if that explained it. In a way, it did. “He was trying to make it on the outside, same as me. Working with him, I got to know him. I trusted him. I still trust him.”

“He understood you.”

“Yeah. We knew each other like books. Course we had girls in the picture, we were always chasing after the girls, but . . . ” Neil affected a woman’s register, not mockingly. “‘Baby, what’s wrong’—They know. You know? But—”

“What are you supposed to tell them?”

“Right. With Frank, a guy like you, I’m not stuck trying to explain the shit you can’t explain.”

“I’m afraid I may have misled you going through your jacket pockets the other night. That was a party trick. ‘A guy like me’ hasn’t spent so much as a night in the can.”

“Frank said you enlisted.” Neil pulled from his beer, and Vincent admired the colored shadows playing across his jaw and throat. “That you did a tour in ‘68.”

Vincent chirped an atonal laugh, trying to play off his discomfort. “I’m telling you. If I ran my mouth about him the way he does about me—”

“Only to me.”

“That’s reassuring. Only a couple of ex-cons have got the inside dope on my life story. Sympathy for my brief but ill-advised stint in hell.”

“Sympathize is the worst we can do,” Neil said sagely. “It’s when the guys behind the big desks have got your number, that’s when you’re in trouble for real. Believe me.”

“I suppose they all do at this point. Between the Marine Corps and the fine city of Chicago I’ve been folded, spindled, and mutilated six ways from Sunday. Country’s gonna fuck me, I might as well get on payroll.”

Neil cleared his throat. “Tet Offensive? You were on the ground?”

Vincent nodded, killing his drink. He was lucky to be alive and getting sick to death of the reminders. These were not events he made any conscious effort to recollect. His parasympathetic nervous system, and the inscrutable theater of R.E.M. sleep, drew readily and randomly from a vivid storage reel of human carnage. Nightmares of Huế struck like storms and with uncanny fidelity, waking him in a cold sweat, recycling the biochemical reflex firings of an animal facing lethal violence. He didn’t have to remember a damn thing. The horror show presented itself regularly, uninvited, whether he liked it or not.

“I spent a few months of ‘66 in Củ Chi,” Neil offered. “I was with the 25th Infantry.”

“In the tunnels?”

“Afraid so.”

Vincent frowned into the empty glass, shifting the melting ice cubes this way and that. “You could do it over again, would you have gone back to Gladiator School? Instead of enlisting?”

Neil looked at him squarely. He was serious, unsmiling, but there was a wry verve to his expression. It occurred to Vincent that Neil had a playful streak, though he was secretive about letting it show. Offbeat, subdued. Vincent decided he liked that about him.

“If I could do it over again I would not have gotten busted,” said Neil.

Vincent smiled slowly at him. Neil smiled slowly back. For once, he couldn’t think of what to say, and was grateful when Jimmy materialized with a second round, his usual scotch and soda. By now, Jimmy knew him well. Vincent saluted his thanks.

“Anyway, you got no competition from me,” said Neil. “Believe me. Frank’s crazy about you.”

“Yeah, how would you know?”

“Because I know him. You should hear the way he goes on about you. He never talks about anybody the way he talks about you.”

Truthfully, Vincent had never entertained legitimate jealousy. Not in the traditional sense of territorial, monogamous possession. (Even now, he and Frank remained an item by dint of deed, and not by name.) Given the circumstances, it was a lousy investment. A waste of feisty energies better directed at exciting new possibilities. In fact he had liked Neil immediately, introductory switchblades notwithstanding. What he envied, ached for as a formless nostalgia in search of phantasmic past, was shared history.

“I don’t care what the two of you get up to,” said Vincent. “Or don’t get up to, as the case may be. I’m not staking claims or anything. I only wish I got to know him for so long, that’s all.”

When Neil smiled he appeared magically, devastatingly affable, and for a moment Vincent was charmed so totally that all knowledge of the rap sheet evaporated. If you told him he was drinking with a hardened recidivist, he would not have believed you.

“You want to know what he was like.”

Vincent swiveled his head around to verify no one was in earshot. “I know you’re not going to tell me about your depredations of the neighborhood financial institutions. Gemstone wholesalers, precious metals depositories. Et cetera.”

“He would not like you saying that.”

“I know, I know. The topic is off limits. I’m not allowed to so much as think about it.” He dashed Neil a wink. “But you’re no rat.”

“Frank has not changed so much. Not since when I met him. He’s older, that’s all. Wants the regular stuff. Wants to start a family.”

“Come to think of it, I can’t say I’m all that surprised.”

“Something different in his eyes,” Neil added after a pause. “Been there since Joliet.”

Vincent nodded. They shared a moment, united in their contemplation of a mutual friend, the pang of sorrow at his ordeal. They silently nursed their drinks.

“What about you?” asked Vincent eventually. “The regular stuff, that’s what you want?”

“Mean the wife and the kids? Nice house in the suburbs?” Neil’s stare, unrelenting, was softened by his expression. “Barbecues and ball games, church on Sundays?”

Vincent thought on it and smiled. “Yeah.”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” Neil inclined toward him with arms folded on the bar, confessional. “An honest dollar's the only dollar that don’t do stunts on your pillow at night. That’s the truth. It wears on you, looking over your shoulder every day.”

“But?”

“But sometimes I wonder. Guy like me, I’m not cut out for the other life.”

“To be honest with you, I don’t know if I’m cut out for it, either.”

“That’s why you dropped out of law school?”

Vincent didn’t answer, which for Neil was answer enough. They watched each other with furtive smiles, a half-assed wariness that was by now only perfunctory, conceding to their tentative fellowship. Vincent searched for his cigarettes.

“Out on the streets,” said Neil. “That’s where you belong. Soon enough you’ll be chasing guys like me around.”

“I hope it’s not you.”

“No, come Sunday night I’m back in L.A. Then you don’t have to worry about running into me. After tonight, maybe we never see each other again.”

Vincent lit up and dragged heavily, blowing aside over the bar. He frowned behind the veil of smoke. The idea of Neil vanishing from his life felt profoundly wrong. He could not explain it. He was surprised by how much it bothered him.

“I tell you, these guys,” he started, trailing off. “I don’t know. I thought it would be different. I thought I would have more in common with them than I do.”

“Who? What guys?”

“The other recruits. Most of ‘em, happy with the beat and the brotherhood. They figure it’s a gig where they don’t make waves they get a decent salary, good security, just enough action day-to-day to keep it interesting. Far as I can tell I’m the only one there who gives a shit about making detective.”

“But that’s not enough action for you.”

“Well, when you put it that way, I sound like a maniac. I can hardly go for a beer with these assholes.”

“They probably think you’re the asshole.”

“Yeah, they probably do. You know what’s fucked up? Know who I get along with? You two jerks. Fucking criminal element. Figure that one out.”

He folded his arms in mock consternation. Neil only laughed.

“Don’t tell Frank I’m already on track to graduate a pariah. He’ll never let me hear the end of it.”

Neil shook his head. “You’re making out for yourself all right, that’s all he cares about. That much I know.”

“Say, how old were you? When you met him?”

Neil had to do the arithmetic. He blinked. “Fifteen.”

“Get out of here. Fifteen?”

So they were the same age after all. Vincent had suspected as much, but Neil had seemed older to him nevertheless. It was the way he carried himself.

“Yeah. He taught me to play cards.” Neil flashed a smile. “And some other things.”

“But you said he laughed you off. How come?”

“‘Cause he’s Frank and he’s decent and he knew enough to know better. And he knew me. I was just a kid with a few beers in him, a crush that was gonna run its course sooner rather than later. Besides, we both knew I was better at stealing cars than hearts.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” said Vincent.

They both glanced over as the door swung in a flash of reflected light. It was only Oscar, one of the Green Mill’s cast of regulars. A stout, affable man with a grandfatherly bristle of a moustache. He tossed Vincent a nod as he shuffled to his perch at the bar. Vincent smiled wistfully. He took up with his latest fidgeting habit, anxious tic or subconscious summoning ritual, and twisted the ring back and forth around his finger.

Neil noticed him fussing with it. “He gave that to you?”

“Now who’s wasting talent?”

Neil answered with a modest, equivocating gesture, somewhere between a shrug and a tilt of the head. Police work, and working a mark, differed only nominally in their repertoire of techniques. He and Neil were both a perverse class of analyst, in a way. Blue collar theorizers of the mind.

“He was in New Haven last fall for a couple of weeks. Why, I don't know. Maybe he’s found himself a specialty market, fleecing the Ivy League trust fund brats.” Neil was generous enough to dignify the joke, and threw over a mischievous glance. “He says he bought it off a legitimate dealer. At first I thought he was full of shit, that he raided the Peabody for all I know. But then I bet Frank’s too much of a highline pro to bother with oddball antiques.”

Frank himself was a bit of an oddball antique. The thought seemed to strike them both, and they exchanged looks of wry amusement.

“The guy sold him a story about how it belonged to some old-time fossil hunter and gem collector. One of those local characters. No pedigree, no formal education, but he made a fortune in the glassmaking business and financed all these digs out in Montana and stuff.”

Neil’s eyes switched in thought, then blinked realization. “He was probably running a load for Sam.”

“Say what?”

“For Mr. Grossman. For the foundry. All kinds of mines out there in New England, running day and night during the war, and now business is slow. Some of ‘em shuttered already. So you got the big shots with the title deeds sitting on a bunch of land while they figure out the next move. Maybe they want to lease it to DuPont or something. Aerospace industry. Who knows. Meanwhile nobody’s working ‘em, security’s not so good, and Frank and Barry can set it up easy.”

“You’re telling me Frank’s got a side hustle in black market fucking geology?” His voice dropped to a hush, more incredulity than discretion. “He’s making out in Connecticut hauling rocks?”

Prying an audible chuckle out of Neil was more satisfying than it had any right to be. Neil took the opportunity to call over for another beer, and the conversation paused while glasses were cleared and refreshments topped off.

“Unmounted stones,” Neil said, matter-of-fact, tonguing the shine of lager off his lip. A puckish blaze of levity crossed his face. “Think about it. The fuck’s a diamond? Just a fancy type of rock, that’s all.”

“A pebble with good branding,” Vincent conceded. Neil had a point. He grinned to himself. “A fancy rock, by any other name, would fetch a price as sweet . . . ”

“Can I see it?”

Vincent tugged the ring over his knuckle and passed it over. There was a thrilling current in the brush of his fingers against Neil’s palm—marked, calloused, pleasingly rough. Just like Frank’s.

Neil turned it over in his hands. His eyes were dark and quick, thorough and thoughtful in their assessment. His brow furrowed with sudden interest.

“What?” asked Vincent.

“Aquamarine,” said Neil. “It’s a type of beryl. But with some bit of metal that grew inside, maybe tantalum, or columbite. Maybe both. It’s an unusual choice, mounting this into a ring.”

“Why unusual?”

“Beryl is a popular gemstone. But most would consider an inclusion this size undesirable. It’s an imperfection. All right for a museum, maybe, or more likely industrial use. Except whoever found it liked it so much he brought it to a jeweler instead.”

Vincent laughed, genuinely delighted that Frank had managed to get himself swindled into a lemon. “So our theoretical fossil hunter had a dud on his hands and didn’t know any better.”

“No, the fella who had this made knew plenty. He knew the rules enough that he decided he didn’t want to play by them. You see the cut that was used?”

“Uh-h-h,” said Vincent. “The smooth kind?”

“That’s right. Called a cabochon. You cut a stone this way when you want to show off what’s inside it. Man who pulled this outta the earth, he didn’t think it was imperfect at all. He was proud of it.”

The ring had been a gift shortly after his acceptance to the academy. The official token of Frank’s blessing, he realized, embarrassingly late to the truth of its significance. Neil returned it to him carefully, almost tenderly. Vincent screwed it back on his finger. The action felt reorienting.

Not long ago he had been under this same roof, aimless and adrift in his loss, gunning with a lead foot through the no man’s land of his grief. When Frank had found him he had little to his name but a common sob story, the rotten souvenir of a broken heart. Under Frank’s guidance he had regained his direction, confidence in his own navigational instincts. He could make sense of his position again. Where he had been, and where it was in his true nature to go.

Tears welled shamelessly in his eyes. Now his dreams and desires appeared with clarity, salvaged from the murky sediment of encumbrance, inherited baggage, familial expectation and enmeshment. He wanted Frank with the same definite, doubtless ferocity that he wanted a future for himself, dictated on his own terms.

Neil opened his mouth to say something. Then he paused, smiled, and slowly straightened. Vincent turned to follow the path of his gaze. His heart leapt. It was Frank coming through the front door at last, alive and well, just as Neil had promised.

“Hey,” barked Frank, bristling on the approach. He fixed Neil with a blazing stare. Its challenge was pure theater, though to Vincent it appeared no different from the real thing. “You putting the moves on my distinguished friend?”

“Distinguished,” said Vincent. “That’s a new one.”

“Snooze you lose,” said Neil.

The charade collapsed, and Frank broke into a grin. Vincent watched, fascinated, as the two embraced in greeting. Neil hooked an arm around Frank’s shoulders. Frank clapped Neil heavily on the back. The reunion had that slight lingering quality suggestive of great history.

“That’s all right.” He withdrew to squeeze Vincent by the shoulder, a cryptic glint in his eye. “You have my blessing.”

Once Frank had received his bourbon, he gestured for a change of location. All parties understood instinctively what was meant. They turned to move toward the rear of the tavern. Vincent slid inside the curved leather seat of Frank’s preferred booth and was joined at either end immediately after. He took a moment to register appearances, not only their propensity for deceit, but for irony. Frank had also arrived well-dressed, debonair in his striped gray suit, a few shades warmer and darker than Neil’s. The uninitiated would have identified two natives of the office or the sales floor. Between them, Vincent shrugged off his black denim jacket, having apparently missed the memo. He tugged up the sleeves on his henley, then raised his drink over the small circular table.

“I’d like to propose a toast,” he said, sitting up straight. Affecting an air of solemnity, propriety, the Protestant decorum in which the table was collectively deficient. “To the spare tire.”

“Pain in the ass,” Frank muttered, shaking his head. “Like Dresden out there, parts of the roads. You two manage to make nice, set aside your differences? No knives?”

“I used my words,” said Neil.

His deadpan was so tremendous that Vincent, after a pause, succumbed to an attack of laughter. Neil smirked and watched him dissolve against the booth. Frank observed the interaction with great interest, taking note of developments underway.

“Must have been some words, Casanova. I know that you choose yours carefully.”

“Neil and I,” said Vincent, recovering, “took the opportunity to get better acquainted.”

“I’ll raise you, then. How about it?” Frank hoisted his beer. “To friends. New and old. What do they say? One is this, the other is some other thing?”

“One is ice,” said Neil, “and the other is cash.”

“Watch it, the kid’s here. Soon to be the man.”

“Yeah, but he isn’t yet.”

“Philistines, the both of you.” Vincent folded his arms. “‘Those are silver, these are gold.’ Joseph Parry. Also adapted by the Girl Scouts of America.”

Now it was Frank’s turn to laugh. He thought that one was a real whopper, slapping his knee.

Vincent looked over at him. “Is it really that funny?”

Neil rubbed a thumb and forefinger together. “I like my version better.”

“Spoken like a true capitalist.” Vincent rallied once more with his glass. “Come on, you heard him—to friends. To the pleasures of good company, and bad influences.”

Neil offered his bottle in assent. “To the crew.”

“The hell with war,” said Frank. “Make love and money.”

If only the counterculture had possessed such a knack for advertising copy, a little more respect for the almighty dollar. Even the white-bread American public might have dug the movement. Who would argue with a slogan like that? It was only sensible. After all had bumped glasses and drank, Vincent couldn’t resist yet one more ill-fated appeal to Frank’s sensible nature.

“While we’re on the subject of crews and money—and I say this with love, baby, I do—you know you could spare the whole cloak and dagger song and dance. Maybe yourself a headache. Asking a smartass to play dumb is asking for trouble.”

The response came like a game show buzzer. Frank whirled on him crankily, and Vincent found himself in the crosshairs of a pointed finger.

“With you I get trouble whether I ask for it or not,” said Frank. “I’m up to my ears in trouble. I am not singing and dancing like a fucking yo-yo here ‘cause I think a bit of ragtime’s gonna fool you.”

Neil was heard exhaling sharply in amusement. Vincent made defiant eye contact with Frank, then went for the accusing finger with his teeth. Frank tugged his hand away at the last second, exasperated.

“It’s principles. Understand? Apples and oranges. I don’t mix business with pleasure.”

Vincent pitched over the table in protest, canting his head at Neil. “Oh, yes you do.”

At this Frank’s mouth hung open, a chamber clicking empty. But he recovered easily, sportsmanlike, in good humor. He seemed both pleased and annoyed to have been so soundly bested. He turned to Neil in a bid for assistance. Pleasantly, Neil folded his arms and reclined against the booth.

“Don’t look at me,” said Neil. “You asked for that one.”

“Hey. Whose side are you on?”

“Funny. I asked him the same question the other night.”

Neil’s glance affirmed that he was only teasing. Still, Vincent felt it stimulate the nerves at the base of his spine, an existential rubber band snap against the forefront of consciousness.

“Almost ten years I know this guy,” said Frank. He sliced a hand out at Neil for emphasis, the better to perform his affront. “The picture of discretion. Couple of hours with you and now he’s got the gift of gab. He kisses and he tells.”

“If it makes you feel any better, the telling was abridged and edited.”

“No, that’s worse. With you that’s worse. ‘Cause I know you, and you will be filling in the blanks with who the hell knows what. Your overactive imagination.”

“By all means, Frank. Regale me with the authorized play-by-play. I invite you to set the record straight.”

“Yeah. You would like that, wouldn’t you.”

“Rumor has it you’re a model of restraint. I should have known, having been on the receiving end of it myself.”

“Model, what? I oughta get a medal for that. I want compensation.”

“I was only breaking the ice,” Neil explained mildly. “Cutting to the chase, or something like that.”

“Something like that,” Frank repeated, heavy with suggestion. He returned a scheming grin.

They spoke the private language of a friendship long matured, its vocabulary of subtleties, a dialect he could comprehend only in oblique flashes. Like how Italian got you a word of French here and there. He felt a wonderment reminiscent of childhood, the mystique of watching his parents at the dinner table, when they would switch to Lombard so they might be understood only to each other.

“Know what I appreciate about my partner?” Frank motioned at Neil. “Half the time, I don’t have to tell him a fucking thing. He knows what I’m thinking. What I’m looking for, where my head is at, everything. Two, three steps ahead.”

Neil, quiet, watchful, only drained the last of his beer in acknowledgment. Vincent’s gaze switched back and forth between his companions. His benevolent pair of criminal bookends. An inkling had dawned as to plans being presently advanced, the ultimate intention of all these coy and coded exchanges. But he was hesitant to pursue the theory much further. He left the prospect where it first glimmered, at the initial excitation of nerves. Warmth and butterflies. Formless anticipation. He didn’t want to think it through, risk spoiling the outcome.

“So that means you can watch out for him,” said Vincent, turning to Neil. “‘Cause you know the moves he’s gonna make. Whether he’ll zig or he’ll zag.”

Neil nodded. Underneath the cool reserve burned a fierce, active intelligence, passion and purpose. Vincent felt the sultry heat of it, the fire the stillness had been fashioned to contain. What Frank wore on his sleeve Neil enclosed carefully within, but its character was little different. It produced the same familiar glow.

“I don’t let him out of my sight,” Neil said.

As reassurances went, a meager showing. But the sentiment was sincere. Vincent wanted to throw his arms around him.

“Lighten up,” Frank scolded. Like an exacting schoolteacher, he belabored instruction. “I don’t like it, I have to repeat myself. Now, tonight, we are celebrating. Enough with the shop talk.” He gestured between Vincent and Neil. “You two are getting right along, I see that. I like that. That’s good.”

“He could not resist my charms.”

Vincent was only joking, naturally, but pleased nevertheless when Neil did not object.

Frank lit a cigarette and took a long, reflective pull. “In that case, he has my sympathies.”

They lingered and talked, drinking to loosen the inhibitory screws but careful not to get sloshed, intoxicated enough to endanger future endeavors. By now the subtext was turning into headlines. Flirting had become brazen, multidirectional. A little testy. It was a sign that everybody was reaching the end of their respective ropes, too horny to go on jousting with each other in the name of courtship. By the time they got out the door Vincent was going privately nuts. He knew exactly what awaited him and he was terrified. He had never wanted anything so badly in his life, but he was nervous.

Neil, like Vincent, was without a vehicle, so they all climbed aboard the Eldorado for Frank to ferry them home. The drive back to the garage, though only a few minutes at most, was psychic torture. Vincent had abdicated shotgun to Neil, partly out of politeness, mostly because the back seat offered superior cover. He found himself suffering uncharacteristic handicaps, struggling to make conversation. His wits were scrambled. Neil and Frank chatted easily and Vincent hardly understood a word of it. His heart was pounding out of his chest.

Inside, Vincent forced himself to rally, even as he wandered dazedly into an unlit apartment that struck him more like a dream tableau in the dark. The sound of the door latch knocked something loose in his mind. It must have been Neil handling security, because Frank appeared in front of him, switching on a lone table lamp before dropping extravagantly into the sofa.

“I’ll be honest with you, Frank, when you said you’d bring back something nice for me, this was not what I expected.”

“I know. I’ve outdone myself.”

“Nice?” said Neil.

Vincent glanced over his shoulder. Neil was crossing behind him toward the kitchen, silent on bare feet. He had kicked his shoes off already and was moving through the apartment with casual ease, comfortable and confident as if it were his own dominion. He opened the fridge to hunt for a can of pop.

“Frank, you think I’m nice?” he called.

“I think you’re nice. Vincent here thinks you’re gorgeous.”

Neil seemed caught off guard, though not displeased. “Yeah?”

At this point the disclosure was hardly news, let alone the incriminating sort. Vincent glared anyway, hands on his hips.

“For a generous man, you sure like playing dirty sometimes.”

“Relax, kid. I’m doing you a favor and you know it.”

“Hey, how come you never call him ‘kid,’ huh? Why is it only me?”

He sensed the approach from the corner of his eye. By the time he turned to look Neil had already captured him. There were hands coaxing at his waist, and at his side loomed a sudden, heady warmth. Inhaling surprise, he breathed the thick scent of raw attraction, the pheromone fireworks of skin and sweat. For a moment he was dazzled, arrested by the spell of Neil’s proximity. The effect of that guarded smile, liberated now with affection, was humbling.

“‘Cause you look like one,” said Neil.

His brow arched severely, though it had become much harder to feign offense. “You’re telling me I look like a child.”

“No, no . . . it’s ‘cause when I see you, I only want to take care of you so bad.”

“That’s how he gets you,” Frank commented from the couch.

Vincent couldn’t keep up the act. He was beaming as Neil pulled them together, knocking their hips together, sampling a little preliminary friction. Vincent ran his hands up Neil’s front with hardly a thought. They swayed together, not very drunk but dipping and weaving anyway, shying away just short of a kiss.

“You want to take care of me? What’s that mean?”

“How about I show you?”

Vincent shot a questioning glance over at Frank, whose approving grin flashed with an edge of cunning. It was apparent he endorsed this turn of events. That he had arranged for them. With his arms splayed out across the back of the couch, he kicked his feet up on the coffee table. He nodded.

Neil turned Vincent’s face back to his and descended, head tipped at an unmistakable angle. Vincent had thought himself prepared. He gasped anyway, opening up underneath him, around a moan.

Neil’s tongue dove into his mouth. He was, like Frank, direct and assertive in his pursuit of love. His kiss was hungry, unrefined, and left Vincent weak in the knees. Yet his embrace supplied an enveloping comfort, a visceral safety that seemed impossible from such a stranger, inaccessible. It made no sense. They barely knew each other.

Tender and wondrous as this catharsis was shaping up to be, it was also escalating fast. Vincent had tugged Neil’s shirt from his waistband and shoved his hands underneath, running them over soft stomach and hard muscle, the hot plane of bare skin. Neil’s clutching fingers were digging into Vincent’s ass through his jeans, grinding his erection into his hip. Their audience signaled his voyeurism with the scratch of a Zippo.

Neil tugged away suddenly, with difficulty. Vincent whimpered protest.

“Frank, get over here.” 

“Settle down, I’m moving. I was enjoying the show.”

“You’re missing the action.”

“Me? Never.”

Vincent watched Neil dreamily, eyes wandering his face. Frank’s great heated shadow stalked at his back. The sound of his voice drew closer, the prowl of his footsteps, until he was looming right behind, up close and intimately personal.

Frank’s hands came to his waist. Neil was still fondling his backside. The noise that two pairs of hands could elicit was undignified, brand new to himself.

“I am a man who is generous with his friends. You said that, didn’t you?”

Vincent realized Frank was talking to him. “Y-yes. I did.”

“So imagine my excitement, I find out you two have the hots for each other. It got me around to thinking.”

“It put an idea in his mind,” said Neil.

“A proposal,” said Frank.

Vincent’s head was spinning. He was being solicited in stereo, hit with the sales pitch for a three-way good time. Frank didn’t leave him hanging for long. He bent close to deliver the formal offer. His voice was low, conspiratorial, rough and hot against Vincent’s ear.

“I want you to let my friend here fuck you. He wants it bad, so do you. And ‘cause this ain’t a charity, and I’m the one fixed everything up, I’d like a cut of the deal.”

Vincent swallowed. He had known full well what was coming, but trembled to hear it confirmed, given to him straight. He blushed furiously under the unwavering burn of Neil’s stare, now openly lustful. His legs might have given out, but Frank kept him upright, supported against his chest.

“So?” Frank prompted.

“How can I refuse?” said Vincent. “I’d hate to be an ungracious host. We have our regional reputation to uphold.”

“For what?” Neil asked. “Corruption?”

“Hospitality,” Vincent laughed, enjoying the momentary reprieve from the adrenaline.

“Tonight, it’s both,” said Frank, with a knowing lilt.

The transition that followed was a blur. He would remember it for the rest of his life, the sound of the bedroom door closing, turning around to see how they looked at him. A pair of twin white points. Superheated, molten and glowing. He allowed imagination to embellish the image, to make sense of the impact. Suits were shed with all their pretenses.

Frank lay on the bed. Vincent lay on top of Frank. They were both supine, with Vincent maneuvered low on Frank’s torso, so that his head occasionally bumped Frank’s chin. This was the physical configuration required, the arrangement of bodies to provision access, sensation, control. Between Frank’s legs his own were splayed and hoisted, the flesh dimpled under the press of fingertips. Neil’s steady, purposeful grip drew a pleasant tension through his hamstrings. His arms were drawn up above his head, over Frank’s broad shoulders, his wrists lovingly restrained in the gentle vise of Frank’s fists. The ache of being held immobile, at the mercy of the pleasure which they gave and took with equal ferocity, threaded the muscles of his body.

Vincent panted from the sight and sensation below, his face deeply flushed, shimmering with sweat. Frank cradled him against his chest, rumbling soothing encouragement, while Neil’s hips rocked steadily and relentlessly into the backs of his thighs. Above him, Neil’s eyes were glazed. His stare was shadowed in the low light of the bedroom. He was fucking Vincent with a slow, reverent rhythm, vocal in the throes of his pleasure, groaning appreciation.

Vincent could only gasp speechlessly. He watched as Neil’s slick red cock thrust inside him, plunging deep and then withdrawing, hypnotic. His skin was painted all over in a crude shine, slippery with sweat and lube. He trembled from the strain.

But where the spirit was willing, the flesh inevitably caught up. When discomfort faded, he found his voice easily again. Loud, and expressive. The sharp, vivid ecstasy of being penetrated, stretched open by the onslaught of Neil’s cock, tore an ongoing cascade of moans from his throat. Neil laughed gently at the ruckus.

“That’s it, baby,” crooned Frank. “You like that?”

Vincent cried frantic agreement, writhing ineffectively. He felt Frank kiss the top of his head.

“He takes it so good,” Neil said, admiring.

“He loves it,” said Frank. “He can’t get enough.”

“I want to give it to him.”

“Show Neil how much you love it. How you’re gonna come for him just like this.”

Neil adjusted Vincent where he lay. He was strong. Vincent felt how easily his body complied under Neil’s manipulations, folding up tighter at the waist, his legs bent further back, thighs stretched taut enough to lift his buttocks off the bed a little. When he had seen Neil’s cock for the first time he had admired its enchanting upward curve—the organ was as unique, of course, attractive as the man himself—and now he was feeling the effect of it. Each stroke set off pyrotechnics of sensation. It was as though he was destined to be fucked by this man, railed within an inch of his life, that in Neil’s anatomy the ideal instrument had been fashioned for the purpose. A ridiculous thought, but forgivable under the circumstances. Vincent erupted with pleasure, crying out at a fever pitch, incoherent. Neil pounded into him, slapping noisily against his thighs.

“That’s right,” Frank said. “Give it to him.”

Vincent’s cock was leaking copiously over the dark hair of his stomach. Pressure was building in his balls, heat pooling in his groin, ratcheting up with the tireless piston of Neil’s hips. He yelped from each strike.

“Come on,” Neil rasped, breathless. “Come on, baby.”

“Come for Neil,” said Frank. “Come ‘cause he’s fucking you so good.”

When he did it was with a shattered wail. He spent all over his navel, and tears of relief streamed from the outer corners of his eyes. He shook with a pleasure so total it threatened ruin. Through the blood pounding in his ears, he heard Frank and Neil speaking in melodic tones, a chorus rhapsodic with pride, lavishing him with praise.

He felt like a blown fuse, overloaded, breaking all at once under the excess. Neil was still inside him. As he lay quivering and boneless through the aftershocks, Frank released him and eased himself out from underneath. Vincent slumped flat against the mattress. He saw Frank’s powerful, muscled thighs eclipse the view beside his head, felt the indentations of Frank’s knees as he positioned himself on the mattress. Bobbing with each movement was the imposing heft of Frank’s cock, no longer tucked against Vincent’s back but hanging right over his face, demanding attention.

Exhausted as he was, Vincent levered himself up on his forearms. He loved blowing Frank, and anyway Neil wasn’t through with him. He liked the idea of offering himself to both. That he was tough, and had the stamina for it. The challenge of their combined lust. He felt Frank’s hand scrape through his hair and watched the other settle around the base of Frank’s cock, guiding it to his mouth. Frank sucked a breath through his teeth as he pushed past parting lips, over the flat of Vincent’s tongue. He slid inside and groaned as he withdrew, when Vincent lapped under the swollen head. Cried out sharply, when Vincent swept a taste inside the vulnerable slit.

“Oh, fuck!”

Frank sank himself into Vincent’s mouth again, deeper this time. His thighs quivered from the angle. His hand leapt under the shelf of Vincent’s jaw and the other guided his head, tugging lightly at his hair, tipping it back to receive him. Vincent let Frank do as he pleased and relaxed his throat to oblige. His nostrils flared, and each breath was thick with the scent of Frank’s musk, which he savored as much as the taste of Frank’s cock. Neil, who had gentled as a courtesy in the wake of Vincent’s climax, was stimulated back to more propulsive fucking.

“What a champ he is,” said Frank, thrusting carefully now. “Ain’t that the prettiest sight?”

“I’m not gonna last,” said Neil, a warp of desperation in his voice.

“Do it,” said Frank. “You want to come inside him?”

“Yes. Oh-h-h-h.”

“That tight little ass feels so good. I know.”

“So good. So good.”

He was filled to bursting, Vincent thought, in every sense of the expression. Overflowing. He was barricaded with them inside their lair, a pair of men whom society had branded dangerous. They were inside him. When they fucked him their faces contorted and their voices growled, their glassy gazes burned and blackened with barely contained wildness. That wildness, Vincent knew, was pervasive in its governance, too primitive to take so easily to boundaries. It shared the same Darwinian machinery the states of Illinois and California had built great sprawling facilities to confine and break, later to “tame” and “reform.” Frank, by all accounts an honestly aspiring family man, remained undiminished in his relish for sodomy, fellatio just short of “too rough.” Neil, so controlled and self-contained in his three-piece gray suit, was awful quick to drop the Arthur Miller act with Vincent’s ankles up by his head. Shouldn’t that have scared him? Weren’t these the violent breed of men he and his class of recruits would be working to take off the streets?

His flesh shuddered and shivered and convulsed around their ravenous desire. He was ravenous, too. His jaw ached like a broken hinge as Frank fucked into his mouth, battering his throat raw. Frank was tossing Vincent’s head over his cock with the hand fisted in his hair, rolling his hips into it. Neil continued his plunder below the waist, and through the film of blowjob tears Vincent could see how engrossed he was, panting, head lolling and eyelids fluttering, pawing at Vincent’s ass as he pumped away inside it. Chanting inarticulate affirmations until his voice cracked.

He announced that he was going to come and threw his head back when he did, a wolf howling up to a lidded sky, guttural with triumph and release. Frank followed close behind, grunting his satisfaction and stroking Vincent’s sweaty hair. Vincent could feel and taste them both, the spill issuing from each throb, primal heat between his legs and deep inside, down his throat. He felt the commanding latch of their broad hands, fastened hard around his face and thighs. Their grip on him loosened as their cries quieted. There was a rush of coolness against his skin when they withdrew, a sudden emptiness.

Vincent lowered himself down to the bed, wrecked and sore. Victory was awarded him in the pair of embraces that followed, Neil once again shored up at his front, Frank spooning at his rear. As they wrapped him in their arms he realized they were shaking even worse than he was. He sighed with joy while they showered him with kisses all over his face and forehead, the back of his neck and the slope of his shoulders. To them he was a treasure, watched over and beloved. Perhaps a part of him had also been stolen. Perhaps law and order had no jurisdiction there, was powerless to recoup the goods.

With Vincent nested against his front, Frank was out almost instantly. He did not snore but breathed loudly, labored, as though to do so took great effort. The long, slow swells of his chest pressed into Vincent’s back. A stab of pity ran him through. Neil was still awake, alert enough to notice a shift in body language. He drew away a little so he and Vincent could address each other more easily. He reclined on his side, folding an arm under his head.

“He’s exhausted,” Vincent observed.

“He did a lot of driving,” said Neil.

Now he was locked up tight as Frank. If Neil had seemed garrulous to Vincent at the Green Mill, it was only in the abstract. Or where the details were old and irrelevant. Statutes of limitation were well exceeded by ancient history, the stories that so fascinated Vincent immaterial to contemporary schemes. Should he inquire further into the specifics of current events, he’d get a blank face and a brick wall. But there remained one last opening he had yet to try.

“You were going to say something to me earlier tonight,” said Vincent. “Back at the bar, before Frank came in. What was it?”

“Forget it. Something I shouldn’t have been saying anyway.”

“No way. You don’t get to do that. Not after tonight.”

“Vincent—”

“You do not fuck me like that and pull rank on me. I don’t care what I’m supposed to hear, whether the hell he likes it or not.”

Neil took a deep breath but didn’t argue. He knew Vincent was right.

“Frank’s the only one selling stories about that ring,” he said.

There was a beat of silence. Vincent made a face, at a loss.

“What?”

“There was no dealer. It never belonged to somebody else. The stone, wherever and however he got it, it was his to begin with. His alone. And he paid good money to get it like that, so that you could put it on your finger.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yes, you do.”

“But why wouldn’t he just say so? When he went through all that trouble?”

“Because then you know what he’s saying for real. What he wants to say, only he’s too scared. He won’t admit it. Who could blame him? What’s he supposed to do?”

Vincent clutched the arm wrapped around his waist. He brought it up against his chin, kissing the knuckles of Frank’s hand.

“I love him, too,” he said helplessly.

“I know,” said Neil.

“Does he?”

Neil took Vincent's free hand to comfort him. He rubbed his thumb over the backs of Vincent’s fingers. Vincent stared out at nothing until his eyes fell out of focus, at once numb and surprisingly present, sanguine in spite of everything.

“I don’t think there’s anything either of us can do,” Vincent sighed finally. “Doesn’t stop me from thinking about it.”

What solace was reciprocity when neither of them could act on their feelings? They were spinning their wheels, same as before. But Vincent was too wrung out from the evening’s steamy fun and games to get all fucked up about rebounding realities. Not right now, at least. He was relieved to be spared any sentimental fits, of the down that occasionally chased the up, especially when the up was of this magnitude. This was an up for the record books. Plus, company was staying the night. If there were tears to be shed he would have nowhere to turn his face aside. He was surrounded. It would have to be in front of one of them.

“You break his heart, we can’t be friends no more,” Neil warned.

Vincent smiled weakly. “Will you be gone in the morning?”

“No. I’ll hang around for a while. Let Frank sleep, and I can take you for breakfast.”

“I’d like that.”

“I’d like it if you come down to L.A. sometime.”

“Yeah? I’ve never been. I hear the weather’s nice.”

“It could be whenever. You can stay at my place if you want.”

“Is that a standing invitation?”

“He’s cool with it.” Neil’s gaze floated to Frank, then down to Vincent again. “You can ask him.”

Vincent’s smile went big. “Have you got a crush on me, Neil?”

“Yes,” Neil said.

Vincent reached over to touch his face. His fingers skimmed Neil’s cheek, down to trace the dip of his mouth. Neil shoved over across the narrow space between them. They kissed, holding each other. Holding out on hope. It surprised him, sometimes, how resilient it was. That despair was not so easy, even when all the evidence pointed in its favor.

The contradictions of his life were untenable. They were grotesque. He marveled at them anyway, forced to admire their irresolvable beauty, the poetry of a rookie cop sharing a bed with veteran thieves, seeking safety in the arms of two dangerous men. One day he would lose them. Frank, Neil. All the same, he committed to love them, to experience that love with the fullness of his spirit, without fear or reservation. In the absence of freedom you made do with escape. You learned to make the most of your time, because you knew whatever time you got was luck. His friends had taught him.

He fell asleep under the weight of their limbs, under their protection.