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somewhere. Harry, sure of it, was thinking, If you'd gotten out when you were sixty-five...
    Someone had picked that age as the best time to quit whatever you were doing and Harry believed now it could be true. By forty you've lost a step, your legs aren't what they used to be, and twenty-five years later all your parts are starting to go. Something he'd never considered until last year when they stuck the tube up his artery, from his groin to his heart, and told him he'd better change his ways. If he had gotten out right after that, last year...
    He thought about it not as a regret or with any feeling of panic, but as a practical notion. If he were no longer here he wouldn't have to worry about this Zip coming to see him, if that's what "handle it" meant. This primitive greaseball in a twelve-hundred-dollar suit, no education, spoke with a garlic-breath Italian accent -- though not much of one, considering, and was not as dumb as most of the guys in Jimmy's crew, sitting around their social club. The Zip was coming. The only thing to wonder about, what was he waiting for?
    Harry Arno packed a suitcase as soon as he got home that Thursday afternoon, October 29, not with the idea of taking off, not yet, but in case he had to. He packed going from the dresser with shirts and underwear to the suitcase on the bed to the front windows to look down at Ocean Drive three floors below. Every twenty minutes or so that afternoon he'd make a side trip to the bathroom, the idea of the Zip's arrival affecting his bladder. Or a combination of the Zip and a swollen prostate. He'd stand there taking a leak, imagine the Zip walking into the building and he'd shake it and hurry back to a front window. A couple of times he almost picked up the phone by the bed. But if he called Jimmy and told him what was going on, went into how he found out he was being set up... The way Jimmy would see it: "Oh, you're tight with this cop? They offered you a deal?" He could swear he'd never talk to a grand jury, it wouldn't matter. He'd be putting his life in the hands of a three-hundred-pound semiliterate slob who never smiled or had finished high school. Some things about Jimmy Cap you could anticipate. Harry knew that if he ever told Jimmy he was retiring Jimmy would have to say, "Oh, is that right? You quit when I tell you you can quit."
    The Zip he didn't know well enough to anticipate. They had never been formally introduced or spoken more than a few words a year to each other. As far as Harry could tell, the Zip didn't talk much to anybody. The other guys in the crew seemed to stay out of his way. Women liked him, the semipros attracted to those guys, or they were afraid not to act as though they did.
    Harry had a suitcase and a hanging bag packed now, put away in the bedroom closet. He stood at a window looking down at headlights in the dusk, dark shapes moving, wondering now if he'd forgot anything.
    Bathroom stuff. What else?
    Jesus, his two passports.
    Someone knocked on the door. In the living room.
    Harry felt himself jump, in the same moment remembering he hadn't packed his gun, the gun he'd used to shoot the deserter forty-seven years ago and he'd brought home as a souvenir. A U. S. Army Colt .45 sidearm. Wrapped in a towel on the shelf in the closet, not loaded, with the Zip at the door. Harry sure of it.
    A black guy in a flowery blue-and-yellow sport shirt came in first, Tommy Bucks behind him in a sharkskin double-breasted suit, a white shirt against his dark skin and a maroon-patterned necktie. Harry stepped aside for them, the black guy looking straight into his face as he came in. The Zip put his hand on the guy's shoulder and gave it a shove, saying, "This is Kennet."
    "Kenneth," the black guy said.
    The Zip was looking around the room now. "It's what I said. Kennet." He turned on a lamp and stepped close to a wall of black-and-white photographs, saying, "Kennet, who is this guy here? Can you tell me?"
    "Yeah, this is the guy," Kenneth