One week and a night later, I couldn't sleep. The fact that I had saved Cinos's primary target meant I was now in the line of fire. Plus, pretty much all our weapons had been lost in the Robco lobby. I was gunless except for my .44 with almost everyone except my four guests against me.

Speaking of those guests, they were slightly worth less than I had bargained for. What with Rouge in my bed, Roland taking the spare mattress, and Shadow on the sofa, I was wondering if maybe it was time to charge rent.

I got up, still wearing my silk pajamas (lifted from a Macy's two years ago). I slipped on my bathrobe, going to the kitchen for a midnight snack.

What strange company I was keeping. I had on my side a shifty mongoose CEO of a bunch of guys who had tried to kill me, the hedgehog/highest-paid assassin in town who was in up to his neck with Cinos, and a bat whom I couldn't trust as far as I could throw, but would lay any day of the week. Was it really so long ago that I'd had to forcibly remove her from this island every other day?

I reached the living room when I caught the scent of hickory tobacco. Shadow was smoking on my balcony.

What a life. I'd just stitched up his lung a week ago, and he was going to dump some nicotine in it. Only one thing I could do. Join him.

I slid open the door to the balcony, taking the seat next to him. I still had some of Rouge's smokes, the really good mint-tobacco ones.

For a moment we just stared out at the lit-up façade of Angel Island. I suppose it's pretty…from a distance. I've told you what it's like up close.

He spoke first, irregular though that was. "Are those Rouge's cigarettes?"

"Yeah. They're really good, where's she get them?"

"She makes 'em herself. You know, rolls up the leaves, licks the paper, gums it together…"

I pictured the perfectly shaped, pink, velvety slip of Rouge's tongue sliding across a cigarette paper. I enjoyed the smoke a lot more after that.

"Oh, by the way, nice job back at my place. Never been pistol-whipped before."

I was a little uncomfortable about talking about my looting of Shadow's apartment (mainly because I was still wearing one of the Rolexes I had stolen), but I could go on. "No problem. I wouldn't have hit you if you hadn't put a gun in the back of my neck."

"What, let you trash the joint?"

"You could have stayed put with Amy. You two seemed to have more than enough to do."

I couldn't see him that well, but I got the sense that he was somewhat grinding his teeth.

"Hey, Shad, if it's the same to you, I have a question."

"Yeah?"

"I heard about that case with Richey the Porcupine. How'd you pull it off?"

"Oh, I just took his daughter for a ride. Took her to some carnival. She really is a sweet little girl. Of course, then I told Richey that I'd put a bullet between her ears if he didn't pay."

He continued. "And how about you? That Cream case is pretty famous now. How'd you cause the perfect road accident with her mom?"

I smiled. The Cream case is a personal favorite. "Nothing much. Just popped some of the ol' nitrogen-based fuel in her gas tank, you know, the kind that makes you go really fast. I wonder how fast she was speeding when she skipped the bridge?"

"Nice. You remember Sandra?"

"That fox heiress? Yeah, the one we bumped off?" I asked. Cases get forgettable when you've had so many.

"Right."

"That was nice shooting by you. I've never seen someone strip a vixen to the nude with nothing but a .45."

"Hey, when they're hot enough, you can aim that much better."

"Man, that was great. She was there, standing naked in the hall of the office, we were out of ammo, and she'd got an elevator, right? Wasn't she saying how unprofessional and inept we both were when she stepped into the elevator?"

"She stepped into the elevator shaft, of course, after you took out the floor of the elevator car, right?" Shadow said mirthfully.

"She fell twelve stories. Oh, yeah and she was trying to laugh at us when she did."

"So it came out 'Ah hah hah hah ha-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!'" he mimicked.

"Something like that. Musta been something for the coroner to see."

"A nude chick turned bug goo? I guess so."

I whistled in agreement, letting out a stream of smoke in the process.

"Might I join in?" came the classy, cultured voice of Roland behind us.

"You smoke?" I asked.

"Not yet," he replied. Shadow passed him a cigarillo.

Roland lit it off of mine, breathing it in like a natural. We stared at him. "I smoked in business school," he said, letting out a perfect gray ring of smoke as he did. "Never really lose the habit, do you? Kind of like riding a bike."

"Hell, yes," affirmed Shadow.

"Drinking's the same way," I chimed in.

"Haven't started that one yet. Suspect I will, though." He let a perfect column of smoke out of the corner of his mouth.

"You know, this is worth it," he stated after a while.

"What?" Shadow asked.

"Losing a business. Life on the edge is significantly more fulfilling, old man."

The "old man" kind of underlined Roland as a stuck-up, but he had a point. He looked considerably more at ease in a tee shirt and faded jeans than he had in the ice cream suit at Robco. Of course, at the time we had wasted a third of his security, so who knows? He ran a hand through is newly tousled hair, obviously deep in thought.

"You have it given to you, you know," he said at last. "Don't waste it."

He finished his smoke. "I'm off to bed. Big day tomorrow."

Shadow and I sat a little while longer, the tobaccy creating a white haze above us.

"I remember what happened now," he said blandly.

"Yeah?" I inquired.

"Amy set me up, plain and simple. Cinos wanted me dead, and she told them. She even plugged me with my 'Eagle'."

I could have told him that the bullet from his Desert Eagle was the dumdum that had whipped his lung, but I didn't. "So, what do you want to do?"

"I want to go to war," he said dangerously.

"I think I can help you with that. Get dressed."

----------------

Hard Rocker's might be my favorite poolhall of all time. It's great because it's so utterly sleazy. Full of all the lowlifes, the air outside is thick with smoke, and not all of it from tobacco. Don't breath too deep if you're ever there.

The air inside is cleaner, but the company is not. If there is a nexus of the mafia, it is here. Every gunner, conman, thug or rapist can find common ground here. But the people who are really at home are those cheap, low-down, adventurers with pistols under their arms. Those worthlessly shifty murderers who would kill their own mother with the right price. In essence, Shadow and I.

The pool tables are clean and that's it for cleanliness. Everything else is a dingy collection of murky underworld-ness somewhat hidden in murky lamplight. There's a junkie for every booth, a whore for every table, a bouncer for every door.

But there is only one Nack in all of Hard Rocker's. And it was he I was trying to meet.

Shadow and I, our coats and hats drawn close to us, walked in, not as tall as some but towering over them all nonetheless. A call girl came up and began to put the moves on Shadow and I. We brushed her aside like a fly, smoke trailing from beneath our hats, the only part of our figures not a silhouette other than our eyes.

Hell's Angels had come to the poolhall.

I spotted Nack in the corner with a hooker on either side of him. Shadow nodded at me, and we glided through the underbelly of Angel Island towards his table.

A really large wolverine bouncer came out of nowhere, blocking our path. "Hey buddy, nobody sees mistuh Nack wid'out no –"

Whatever it was we needed, we never found out. The bouncer was doubled up in pain after my uppercut to the solar plexus.

Nack's up now, all five of his rings visible, his gold-encrusted tooth glimmering in the light. "Hey, whoddafuck do you think you –"

I lift the brim of my Trilby just enough so that he can see who I am. "Hello, Nack. Long time, no see."

Nack's eyes went wide, and he sat back down, the gold and silver chains around his neck shaking as he did so, his fluffy coat settling in his lap. "Uh, hiya Knuckles, um, what can I do for you? Uh, just hope it's not guns…"

"It's guns," I sneered.

"Well, I'm sorry, but I don't do that no more, pimpin's where the real money's at, right girls?"

The sluts both gave vapid, affirmative smiles.

"Well, that's a shame. I mean…" I continued, pulling out a wad of C-Notes, "…if you're not into it no more…"

"Well, hey, man, since money talks…"

"And bullshit walks. Right."

Nack grinned, displaying his gold fang even more. "Usual package?"

"Four of them."

Nack's eyes bugged almost out of his sockets. "Four? That's a ton, even for me. Well, then the price has got to go up, I'm holdin' on to some very sensitive material."

"Nack," I growled. "Just because we're buying guns doesn't mean we didn't bring any."

"Well, when you put it that way, it kinda makes things clearer. Come on back, let's get you two set up!"

--------------

Twenty minutes later, Shadow and I were lugging six duffel bags into the trunk of the car. As we drove our black sedan away, Shadow looked at me sideways. "How the hell are you going to pay for all this?"

"I told Amy Rose she'd pay expenses. I wire her the bill tonight, and that's that."

"So now what happens?"

"We'll sleep in tomorrow. Get some extra rest, have a nice, fulfilling breakfast, do some yoga, have a shower, get some fresh clothes on, go see a movie with all the guys. Then we load up and tear Cinos apart at 10:30 that evening. I'm sick of this case."

"No more backstabbing."

"And no more smoke and mirrors."

"It'll be good to see it go, won't it?"

"Yeah. And who knows how it's gonna go down, but we'll see, right?"

"Roland's probably sick, too."

"In two weeks he's lost everything. I think so."

"You know, it's weird. He's rich, but somehow, he's just as tough as we are. You know what I mean?"

"Yeah." And that was because Roland was just like us. He was someone who had managed to forget the past, move on, pursue a dream, and with a single instance that dream was taken from him. Just like us. Just like us.

And though I'd never seen him shoot, I had a feeling he had it all in him. I knew he was a sharpshooter deep down.

I sighed. "Have you ever thought of this all as a farce?"

I looked at me. "What do you mean?"

"It's like we're marching to our exit lines, the part where we're removed from the play, and we have to say our lines, and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it."

"Yeah. You mean like we're doomed? Yeah, I've thought that. I wonder what dying's like? Is it like falling asleep, or is it something else?"

"We might find out tomorrow."

"Right."

A somber silence followed, as it does when a couple of battered old gunslingers contemplate their last stand together.

"You know, Roland's right. It is worth it."

"Hmm?" I inquired stoically.

"It's been worth working with you, Roland and Rouge. If I had to die, I guess I could say that it'd just be like old times."

"Old times." I rolled the word across my mouth, feeling the resonance of that word that meant so much. The times when we had been not hired killers but freedom fighters, people who actually stood for something. When we were the defenders of a world green and good and not yet gone. When life, liberty and love meant something to us both.

Could those times be so again? Could we win through?

We'd find out tomorrow.

The case to end all cases was wrapping itself up. Time would tell who would stand at the end.

And time would tell who would fall.