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They were kicking the hell out of the little guy.

Halfway down the alley between two wooden storefront buildings, shadows in the moonlight did an evil dance, three goons circling around a whimpering pile of bones down on the gravel. The big guys seemed to be trying for field goals, their squirming prey pulled in on himself like a barefoot fetus in a ragged t-shirt and frayed dungarees. Blood soaked through the white cotton like irregular polka dots, and moans accelerated into ragged screams whenever a hard-toed shoe put one between the goal posts.

“Mike,” Velda whispered, grasping my arm.

Two of the baggy-suit bastards had hats jammed on their skulls, the other one, the biggest, was bare-headed with a butch cut so close to the scalp he might have been bald.

I said a nasty word, took a last drag on the cig and sent it spinning into the deserted street. I slipped out of my sportcoat and handed it to my raven-haired companion, who was frowning at me, though those big beautiful brown eyes stayed wide. I held up a hand to her like a crossing guard, and she just nodded.

“Where is the dame?” the bare-headed brute demanded. “We played games long enough, Poochie! You must’ve seen something!”

Like the man said, it was none of my business. I was on a weekend getaway with my lovely secretary, trying to ease the pressure of big city life. Just before ten p. m. we’d arrived in Sidon, eighty miles out on Long Island, a little recreational hamlet in Suffolk County. We left my heap in the hotel lot and were having a nice cool evening stroll along the boardwalk, checking out the two-block business section of a little burg that had already gone to bed.

“You wanna die tonight, Poochie?” the big guy was saying. He had three inches on my six feet, and forty pounds on my one-ninety, and there was fat on him, but muscle, too.

And the hell of it was, I knew the son of a bitch.

“You can die right here, Poochie! We’ll drop your sorry butt in a hole in the woods somewhere, no one the wiser. ”

I let the moonlight frame me in the mouth of the alley as I said, “You haven’t changed much, Dekkert. Little fatter. ”

His bully boy associates froze; one in mid-kick almost lost his balance. That was worth a grin.

“Who is that?” Dekkert asked, turning toward me with that stubbly bullet head like a badly superimposed photo over his bulky body. He’d been handsome once, a real lady killer, before his nose became a nebulous thing that had been broken past resemblance to any standard breathing apparatus.

Once by me.

“I heard you were back in the cop business,” I said. “I just didn’t know Sidon was the lucky winner. You won the sweepstakes yourself when Pat Chambers didn’t get your fat ass tossed in the pokey, for all the graft you took. ”