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“I asked him about it. He said it was to do with his time in the military.”

“And you accepted his explanation?”

I didn’t manage to keep the skepticism from my voice and immediately apologized.

“I think,” said Zetta, “that his service might have involved more than riding a desk.”

“Did he elaborate?”

“No, and I didn’t press him. I had no reason to.”

“But now youaretrying to hire someone to investigate him.”

“If you’ll accept the job. I just want to know that he’s okay.”

“Have you reason to fear he might not be?”

She sipped her drink, buying herself time to consider how she might respond. I was nursing an alcohol-free beer for appearances’ sake. I preferred to keep a clear head when meeting clients. If someone insisted I order something stronger, I would, but I’d allow it to remain untouched before declining whatever job was being proposed. People who insist that you drink with them are best avoided.

“Is it usual for a person to abandon a place he shares with a woman without retrieving his possessions?” she asked.

I thought of Jack Nicholson inFive Easy Pieces, leaving Karen Blackto get coffee as he goes to a gas station restroom, only for him to hitch a ride alone on the first truck heading out. Occasionally, people didn’t want to put themselves through a painful conversation, or not one that wasn’t about to alter the finale. It was a coward’s way to end a relationship, but it happened.

“When you say he left his possessions, what are we talking about?”

“Clothes, books, some money,” said Zetta.

“How much money?”

“Seventy-three dollars, ninety-two cents.”

“That’s not a lot.”

“There was a time when I’d have fought a bum for a tenth as much.”

“But not now.”

“No, not now.”

“What about Riggins? Is he the kind of man who’d feel the loss?”

“He refers to C-notes as ‘Texas pennies,’ so I guess not.”

I watched as a man named Gibson Ouelette stepped into Howie’s, walked to the bar, and ordered the cheapest beer on offer, which he’d do his best to make last. Gibson acknowledged me, and I nodded back. He’d just emerged from Bolduc Correctional Facility, to which he’d been transferred from Maine State Prison for the final three years of a nine-year stretch. Bolduc was a minimum-security facility that resembled a farm, but only from a distance or if one wasn’t looking hard enough. Gibson, who’d seen the inside of enough cells to count as an expert, once told me something interesting. He said that the worst part of getting busted, worse even than being caught in the first place, was the period between capture and conviction. He told me that it was like being trapped in limbo, but as soon as the judge passed sentence, he felt a sense of relief, because a decision had been made and he could now set about figuring out how to accommodate himself to it. There was nothing worse than not knowing, he said, which might have explained why Zetta Nadeau was willing to spend moneyestablishing the whereabouts of a man who could simply have run out on her because it was easier than discussing why he no longer wanted to be with her.

But I used the wordmightadvisedly, because I’d spent enough time listening to people tell me stories to be able to spot gaps in a narrative. I knew Zetta was holding back, and in whatever was being concealed lay the pitfalls: for her, for her boyfriend, and for me, if I agreed to help her—which I wouldn’t unless she came clean. That was another lesson hard learned: the risk lay in what was hidden. With risk came hurt, and I’d had enough of that. I ached more than any man in his fifties ought to, not unless he’d been through a war. I was in pain from the time I woke to the time I went to sleep, and I slept less than I would have liked because of it, which exacerbated the situation. I’d been prescribed medication for the toughest nights, but I didn’t like using it because it left me foggy for too much of the following day. It also caused me to sleeptoosoundly, which meant that I was less likely to wake if something happened. I suppose one could call it caution on my part, but that wouldn’t have been entirely accurate, so call it what it was. Call it fear.

“What did he do for a living while he was here?” I asked.

“Wyatt worked at BrightBlown, but mainly for the discount.”

BrightBlown was one of the many dispensaries that had proliferated since Maine legalized the recreational use and sale of cannabis. They weren’t all going to survive, but for now, Portland resembled the Wild West in cannabis terms—or the Laid-back West, if you preferred. The down-and-outs who would previously have argued over bottles of Flash Point or Fireball were now to be seen negotiating the use of medical marijuana cards, while storefronts that might once have housed the kind of businesses that lent variety to a city had been taken over by weed distributors. Rents were being pushed up, restaurants and bars were struggling to retain staff because selling weed paid better, and, as was inevitable, the money to be made had attracted criminals ofvarious stripes, from thieves targeting cannabis-growing operations to organized crime gangs engaging in illegal cultivation and mass distribution.

But apart from that, my experience of pot smokers was that some of them were the dullest people you could meet, because what they were most interested in was weed—where they were going to get it, when they were going to smoke it, and how they were going to feel when they did it—which made them poor company for anyone with all their synapses firing.

Zetta smirked.

“You’re wearing the same look of disapproval I saw on Ammon’s face the first time he caught me smoking a joint,” she said.