Dragonfire

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Welcome to hard times...

Sunday afternoon, mid-August. Eberhardt and I were sitting in the backyard of his house in Noe Valley, drinking beer and getting a little tight. It was a nice day — bright sunlight, warm, just a hint of breeze. The smell of burning charcoal was in the air; Eb had started the coals in the brick barbecue pit he’d built some years back and we were going to have steaks pretty soon. In one of the other yards beyond his fence, somebody was mowing his lawn; you could hear the faint ratchety whir of a hand-powered mower.

It was all nice and pleasant: one of those lazy days of summer, a Sunday rite like thousands of others in San Francisco. The only problem with it was, neither of us was enjoying it. Eberhardt’s wife Dana had left him for another man three months ago, after nearly three decades of marriage, and he was lonely and bitter and rattled around in his house like a marble in a box. And I was even worse off. I had also lost a woman I loved, for different reasons — or it seemed I’d lost her from all indications the past month. Eberhardt, at least, had his job — he was a lieutenant on the San Francisco cops — and could bury himself in his work. But I no longer had mine. That was something else I’d lost a month ago: the only profession I had had for the past thirty years. My private investigator’s license had been suspended indefinitely by the State Board of Licenses, on recommendation of the chief of police.

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