Friday's debriefing was held at the piano bar at the Harleton Inn. It was best that way. If anyone became overly debriefed, there was always a room to sober up in for a few hours.

It seemed, to Susan anyway (drinking tactically, having discreetly switched after the first vodka and tonic to equally colorless but innocuous Perrier), that the five guys she now worked with--Juba, Juan, Sasquatch, Ashe and Joel--at the Agency were not so unlike the men she'd worked beside at the tiny Kusata City police department. Like all guys, they were only guys--guys who did weird things for a living, sure--pretending to be people they weren't, buying dope from very strange strangers--guys with better stories than most guys, but guys nonetheless.

Not that Susan had anything against guys--Susan loved guys--or that she was sick of guys, (although she could easily have gotten disgusted with guys a thousand times over) but guys--even these performing out at the edge of their gender--were so embarrassingly literal, so peculiarly linear. Even their secret selves were worn on the outside. Men, she considered, are like the werewolves the villagers stone to death because anyone can see that they're werewolves. But women--women are like the werewolves who are never captured, because they wear their hair on the inside. Men will attack a thing headlong, heedless of consequence. Women will approach a thing sideways, assess its strengths and weaknesses, then exploit its weaknesses--and use its strengths against it.

"I do not think," said Sasquatch, maudlin, "that I can go home again."

"You can't go home again," Ashe observed, wolfishly.

"Obliviously," said Sasquatch. "But what I mean--what I really, really mean, is that my poor old Georgia daddy would lock the door if he saw me coming. Plechpette, North Carolina. Peachpit, we called it. Damned if I can ever go back to Peachpit again."

"Why would anyone go back to Peachpit?"

"Just exactly. Why would anyone go back to Peachpit, least of all, me. I left Peachpit--oh--a long, long time ago now. Long, long time. Did I ever tell you I had a brother?"

"There are two of you?"

"No, just one. The other one is my brother. He's younger than me. Way smarter, but doesn't have the common sense that God gave a goose. He went to school up at MIT and majored in chemical engineering. Came home over Christmas break and got a girl named Pearl pregnant. Left school, married Pearl, and became a truck driver. Pearl divorced him, and her lawyer took everything he had--the house, the car, the kids. Left him flat. He mooned around over Pearl for two years, bought another house, bought a couple more cars, and got remarried to Pearl. She divorced him again, and her lawyer took everything he owned again."

"Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, is he?"

"That's what I'm saying. Not the sharpest knife. Dumb as a sackful of hammers is more like it. He got married again to a different woman, and he's now assistant pastor at the Baptist Church in Huininga."

"Hooningah?"

"Huininga," said Sasquatch, carefully. "My old daddy still lets my brother visit, but not me. He says I'm an abomination."

"What? You're a cop. That's not so bad."

"It's mostly my hair daddy doesn't like."

"You're losing your hair, so you ought to be able to go home again someday."

"Not my beard," said Sasquatch, petting his own head experimentally, "It's just fine, thank you."

"Thank you. But you could shave."

"Not on your life."

Juba, uncharacteristically silent, took the opportunity he perceived in the wake of Sasquatch's tale of woe to press his foot questioningly against Susan's. Had she felt the love? A deliberate flick of her foot high on Juba's outer thigh was her answer--the muscle in the thigh was called the common peronial, and a sharp blow could be incapacitating. A mild flick caused what kids used to call a "monkey bump". Exquisitely painful, but harmless. Juba's face whitened.

"Oops. Sorry," she said. "Didn't mean to do that, but you were tickling my foot. Must have been an accident." Susan had a third-degree black belt in Taekwondo.

Taekwondo had done more than save Susan's life--it had constructed it. There were hidden selves, other lives within that she would never tell, in liquor or otherwise. Unlike these doggish, bounding boys, she wore her hair on the inside.