The waitress returned, and the apologetic look on her face was a clear indication that my prayer was stuck in some heavenly cyber-queue.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but the credit card company declined payment.”

Jolie was ready with a twenty-dollar bill.

The waitress took it and hurried away gratefully.

“It bites, being poor,” I said, my face hot with embarrassment.

“You really got burned in that divorce,” Jolie said. “I thought you’d paid all that stuff off.”

“That’s the last one,” I said. “I cut up the other cards a long time ago.” I thought of Nick, and his mother, and seethed. I’d rarely used plastic, but Nick had flashed them everywhere he went. Most likely, I’d taken the fall for a lot of hotel rooms, romantic dinners and sexy lingerie. Nick DeLuca was going to be a while getting out of the train station up yonder if he needed my forgiveness to buy a ticket.

“Better take the whackers to that one, too,” Jolie suggested.

“You can bet on it,” I said.

On the way back to my place, Jolie pulled into a supermarket parking lot and loaded up on groceries. Maybe she’d looked in my fridge between going to the bathroom and catching me at smoothing the bed. Maybe—and this was worse—she just felt sorry for me because I was a schmuck with a piecework job and bad credit.

We carried the bags up to my apartment, and Jolie went off to take a shower and put on her pajamas while I put the stuff away.

Nick popped in just as I was turning away from the refrigerator.

“Creep,” I said, in a whisper, because I didn’t want Jolie to hear and demand an explanation. It was enough that I’d had to tell Tucker I saw ghosts, and if it hadn’t been for the Jessica story, I would have been up against it in the credibility department.

Nick looked offended. He was holding Chester, or I’d have smacked him with something.

I grabbed my purse, dug out the credit card, and shoved it in his face. “This bounced tonight, thanks to you and Mommy Dearest, and I was humiliated. Again.”

Nick frowned, put the cat down on the floor. “There was life insurance,” he said. “A lot of it.”

“Fat lot of good it did me,” I said. I yanked open the junk drawer, got out the scissors and snipped the card into pieces. Okay, I should have checked the available credit before I tried to use the thing, but I’d been making minimum payments for about a hundred years, and I figured there was room for two pancake specials at IHOP.

Nick backpedaled. Maybe because I still had the scissors in my hand. I couldn’t kill him, but ectoplasmic puncture could conceivably be a problem. In that moment, I really wanted to test the theory.

“Where’s the dog?” he asked.