“I’m sorry about the other women,” he said sweetly.

“Too little, too late,” I answered, stunned by the sharp, sudden pang of sorrow at the verbal reminder. It was like a rubber band snapping around my soul. “What are you doing here?”

He cocked one perfectly shaped eyebrow. In life, Nick had been a real estate developer, eating up the Arizona desert with tract houses, convenience stores and strip malls. I half expected his cell phone to ring. He was one of those people who go around with an earphone plugged into their heads, apparently talking to themselves. “I wondered when you’d get to that question,” he said.

“Now you know.”

Nick fiddled with his tie again. His mother chose that tie—red, with tiny silver stripes. I hated it, and I hated her. More on that later. “It’s hard to get your attention,” he said. Then, with a wistful look, he added, “Some things never change.”

“Pul-eeze,” I said. “We’re not going to play the poor, misunderstood Nick game, okay?” I was so not in love with him, dead or alive, and I didn’t want him hanging around. How do you get a restraining order against a ghost?

He held up a hand, palm out. “All right, all right,” he said. “Let’s not go there.”

“Wise choice, Bucko. And you still haven’t told me what you’re doing in my bedroom in the middle of the night.”

“It’s a long story.” He looked around the bedroom, with its linoleum floor, fading wallpaper and garage-sale furniture. “Still living over the biker bar,” he observed. “When are you going to get a decent place?”

Thanks to Nick and his mother, Margery DeLuca, society scion and barracuda divorce lawyer, I’d gotten F-all in the settlement, except for a pile of credit card bills I was still paying off. I couldn’t afford anything but what I had, and sometimes even that much was a stretch, but there didn’t seem to be much point in going down that winding and treacherous road. “Did you come here to talk real estate? If so, kindly go haunt somebody else—your mother, for instance. I’m not in the market.”

Nick looked hurt. That was my second cue to feel guilty.

Not.

He sighed once more, philosophically this time, like some holy martyr, angling for his own prayer card. No sale there, either. Nick DeLuca was a lot of things, but a saint wasn’t one of them.

“Damn it,” he said, looking down at himself again. “I’m fading.”

Sure enough, the glow indicated low batteries, and I could see through his left shoulder and part of his mid-section.

“Wait,” I said. The word scraped my throat.

Nick’s brown eyes connected briefly with mine, then he vanished.