"No. In the room."

She knew that, she just felt like avoiding it. "I don't know. I freaked out. I wanted an orange soda."

"An orange soda."

"Like I said, bitches be crazy."

"Any chance we can talk about it? Or just hang out, watch some TV?"

He's reaching, she thinks. It's sweet. But –

"I can't. I have to go. I have to tell my brother, and go kick his ass for making me lie to a pair of federal agents."

"Can we do it again?" he asks.

His face is sad, pleading. This is a lonely man, she thinks; he must be, he wants to spend time with her. But then there it is, a flash, a shadow over his face – a pair of gouged-out eye sockets, four strips of electrical tape, blood pouring, maggots crawling, rust flakes falling from a shitty fish-gutter knife. She shudders.

"I'm an awful person," she declares. "I'm a hideous little nogoodnik. I have horrible thoughts. I do horrible things. I curse, I drink, I smoke. I basically have shit in my mouth and my head, and it always comes pouring out of me–" Like a stream of maggots, she thinks. "And you don't need that. Louis, you're a genuinely nice guy. A good person. You don't want to be with me. You'll just get covered in shit. My shit. My problems, my emotions, my everything. I am like a bucket of sewage turned over your head. Go find a nice girl. Someone in a sundress. Someone who isn't so comfortable with the words 'mother', 'cock', 'fucker', and 'sucker'."

"But–"

"No but. This is it. You're sweet."

She gets on her tippy-toes and kisses his chin.

"Have a good life," she says, and she wants to tell him the truth. She wants to say that this is it for him, he doesn't have long – she wants to exhort him to go get a prostitute, go eat the nastiest and most expensive cheeseburger he can find, and for God's sake stay away from lighthouses. But she says none of those things. A tiny part of her hopes that if she can stay away from him, that will be the secret. The trick. That will be what saves him. It's a lazy, passive theory – but since being proactive hasn't earned her a damn thing yet, it's all she has.

"Wait!" he calls after her, but it's too late. She's in the Mustang. She coaxes it to life.

And she sprays gravel peeling out of the parking lot.

"Another bust," Frankie says, rubbing his eyes. He yawns. "We're never going to find this little pecker. Ingersoll's going to have our balls for brunch."

"I don't have balls," Harriet says as she pulls the car over just past the motel entrance. She leaves the car running but dims the lights.

"What are you doing?"

"Waiting."

"For what?"

"For the girl."

"What girl? That girl we just met?"

"Yes. They were lying."

Frankie blinks. "What? Who? Paul Bunyan back there and his little snippy bitch?"