“I went back with Al to his photo studio after we left Ketch and Craig. I told him I lied about being pregnant. Then I got him naked and took out a gun. I told him that either I was gonna get my money or I was gonna shoot him.”

“And?” I asked. “Did he tell you?”

“Yeah.” The nod and twist of her lips told me that this knowledge just presented another barrier. “He told me, but I realized that I couldn’t get at it—not directly.”

“So you needed him alive to get to the money?”

She nodded again.

“But you killed him anyway.”

“Yes.”

“Why would anybody kill someone when they needed him?” It’s a bad sign when you start discussing murder as if it were a chore done out of sequence.

“I could see in his eyes that he thought he still had me tied to that tree.” Her face was not quite so beautiful when she talked murder. “At the very least he planned to take my money and run. At most he’d leave me burned alive. He thought that I needed him too much to kill him. But as my mother used to say, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

“Ah,” I crooned. “That’s where I come in.”

Donata smiled.

“But you’re not gonna tell me where the money’s at until you know that I can’t do what Alonzo planned,” I concluded.

“I need somebody who’s smart enough to negotiate,” she said. “Somebody who doesn’t think in absolute terms.”

Those blue eyes bore into mine like twin skies over a day-old battlefield. The land was devastated and the soldiers all dead or dying.

“Girl, you scare the shit outta me.”

Donata grinned, stood up, and retied the sash of her robe.

“Fifty thousand dollars,” she said. “That’s all you have to worry about.”

“If your money is stacked up with what Alonzo and his crew stole, then you got over four hundred thousand,” I argued. “Fifty don’t seem like enough.”

“I’ll go as high as one hundred thousand. That’s the limit.”

“And what about Brock?”

“We leave LA. He’ll never find us.”

“Brock’s a killer,” I said.

“Yes, he is. That’s why we have to do something, Easy. Either take the money and run or just run.”

“I could give you to Brock.”

“He’d kill you anyway.”

She was probably right about that.

“What do you say, Easy? Is it a deal?”

It was my turn to think. I should have been figuring out the right move to make but instead I wondered how I could get into so much trouble. Most people live their entire lives without experiencing what I had just sitting here, talking to Donata Delphine.