I wanted to ask him if he’d killed the young man who’d taken such care of that pretty body. I was afraid to know. “So Frances will try to take Worecski over. What happens if she does?”

“Oh, she won’t,” he said. “She just needs to hold him there while she blows his brains out.”

“Chango.” When my voice was entirely mine again, I said, “But if she’s — won’t she blow her own brains out, too? Effectively?”

“Timing’s everything,” he agreed. “If she pulls back too early, he can skip before she kills the body. If she doesn’t pull back in time, it’s blammo, brain for rent.”

Unless that gave the brain back to its original owner. Did Mick believe that Frances had killed her host? “You don’t talk as if this is hypothesis. You… People have done this before.”

“Yes,” he said, mildly surprised. “I told you, it’s called a head fight. Not too many people actually got killed, but that was usually the intention.”

“Frances has done this.”

“Oh, yeah. It must be the way she got the Horsemen she was hunting, too. She was always good. Strong and fast. But Tom was strong and fast and bugfuck crazy. I don’t think Frances can take him. Without help.”

“This doesn’t sound like something you can do by committee.”

“We could distract him,” said Mick. He was hard to see in the dark. “We could do that much.” He sounded as if he were arguing with something I couldn’t remember saying.

It was cool, out near the river after sunset. Mick was wearing his jacket, the one he wouldn’t leave behind in my apartment. I shivered and rubbed my arms.

“Then you can,” I said. “Have fun. If this is a remake of High Noon, she’s not Gary Cooper. She’s not the good guy.”

“Who is?” he asked, as if the question wasn’t rhetorical.

“Forget it. I’m square with Frances, and I’m sure as water runs downhill not going to try to get killed just because I can.”

“You still hold it against her, that bit back at your place.”

“No, I told you. We’re square. If I owed her, it would be different, but I don’t owe her anything. Do you?”

With a crunching of gravel, he turned back toward the shrubbery. He came out of the shadow of the garage and moonlight fell on him. I caught up to him where the path bent.

“We all slept with each other,” he said. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, at first. “We had a lot of contempt for normal people — or we said we did — and besides, some experiences are so strange and strong that they force you away from anybody who doesn’t share ’em. When we wanted to get laid, as opposed to when we wanted to prove something, we turned to our own kind. So Frances and I have gone to bed with each other a few times.” He pinched a branch end off the nearest shrub and toyed with the leaves, creasing them along the veins. “I think, for Frances, that’s all it was.”