I swallowed, to no effect, and said, “You’ve been looking for this guy for years. You think he’ll find Mick Skinner in an hour?”

“I can’t afford to believe he hasn’t.”

“I’m staying here.” I managed not to drop my eyes from hers.

“No, you’re not,” she said agreeably.

“They don’t want me. None of them want me. They want you.”

“What I did to you tonight,” she replied, each word evenly spaced and without emphasis, “was nothing. Tom O’Bedlam or anyone who serves him will separate you from your desire to live and any last complacent conviction you may have about the privacy of your own mind as easily as tearing rotted cloth. Knowledge of me will gush out of your brain and your mouth and a hundred other openings that he’ll make just for that purpose. I suggest you come with me.”

“What can I tell him? ‘Well, yeah, there’s this woman, right now she looks like this, but that might have changed; and she wants to bump you off, but you knew that already.’ ”

“Sparrow,” she said, and stopped, and began again. “It didn’t occur to you that I might have your welfare in mind and not mine?”

I frowned at her, and she returned my gaze, her eyebrows raised. “Why would you?”

“Thank you, I have retained a few dried-out shreds of human decency, I think.”

“That’s not how things work around here.”

It was her turn to frown. “Pretend you’re someplace else, then. Go change, and gather up anything you need, within limits.”

“Where are y — we — going?”

She leaned on the corner of the desk. “Away.”

Do you still have purposes? Mick had asked. I used mine up. I just move around. I couldn’t go to Dana, obviously; and I couldn’t go to Cassidy, because I didn’t know where that was. If I went to Sherrea, I might involve her -

Oh, no. Think. I already had. Sherrea and Theo, Theo with a hole in him, and at the bottom of the stairs the woman Frances had ridden, Myra, and Dusty, whose craziness had come off him like heat off a griddle. Who’d pointed out, smiling, that now he knew where to find Theo and Sher if he needed them.

“When you… when you rode that red-haired woman out back of the Underbridge. How much of her brain did you pick?”

“Not much. I was busy, you’ll recall. Why?”

I didn’t ask them to get involved. I didn’t ask Theo to follow me out of the building with a gun. He knew better; he’d told me so. “The two people I was with. They were still there… ”

Some buttress of self-containment slipped loose, for an instant, behind her face, and was restored just as quickly. “If you’re going to suggest we go back,” she said, “I’ll save you the trouble. No.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because if it’s not the first place they’ll look, it’s the second.”

“You think Myra and Dusty work for Tom Whatsisname.”