“It’s me,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’m at a phone booth.”

Keegan listened hard, but he couldn’t hear any background noise. She could be calling from anywhere. He rubbed his itching eyes. How were they so dry when every other part of him was slick with sweat?

“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “What if they’ve got your phone tapped?”

The phone’s coiled chord sagged, full of knots, in the space between the table and the wall. If the ballistics report had come back, there’d definitely be enough for a phone tap warrant, Keegan reasoned. But there’d also be enough for an arrest—yet here he sat, a free man in his mother’s kitchen. “Maybe they have,” Keegan said. “Maybe they haven’t. There’s nothing we can do about it right now.” He turned the phone and pressed it to his other ear. “So, what’s the story? Please tell me you haven’t told this lawyer anything.”

“I haven’t,” she said, sounding a little offended by his question. “And I’m not going to say anything to anyone unless you’re there to do it with me.” Her voice warmed noticeably. “We’re in this together, Jim,” she said, “hell or high water.”

For richer or poorer. All or nothing. A man or a mouse. Keegan’s heat-addled brain rattled off conditionals, until he caught himself doing it and forced it to stop. He pressed a damp palm to the tabletop. “So where did you go today?”

“Santa Barbara,” she said. “It’s all set up. He can help us. We just all need to meet.”

“Who is he?”

She paused a beat, considering. “I probably shouldn’t say on the phone,” she told him. “It’s complicated. But I promise it’ll all make sense. You’ll see. He’ll explain it all. He knew all about Merrill, apparently, and what he’d found in that North Beach warehouse. But we need to meet him in secret.”

A stab of wariness cut through Keegan’s exhaustion, and he pulled himself straighter in his chair. “Why in secret?”

“Jim, please,” she said. “Just trust me.”

“When is this meeting supposed to take place?”

“Tonight,” she said. “Midnight. By that old amusement pier. You know the one.”

“Pacific Park?” he said. “You’re joking.” He thought of the old gun arching out across the black water and splashing up a white plume. He thought of the ramshackle silhouette of the pier’s old roller coasters on the north horizon. She couldn’t have known he’d got rid of it there. He hadn’t let it slip, had he?

“It was the only place I could think of,” she said. “It had to be a place he could find, but where no one would be around. He said he knew where it was. We can talk there in private.”