He tilted the rearview mirror to look at his face in the streetlight that came down through the windshield. His eyes looked hollow now, nearly lifeless. He thought again of Ormsby’s face gazing up empty-eyed from the kitchen doorway. Was death really anything to fear?

He slipped the car into neutral, cut the motor, killed the headlights, and sat looking out through the windshield as the hot engine ticked. Up ahead, he could hear the breakers in the darkness. He gripped the steering wheel with both hands and looked at his own two fists. His knuckles were bone-white against the wheel’s leather grip.

The irony was not lost on him: Keegan had spent the last decade teaching others the art of distrust, ushering them, client by client, into the cold world of betrayal—unmasking the philanderer, the double-crosser, the liar, the cheat. Secretly, he had always felt superior to those credulous souls who came to him for help. They were dupes. They ignored all those blatant cues that should have tipped them off.

But if Lieutenant Moore was right, he’d joined their ranks, hadn’t he? Eve had played him for a fool. At this moment, he felt gut-shot by the notion that he could be anyone’s patsy, especially hers. He’d give everything he owned for Eve to be the woman she claimed to be. He remembered her holding the old revolver with both hands and the smell of gunpowder in the dry morning air. So innocent—yet so lethal, she’d said. Truer words.

He opened the car door and got out. The balmy wind coming in off the ocean rippled at his damp shirt. He was half a block from the waterfront. No one waiting for him down by the pier would have seen him yet. There was plenty of time to turn back, to start up the car and drive away, to leave Eve and her accomplices, if they existed, in the shadows.

There was a gash in his car’s ragtop roof now from the railroad crossing gate, an eight-inch tear on the passenger side. He ran his hand along the slit. A few days ago, he would have been furious, but tonight it was hard to care.

He straightened up and saw that he’d parked in front of a camera shop. He could see his reflection in the plate-glass window under the red-and-white awning. He was stooped and old, a broken-down, shot-to-hell human being. Why would any woman give him a second look?