His phone rang and he picked it up. “You can’t find her, can you. Devina Avale is nothing but air.”

Matthias wasn’t laughing this time. “Nothing. Not a damn thing. It’s like she dropped onto the earth out of nowhere. The thing is, she has all the right surface credentials—but only to a point. No birth certificate. No parents. Established credit only seven months ago, and the social security number is actually that of a dead woman. So it’s not a great facade, which means I should have been able to find something, anything on the real her. But she’s a mirage.”

“Thanks, Matthias.”

“You don’t sound shocked in the slightest.”

“I’m not.”

“What the hell have you gotten yourself into?”

Jim shook his head. “Same shit, different day. That’s about it.”

There was a short silence. “Expect a package from me.”

“Roger that.”

Jim hung up, put the phone in the front pocket of his jacket, and decided it was time to go face the music over at the Commodore. Vin diPietro had a right to know who and what his ex was, and here was hoping that the guy would be open to the truth—even though it sounded a lot like fiction.

Abruptly, the memory of Vin looking up from the stool in the locker room at the Iron Mask came back.

Do you believe in demons?

Jim could only hope that question had been a rhetorical one.

CHAPTER
28

Funny thing about glass. When you broke the shit up, it got pissed and bit back.

Upstairs in the duplex’s master bath, Vin was surrounded by gauze and white surgical tape. What he’d done to his palm squeezing that bourbon to shreds was way out of Band-Aid land, so he’d had to call in reinforcements of the Red Cross variety and things were not going well. With the injury being on his right hand, he was a floundering, cursing nurse, fumbling with all the wrapping and the scissors and the tape.

Damn good thing he was his own patient. The vocabularly alone, much less the incompetence, would have gotten him disbarred—or whatever the hell the candy-striper equivalent to that was.

He was just coming to the end of the ordeal when the phone by the sinks rang, and wasn’t that just loads of fun. With a tiny pair of nail scissors locked in his leftie, a strip of gauze in his teeth, and his right hand all but a paw, it took every bit of coordination he had to answer the call.

“Let him up,” he told the lobby guard.

After putting the receiver back, he did a half-assed taping job and left the mess on the counter as is, heading for the stairs and going down to the front hall door. When the elevator binged and opened, he was in the corridor, waiting.

Jim Heron stepped out and didn’t hang around for a hello or an invitation to speak. Which you had to respect.