Jane cleared her throat. “I feel like all I’ve got is ‘I’m sorry.’ And that just sucks.”

“Not a party on my end, either.”

Silence. Lot of silence. But he wasn’t one to keep asking when all he got in return was I’m sorry. Besides, he wasn’t totally in the dark. He knew she had a patient she wanted him to treat and he knew . . . Well, that was about it, wasn’t it.

Eventually, she took a right hand turn off onto . . . a dirt road?

“FYI,” he muttered, “this car was built for racetracks, not roughing it.”

“This is the only way in.”

To where, he wondered. “You’re going to owe me for this.”

“You’re the only one who can save her.”

Manny flashed his eyes over. “You didn’t say it was a ‘her.’ ”

“Should it matter?”

“Given how much I don’t get about all of this, everything matters.”

A mere ten yards in and they went through the first of countless puddles that were as deep as frickin’ lakes, and as the Porsche splashed through, he gritted, “And screw this patient. I want payback for what you’re doing to my under carriage.”

Jane let out a little laugh, and for some reason, that made the center of his chest ache—but nothing good was going to come from dwelling on the emotional crap. It wasn’t like the pair of them had ever been together—yeah, there had been attraction on his part. Big attraction. And, like, one kiss. That was it, however.

And now she was Mrs. Someone Else.

About five minutes later, they came up to a gate that looked like it had been erected during the Punic Wars. The thing was hanging at Alice in Wonderland angles, the chain link rusted to shit and broken in places, the fence that it bisected nothing more than six feet of barbed cattle wire that had seen better days.

Yet the thing opened smoothly. And as they went past it, he saw the first of the video cameras.

While they progressed at a snail’s pace, a strange fog rolled in from nowhere in particular, the landscape blurring until he couldn’t see more than twelve inches ahead of the car’s grille. Christ, it was like they were in a ScoobyDoo episode out here.

The next gate was in slightly better condition, and the one after that was even newer, and so was the one after that.

The last gate they came to was spit-and-shine sparkling, and all about the Alcatraz: Fucker reached twenty-five feet off the ground and had High Voltage warnings all over it. And as for the wall it cut into? That shit was nothing for cattle, more like velociraptors, and what do you want to bet that concrete face fronted a solid twelve or twenty-four inches of solid horizontal stone.