“You talked her down, didn’t you, Remy?” I said, stowing away the gun and clips in my luggage. “You talked her down and pocketed two hundred, sí?”

It took a moment, but he finally answered, “Sí, Señor Ghost.”

“I thought we were pals, Remy.”

“She still made out like a bandit, señor!” Remy pleaded. “She could have sold the gun for fifty American and made in a day what it would have taken her a week to make from her crappy clothes and shit.”

“I’m deducting two hundred from your tip—”

“Aw, come on! Is that really—That’s not really fair! I got bills to pay—”

“And babies to feed,” I said. “Yeah, I know the story. Listen. You can drop me off at the next corner, or we can continue our relationship for a couple more hours, and you can make two months’ wages—maybe more. But our relationship has to be at a higher level of trust, comprendes?”

Two hours and fifteen high-end shoe and clothing stores later, I had the name and shop location of the shoemaker to the wealthy: Ernesto Manta—EM, the letters embossed on the inside sole of the shoes on a dead man purported to be the mysterious Mr. Sloane. The man with ten million in dirty and disappeared cash and twenty million in vanished bearer bonds. The man who had planted my name in the pocket of the suit he put on a homeless vet before tossing him into a water clarifying tank. The man whose finger had flicked every domino that had started a chain reaction that had threatened to kill my friends and me.

I had Remy take me to my hotel, where I had registered under the name Pumpsie Green, hoping no one at the front desk was a diehard Boston Red Sox baseball fan.

“Be here in an hour, Remy,” I said. “If you decide not to show, it’s been fun.”

“I’ll be here,” he said. “But promise me one thing, señor.”

“What’s that?”

“My payment’s not going to be a bullet from one of those clips.”

“Your payment is going to be cash money,” I said. “That’s all and that’s a promise.”

“Cool,” he said. “Una hora.”