“We’re just getting started. Are you ready for tomorrow? Or did you come to try to convince me we should make a deal?”

“I know better than that. And I don’t think my clients are in any more compromising a mood than you. I wanted to come ask you about something else. But it can wait until after the hearing.”

He looked at his watch, and regretted coming all the way out there. Especially as he realized it was later than he had thought, and the sun was already starting to work its way behind the river.

“Is it safe to walk back from here?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” said Joyce. “I don’t go out at night much anymore. But Sig always comes back. And I’m sure he’d be happy to help you find your way if you think you need it.”

He looked back toward the trees to see if he could see the feral kid stalking his prey. He just saw the ruins of the zoo, back there behind the foliage gone wild. Then he heard a scream, or maybe a holler, like the sound of some big ape. It might have even been a man.

“It’s a bird,” said Joyce.

“A big heron,” said Patricia. “She’s ready to mate.”

“Or she heard Sig is coming,” said Joyce.

Donny tried to read the look on Joyce’s face, and kept his quip to himself. He couldn’t tell who was sleeping with whom in this house, but he knew it was none of his business. He was an asshole for coming in the first place, and for letting himself think Joyce would have anything more than business to talk with him.

“I should go,” said Donny.

“That’s probably a good idea,” said Joyce.

36

Donny had seen Joyce just one other time since she fled the country. In Mexico City, for lunch, about three years after she left. He was there to interview a witness, another expat. She picked the place, on a side street off the main drag in Roma.

“We need to be careful,” she said in the message she left at his hotel. “Even here.”

He didn’t know what that meant, even though he sort of did. There had been a change in government in Mexico, and the new regime was said to be trying to improve relations with its northern neighbor.

That was the reason she had a table for them in the back, instead of out on the sidewalk enjoying the gorgeous weather. It was the reason she entered from the back.

“I’m afraid to even hug you,” she said, half laughing and half scowling. “Like I’ll catch one of your bugs.”

“I’m not sick,” he said.

“I don’t mean that kind of bug. I just mean you are the biggest surveillance magnet I know.”

He couldn’t argue. “I just try to bore them.”