Mitch. Yes, my dog. Leading me on a mission impossible, a mission to nowhere. He bit me again, hard enough to break through my peacoat. I shrieked and pushed myself upright again.

“Jeesh, you a marine sergeant or what?” I croaked at him.

He looked at me balefully: I was the sorriest excuse for a recruit he’d seen in all his years in the corps. He trotted along the edge of the water, stopping briefly for a drink. We went around a bend, and I saw in the distance a small fleet of blue trucks and, in front of me, brown mountains of garbage. The city dump. We were at the city dump? This hound led me through hell to get to the world’s biggest supply of garbage?

“When I find someone to drive me home, you are—” I broke off my hoarse and useless threat. Mitch had disappeared over the side of a pit. I walked cautiously to the edge. It had been dug out and abandoned: dead, scrubby weeds were starting to grow along the sides.

Two bodies lay at the bottom. I scrambled down the rocky clay, my exhaustion forgotten. Both bodies had been badly beaten, so beaten they were black and purple, with pieces of skin flayed off. One seemed to be a man, but it was the woman Mitch was pawing at anxiously. She had a mass of tawny hair around her swollen, battered face. I knew that hair, I knew that black leather coat. And the crimson fragment on the fence, that had been her scarf. I’d watched Marcena Love tie that scarf up any number of times. My good-luck scarf, she called it, I always wear it in battle zones.

The man—I looked and looked away. Not Morrell, how could it be? The black spots in front of my eyes grew and danced, blotting out the gray sky and the mangled bodies. My gorge rose and my empty stomach heaved. I turned away and vomited up a trickle of bile.

28

It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, No, It’s…

I pulled myself together by force of will. I desperately needed water; my legs were trembling as much from dehydration as from shock and exhaustion. I was tempted again by the bourbon in my pocket, but if I drank whiskey now, on my empty, dried-out stomach, I’d just get sick.

I crouched next to the bodies. The man was taller and broader than my lover, or than Billy.

Think, Warshawski, save the melodrama for the daytime soaps. Romeo, I supposed. Romeo Czernin. He looked very dead to me, but I tried to find a pulse in the purply pulp that had been his neck. I couldn’t feel any movement, but my own fingers were so numb I might be missing it. His skin was still warm; if he was dead, it hadn’t been for long.