“If they only took the money, I’m not sure I even would’ve told Helen. Not after I got so drunk. I drink too much. Helen wrote me a note a few months ago, about how much I’ve been drinking. She wanted to know if it was because I was unhappy with her. It would be easier if she was the kind of woman who’d just scream at me. But I got drunk like that, and the wedding ring she gave me that used to belong to her daddy is gone, and all she did was hug me and say thank God they didn’t hurt me.”

Mal said, “I’m sorry.” She was about to say she would give it all back, ring and money both, and go with him to the police if he wanted—then caught herself. He had said “they”: “If they only took the money” and “they didn’t hurt me.” Not “you.”

Glen reached inside his coat and took out a white business envelope, stuffed fat. “I been sick to my stomach all day at work, thinking about it. Then I thought I could put up a note here in the bar. You know, like one of these flyers you see for a lost dog. Only for my lost ring. The guys who robbed me must be customers here. What else would they have been doing down in that lot, that hour of the night? So next time they’re in, they’ll see my note.”

She stared. It took a few moments for what he’d said to register. When it did—when she understood he had no idea she was guilty of anything—she was surprised to feel an odd twinge of something like disappointment.

“Electra,” she said.

“Huh?”

“A love thing between father and daughter,” Mal said. “Is an Electra complex. What’s in the envelope?”

He blinked. Now he was the one who needed some processing time. Hardly anyone knew or remembered that Mal had been to college, on Uncle Sam’s dime. She had learned Arabic there and psychology too, although in the end she had wound up back here behind the bar of the Milky Way without a degree. The plan had been to collect her last few credits after she got back from Iraq, but sometime during her tour she had ceased to give a fuck about the plan.

At last Glen came mentally unstuck and replied, “Money. Five hundred dollars. I want you to hold on to it for me.”

“Explain.”