“Did you ever stop to think we could settle down in a town like this? We could quit what we’re doing? We could get regular jobs?”

Of course I’d thought of it. “No,” I said. “It’s never crossed my mind.”

“Liar. You could date some guy like Hollis for real. You could work in a department store, or in an office. Somewhere with live people.”

I looked away from his face. “You could date a hundred Janines, or even wait for Mary Nell Teague to grow up,” I countered. “You could get a job at a Home Depot. You’d be manager in no time.”

“Could we do that?” he asked. He didn’t mean, could we do it if we had the option; we had the option, all right. He meant, was it possible for us to settle down to being regular citizens.

“It would be pretty hard,” I said, after a pause, in a noncommittal voice.

“Getting a house might be the first step,” he said.

I shrugged. “Could be.”

He shut the door behind him very quietly.

We didn’t talk much about the future.

Of course, I’d had plenty of opportunities to think about it. We spent a lot of time driving. Though we listened to audiobooks and the radio, inevitably there were long periods of silence.

Though I didn’t want to tell Tolliver this, I thought way too much about our past. I tried not to dwell on the squalor of daily life in that house in Texarkana. Maybe if I hadn’t been raised so gently to start with, it wouldn’t have bothered me quite so much. But the descent from pampered princess to virgin pussy peddled for drug money had been too shocking, too abrupt. I hadn’t seasoned slowly enough. I’d acquired a hard brittle shell instead of toughening all the way through.

“Bullshit,” I said out loud. “To hell with this.” I pushed introspection right out of my brain and turned on the television. My nails were beautiful by the time I finished with them.

Tolliver returned about four o’clock, a lot later than I’d expected. When he came in, I smelled a whiff of beer and sex. Okay, I told myself. Steady. Tolliver almost never drank much, and he wasn’t drunk now. But the fact that he’d had a beer during the day, and the fact that he’d stayed away to have sex when he knew I’d be anxious—those were significant facts.

“Well, the car is clean,” he said, “and I talked to former police officer McCluskey, who is without a doubt one of the most repellent people I’ve ever had a conversation with.”

“That’s good, about the car,” I said. I was pleased with how level my voice was. “What did McCluskey have to say? Anything interesting?”

“It took me forever to get him soothed down and to the point,” Tolliver said.