“I been in line thirty minutes and there’s people behind me still waiting. You asking questions about Nicola, right?”

Nicola Aguinaldo. Somehow I’d also lost track of her in the last few days.

“Did you know something about her?” I asked.

“Is there a reward?”

“The family doesn’t have much money,” I said. “If they could find out how she managed to get out of the hospital, it might be worth a hundred dollars.”

“Out of the hospital? I only know how she went. On a stretcher. That ought to be worth a whole lot more than how she left.”

“Female difficulties, I understand.” I sounded prim.

“You call pounding a CO on the chest with your bitty fists and getting burned “female difficulties,’ you have a different body than me, miss.”

“Burned?” Now I really was bewildered: I didn’t remember seeing burn marks on Nicola’s body, but there was no way of finding out now.

“You don’t know anything, do you? With a stun gun. The CO’s all carry them to keep order in the workshop. No one would’ve guessed they’d ever need one on Nicola.”

“That’s what took her to the hospital?”

“What about the reward, before you pry any further.”

“Did you see the CO burn her?”

A silence on the other end told its own tale. Before the speaker could bluster into some lies, I said I thought that much information was valuable, probably worth fifty dollars.

She paused again, marshaling her tale, then said in a rush, “Nicola took the gun—the stun gun—from the guard, turned it on him, and he got so mad he gave her a lethal dose. Stuns the heart, you know, just like the electric chair, if they turn up the juice. So the guards thought she was dead and rolled her body out of the hospital themselves to make it look like she didn’t die there. They wouldn’t want an investigation. That’s what happened.”

“I like the story; it’s a good one. But it’s not how she died. Where shall I send the fifty?”

“Fuck you, bitch, I’m calling to help, aren’t I? How do you know when you wasn’t there yourself?”

“I saw Nicola’s dead body.” I didn’t want to tell her what injuries caused the death, because then she’d embroider some story to account for them. I told her it would be worth another fifty to me if she could get me the name of someone at Coolis who’d known Nicola well.

“Maybe,” she said doubtfully. “She didn’t speak much English, but the Mexican girls didn’t hang with her on account of she was from China.”

I was startled, but then decided it was just garbled geography, not some unusual fact about Aguinaldo I hadn’t heard before. “You said she got injured in the workshop?”