In my first year, I’d been given the name of a potential contact in Stanton, Texas, and so I’d asked the referrer what to expect there—what the period was. The guy told me Stanton was set in the Old West, and my contact lived in a brothel. Naturally, I showed up in a costume appropriate for the period and the setting, and found myself in a nineteenth-century Carmelite monastery dressed as a whore. Lucky to get my ass out of there without a nice coating of tar and feathers. Oh, but the guy who sent me there had himself a good laugh. In a long and often monotonous afterlife, sometimes that’s really all that counts.

I’m sure the scenery was lovely, but it had been ten miles since we’d seen any of it, trudging along in the darkness, under the glow of my light-ball spell. Finally, we saw another glow lighting the night sky.

“That’s gotta be La Ceiba, but I think it’s too late to get a boat to Roatan.”

“Legally, yes. But there are bound to be plenty lying around.”

“Good plan.” I sniffed the air. “Do you smell that?”

“Wood burning. Campfires, I think.”

“A Boy Scout town?”

“I wouldn’t bet against it. They have everything else here. Just name your fetish.”

I knocked his arm. “It’s called an alternate afterlife-style choice, remember? Or did you sleep through that part of orientation?”

Kris snorted. “When you choose to spend your afterlife living in a Southern manor, that’s a lifestyle choice. When you spend it playing Confederate soldier or Billy the Kid, it’s a fetish.”

“Hmmm. I seem to recall a certain someone playing Billy the Kid sixteen years ago.”

“It was Pat Garrett,” he said. “And one night is not a ‘life’-style choice.”

“No, it’s a fetish.”

He slapped me on the rear and growled, “Watch it.”

“Hey, I said it was a fetish.” I grinned over at him. “Didn’t say I objected.”

We crested a small rise. Just below, in the glow of moonlight, lay the town of La Ceiba, a ramshackle collection of houses that were little more than huts—and decrepit huts at that. From the town came the raucous laughs, whoops, and catcalls of men trying very hard to have a good time, and downing massive quantities of alcohol to help them find it. The waver of candlelight blazed from the windows of a few of the larger buildings. Wood-fire smoke hung in a blue-gray haze over the town.

“Nineteenth-century frat party?”