Anyway. If she hadn’t skedaddled when she had, the big guy would have done in her and Franny, too. She’d probably be dead right now if she hadn’t picked the lock on the cuffs that baby-faced Boy Scout had used to chain himself to her. She’d done him a favor, too. If he’d thought about it for half a second he’d have to realize she’d made it a lot easier for him to defend himself. And since she hadn’t found his body next to Jamal’s, he probably made it out of the casino. So, really, Franny was lucky Mollie got away from him when she did. She hoped he saw it her way.

“Michael fucking Berman. Franny fucking Black,” she muttered to herself while crawling under a roulette table to wrench out the cash box. “Noel fucking Matthews. Baba fucking Yaga.” So preoccupied was she, muttering the names of those who’d made her life such a piss parade, that she didn’t hear the crunch of footsteps on broken glass. But then she caught a whiff of the medicinal stink of cough medicine. She scurried from under the table on all fours, to find an oily joker standing over her. She banged her head trying to scramble to her feet.

“SHIT!” she yelled, rubbing her scalp. “You scared the piss out of me.”

The joker cocked his head and stared at her. The flickering half-light lent a peculiar sheen to his greasy skin. He was backlit, making it hard to see his face, but she’d recognize the smell anywhere. It made her woozy. She leaned against the table to steady herself while her heart stopped trying to chisel through her breastbone. She knew Vaporlock; they’d worked together, doing snatches for the fight club. They weren’t besties, but they’d talked a little, enough to know he wasn’t keen on the cage matches. And that he found the drooler in the wheelchair creepy as fuck, too. So they shared a couple things in common.

“I guess we both had the same idea. I take it you-know-who isn’t around?”

The instant the words came out of her mouth she realized she had just kicked herself in the molars. Vaporlock hadn’t returned to the casino as she had—he must have been here when the shit went down and got left behind. Oops.

She didn’t need to see his face to know he wasn’t all that happy about it. There was a tension in his body language, like a tightly coiled spring. He stepped closer. A wave of medicinal miasma crashed over her. Mollie’s head spun. She tried to retreat but bumped against the roulette table. “Back off, hey?”

He didn’t. The funk threatened to suffocate her. Mollie created a new pair of portals. One hovered in the air to her left; its flipside opened on an observation deck overlooking the Atlantic Coast of Nova Scotia. A stiff sea breeze gusted through the casino, blowing cocktail napkins and loose currency past Mollie’s feet like autumn leaves.