I needed to screw up my courage first. “Dutch courage,” Shot would’ve called it. For what I planned to do. I kept telling myself it was stupid. Then finding ways to convince myself. This would be it. The last lead I’d investigate. I’d do this thing and Silvina would be out of my life. Whatever I found, whatever I’d already discovered that might be valuable … I’d send it anonymously to the authorities, to wildlife protection organizations. Whatever made sense. Then I’d find another job in the security business. Or somehow beg Alex to take me back. Like my old life just waited there, patiently, for me to inhabit it again.

First, I’d driven to within a fifteen-minute walk of the broken-down shed that hid my go-bag. I’d already taken out all the cards at the house, along with further precautions. I stashed Shovel Pig and all my phones save my work phone. Bog felt too valuable to risk, but I’d changed the work phone to make it harder to trace. I’d ditch it after.

Then I drove to the dive bar across from my gym, which wasn’t too far out of the way. Back route through a residential neighborhood and parked a block away. Slipped in through the back door, sat in the velvet darkness on the long, low bench along the wall, derelict pool tables in a herd in front of me. Only three people at the bar. I waited for the bartender to come to me. Figured I was four or five quick steps away from slipping out the back door. That was how I was thinking. That someone might come for me.

I couldn’t see the gym from my position, just the lonely parking lot streetlamp that I used to park beneath. Rationed my double Jack and Coke, ate some bar peanuts. It smelled like piss from the bathrooms, but the reek just kept me sharp, focused.

Ronnie Simpson. Apparently, an Olympic-caliber swimmer in addition to reformed ecoterrorist. Unitopia still in my head. A kind of sourness of regret. Maybe I still had a cage around my brain that Silvina hadn’t pried open yet. Because I thought in that moment about the wasted potential. How with Vilcapampa company resources behind her, Silvina might’ve done more good. Instead, she was dead, and all I could find of her were people like Langer and Ronnie.

My work phone beeped. A text.

>>I don’t have eyes on you. You just disappeared. Where did you go?

Hellbender. Such a swell of satisfaction that he couldn’t find me. That my precautions worked. That I had no need to answer.