“He always talked too much,” Hellmouth Jack said. But I didn’t much care that he’d ended the man who’d tried to kill me.

“How did you find me?” I asked.

He was squatting on a tree stump a good ten feet away. Wary. The way I’d brought Langer low wouldn’t happen to him. Smoking a cigarette, Glock in the other hand, vaguely trained in my direction. Not as bad as my husband, but in the new light he didn’t look great. Either he’d been dyeing his hair before or the gray had just begun to come out around the temples. Subject to current events. Smelled the alcohol on him even from the ten feet. Rum, not whisky.

Langer’s remains lay among meadow grasses thirty feet farther down the slope. Neither of us had suggested burial.

“Called in a last favor with Homeland Security. I knew you weren’t going home home. Drone triangulation on your car when you parked at the cabin to talk to your beloved husband.”

A trap, then, and I’d walked into and through it, and here we were.

“Homeland Security still exists?”

“Not by that name. Just their drones. Do you know how many secret drones lacerate the sky these days? They’ll outlast us all. Form their own civilization.”

“Thanks for saving me,” I said.

He smiled at that at least, even if grim-faced. His voice had such a flat certainty to it. A clipped certainty. So unlike the flirt at the bar or even him over the phone.

“You did me a favor, bringing all the bad actors out of the woodwork so I could get at them. But, in the end, it didn’t much matter to me who took care of who. So why get involved.”

“What if I’d swallowed the key?”

“The key? Oh—the clues? Good idea to bug both the cabin and the house, as it turns out. Once I knew the letter existed, I got the gist from your lovely stepmother. Just recently.”

Flare of anger.

“She’s not my stepmother. Did you kill her, too?”

“My, the things we worry about at the end of history. No. I didn’t have to—she was happy to tell me.”

To be expected. I felt more betrayed by Hellmouth Jack. That didn’t make sense, meant I’d relaxed too much into the banter of our conversations.

“I’ve always been more discreet than Langer anyway,” he added.

“Langer was the last one, wasn’t he?”

“Last what? Lone ranger? Anger management counselor? Inept courier?”

“Last member of Contila. Of any note.”

“True. Contila membership has become very elite in recent months. But there’s one left.”

“Who?”

“Silvina, of course. And she—or her ‘child,’ her pet project—is up here somewhere, isn’t she?”

I said nothing.

“Surely you, too, have looked askance at that hit-and-run report. Surely you, too, would like someone to find her ashes in the ocean and run a DNA test?”