A teardrop lands on the note. I brush it away with my thumb, and walk out of the room. I find myself looking at the dead man with an umbrella stuck in his head, without really seeing him. Part of me is aware that I’m in a house where shots were recently fired, and the police are probably on their way. I can’t stay. But I don’t know where else to go.

I’m a missing persons investigator, but for the first time, I’m clueless. Thistle could be anywhere. Even if I somehow found her, there’s no way I could convince her to trust me again. It’s over.

Eventually I wipe down the door handles, the umbrella, and the parts of the floor I might have touched with my hands. No time to mop up my muddy footprints. I leave Tyrrell where he is. I don’t touch the crystal healing book, which almost certainly contains a month of rent. Apache tears are a kind of volcanic glass.

By the time I get back to the car, sirens are in the air, and Charlie Warner is dead.

CHAPTER 48

CHAPTER 48

I can turn back time, resurrect the dead, make you smile, make you cry. I form in an instant, but last a lifetime. What am I?

The highway cuts a ghostly ribbon through the forest. My headlights turn the trees grey, like headstones. I’ve showered, but I can still feel the dead all over me. The heater roars, drying out my eyeballs. The radio is cranked up as loud as it goes, so I can’t hear myself think. It doesn’t work.

Without Thistle, I can’t change. But without Warner, I have no one to eat. The hunger will slowly drive me crazy.

I could turn myself in. Confess to everything I’ve done. Die by lethal injection. Or maybe hobble out of prison an old man, penniless in a futuristic city I don’t understand, Reese Thistle a distant memory.

That’s the less appealing of my two options.

I still can’t hear Thistle in my head. Instead I have Hope’s voice: Let me give you some advice, Mr Blake. If you ever want to kill yourself, put the gun to the side of your head, not the front or the back.

That’s the more appealing option. I have Warner’s Springfield. My aim isn’t good, but it’s good enough. There’s just one more thing I have to do first.

The turn-off is so well hidden I nearly miss it. I brake hard and narrowly avoid flipping the car. I spin the wheel and send the car bouncing down a dirt road. It seems impossible that anyone could live so far from civilisation. But according to the navigation software on my phone, this is the right way. I resist the urge to double-check the address on the envelope, hand-written by Shannon Luxford.