“I won’t chew on her,” said Warren ironically. “You go on shift tomorrow at five in the morning. Go home, Mary Jo.”

“I’ll see you when you get off work,” said Christy, managing to look like she wished Mary Jo would stay while indicating just the opposite with her words. It was quite a feat. “We can go get a manicure at that place we like in Richland.”

“It closed,” Mary Jo told her.

“I’m sure we can find another shop. Auriele will know someplace good.”

Mary Jo grinned. “She will. Are you sure you’ll be okay?”

“Mary Jo,” Adam said. “Go.”

Left with no choice, Mary Jo preceded us out the door. “Are you sure she’ll be safe with just Warren?” She looked back over her shoulder.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Adam with more patience than I’d credited him. “Her stalker set her apartment on fire tonight. There aren’t any direct flights, and it’s a six-hour drive from Eugene to here. Even if he came directly to murder her in my home, guarded by one of the toughest wolves I know, Juan couldn’t get here before I get back.”

Adam opened the passenger door of his SUV for me, shut it, and got the driver-side door of Mary Jo’s Jeep for her. She thanked him gravely, when she’d have given any other man the rough side of her tongue for his courtesy. Opening a woman’s door was ingrained in Adam, but he was careful not to do it where one of her coworkers might see it. Apparently firemen, even if they were women, were supposed to be too independent to have doors opened for them—and Mary Jo didn’t want to get teased about it.

Zack’s motel was in east Pasco. The Tri-Cities doesn’t have really dangerous neighborhoods, but east Pasco comes close. The motel was one of those old ones with little rooms that opened out onto the parking lot, the kind they don’t build anymore because they aren’t really safe.

The big, shiny black SUV garnered the interest of a group of boys hanging out smoking at the edge of the parking lot. They were in that fourteen-to-sixteen age category when men are old enough to feel the testosterone and too young to have acquired common sense.

“Hey, gringo,” one of them said. “You sure you want to park that there?”

“Why don’t you just leave that chica with us, gringo. ’Cus we know what to do with bitches like that. She don’t need no white meat. ’Cus everybody knows white meat is bad for you.”

Adam, who’d rounded the front of the car, kept walking until he was next to me. Then he turned his face a little up and out, letting the weak yellow illumination of the motel’s parking-lot lights hit his features full on.