Three people in the photo: Xander, Johan, and—standing between them—a tall (tallish) Latino with a narrow jaw and close-set eyes.

“Him,” Luke said again.

It was the bat-faced man.

Luke was late returning the Camaro. There’d be a $200 minimum charge but he didn’t care; rental company policies were not a point of concern at that moment. He was parked on a residential street just off Sunset Boulevard—and had been for the past hour—lost in the depths of his phone. He’d signed up to PictoShark using a fake name and had tried following Xander but his account was private. It didn’t matter. Luke found the photo he wanted using the Stray Bullets hashtag. He found other shots of the bat-faced man under the same hashtag, going back several years. He was obviously a regular.

“There you are,” Luke whispered. He’d dropped the relevant snaps in a favorites file and swiped quickly between them. “There you fucking are.”

Xander hadn’t given him a name, despite the way he and Señor Bat Face were cozied up in the photo. He claimed not to know him—that he was just some guy who’d jumped in on the shot. No surprise there, Xander had said. A lot of people wanted their picture taken with Johan.

“On your phone?” Luke had asked.

“I don’t know. We were drunk.” Xander had shrugged—no big deal. “It just happened.”

Maybe he was lying. Luke didn’t want to press too hard. He’d slipped out of character and this unrelated matter might undo all his good work. But he had something now. Something to work with.

He ran a hand through his hair—his real hair; the blond wig was in the passenger seat—then exited PictoShark and brought up Google Maps. Nueva Vida was two hundred and fifty miles away. He could be there before dark—in time, perhaps, to watch the bat-faced man pull up a stool at Stray Bullets and order a shot of mescal.

Luke remembered the way Lisa had sidled up to him at Uncle Lizard’s, the intimate way they’d spoken. There was something between them. No doubt about it.

“They knew each other,” Luke whispered with certainty.

He wiped sweat from his throat and breathed deeply. It occurred to him that he could off-load this information on Tera Montecino. But would she follow up on it? She didn’t like Luke—fucking despised him, in fact—but was she big enough to look beyond that and chase down a genuine lead? Luke wasn’t sure. Perhaps if he had more information—a name, an address . . .

He looked at the map again.

“Nueva Vida,” he said.

It was Spanish for New Life.

14
What Friends Do