“No,” Kitty replied. “What makes you say that?”

“I got busted twelve years ago for drug possession with intent to distribute. Three pounds of bouncing powder packed into my cooch. Served four years in County. Since then, I’ve developed a nose for bacon.”

“I’m not a cop,” Kitty said.

“No, you don’t smell like one. Your uncle, though . . .” Dawn shook her wet hands and turned to Kitty with a sly grin. Her teeth were almost purple. “You know you’re not the same color, right?”

Kitty ignored this. She held up Luke’s phone—still in the PictoShark app—and showed Dawn the picture of the bat-faced man. “You know this guy. Who is he?”

The older woman looked at the mirror over the sink, not at the phone. There was, beneath the weathering of abuse, a vestige of attractiveness. Her eyes flared upward at the edges, a dusky blue, and her neck was long. She might once have had the deportment of a graceful woman. Kitty imagined her striding into a courtroom, dressed in a sleek suit, a briefcase at her side, or at the head of a table ringed with older, male executives. As it was, she wore a tube top and a pair of black jeans with a hole ripped in the ass. The tattoo on her inner left forearm read no regrets.

“I’ve got a nose for drug dealers, too,” she said, turning from the mirror, nodding at the phone without looking at it. “This fucking guy . . . he comes here with his pockets full of molly. Thinks he’s slick, but I see the way he operates. Watch someone long enough and you learn a lot about them.”

“He sells E?”

“This place gets loud. Kids want to party, and there’s only one source.” She nodded at the phone again. “We got three cops in this dustbowl and not one of them worth a shit. It’s the perfect place to open shop, and no one’ll say nothing—not until some dumb jackhole ODs in the parking lot.”

Kitty lowered the phone and pocketed it. “What’s his name?”

“Ramón . . . something.” Dawn shrugged. “Don’t know his second name.”

“Does he live in Nueva Vida?”

“No,” Dawn replied. She wiped a damp hand across the front of her tube top. “He’s across the state line.”

“Nevada?”

“Yeah. About thirty miles from here. Town called Pale Bone.”

“You have an address?”

“Fuck, no.”

“A street name?”

“All’s I know is he lives on a ranch and drives an Econoline van, blue with a red stripe along the side.” Dawn tilted her head. The lines around her eyes were deep and storied. “Shit, there’s nothing much to Pale Bone. You could spit across it, with the wind blowing right. He shouldn’t be hard to find.”