The Tundra followed, with Ruben behind the wheel. Luke was propped awkwardly on the backseat, with Xander next to him. The berserker’s energy was as live and hazardous as a downed power line. He brandished his semiautomatic pistol, listing all the places that Luke could take a bullet and still die slowly.

“Your foot,” he said. “Lots of small bones in the foot. Real painful. Or your shoulder . . . your thigh . . . your leg. Hey, how about your kneecap? Both kneecaps?”

His face and hands had stopped bleeding. The wounds were dark and puffy. Luke wondered, if Xander were to contract rabies, if anyone would notice.

“I could shoot off your thumbs.”

Luke stared through the windshield, and before long the Tundra’s one working headlight picked out the dark angles and unwelcoming façade of the Rattlesnake Hotel.

26
So Wrong

By her own estimation, Tera Montecino’s cop intuition operated at seventy-five-percent efficiency. It—and her notable temper—had been the reason for her numerous reprimands during her time on the force. She still trusted it, though, because it was right more often than it was wrong, and because, without intuition, a cop was little more than a badge with a face.

She had gone from Luke’s house to a Starbucks in Echo Park, where she indulged in a Frappuccino while monitoring the red blip on her Track-U-Gen app. She’d assumed Luke had ventured into the desert to bury Kitty’s body, but his route didn’t jive with that. He had kept to the main roads, stopping only a couple of times along the way, once at a gas station outside Barstow, and again, briefly, on Interstate 40. In Nueva Vida, he’d parked outside Jane’s Family Restaurant on Principle Street, presumably to eat, then spent close to an hour at a bar called Stray Bullets.

This, Tera opined, was remarkably casual behavior for a man with a dead body in his trunk.

“So he dumped her somewhere else,” Tera had said under her breath, wiping cream from the tip of her nose. “It doesn’t change anything.”

Right. The time for detective work was behind her. This whole thing had been stripped down to two components: Luke the killer, and Johan the vigilante. Everything else was redundant.

Her intuition would not be so easily dismissed, however. It grew increasingly persistent as her anger quelled, informing Tera that there was more to all of this. Luke—and whatever the hell he was doing in the desert—was only a part of it. Aligning herself with Johan was another part. He’d offered a version of the truth to suit his own needs, which was fine as long as their needs ran parallel, but Johan clearly hadn’t told her everything. What’s more, she hadn’t liked Xander’s reaction when she revealed that Luke was in Nueva Vida. He had squirmed and tugged his earlobe—a dubious response, if ever there was one.