She stood up quickly, but her vision grayed around the edges and she sat down hard again. Tears welled in her eyes. She hadn’t cried in sixteen years.

“I have to make this right,” she said, wiping a hand across her wet face. She considered texting Johan back, but what good would that do? This had gone too far for him to back down now, and he clearly had his own agenda.

Her head roiled with emotion, offering no clear thought. She consulted the lining of her stomach but found no help there. Desperate, Tera clenched her fist and rocked it hard against her jaw. The pain flared into her skull and jolted several thoughts loose. One of them, at least, was useful. She backed out of her messaging app, accessed Track-U-Gen, and brought up that last-recorded location in the desert.

“Where are you, Johan?”

It wasn’t the dead signal she was interested in, but the geography around it. Tera zoomed out and journeyed across the map, looking for isolated buildings within a ten-mile radius. There was a ranch and a gas station, then she scrolled west and saw the Rattlesnake Hotel. She wouldn’t have given it a second thought, except it nudged something at the back of her mind. Tera paused, then remembered the sun-beaten billboard she’d seen on her way into Pale Bone, advertising the hotel. Most striking was the signage—closed—splashed across the front in big red letters.

A Google search confirmed this. The Rattlesnake Hotel had closed its doors in November of 2020, another sad casualty of COVID. Tera imagined it, dark and abandoned, the perfect place to kill someone slowly.

She tapped the directions icon. Fifteen minutes away. Ten on these empty roads. But would her confronting Johan turn violent? Tera considered calling Kraemer again, to request backup, but that might resolve badly for her. She was complicit in this. If arrested, Johan, Xander, and Ruben would gladly throw her under the bus, and her tarnished career as a cop wouldn’t play to her favor.

Tera spilled from Ramón’s kitchen, down the hallway, and out the front door. The air wasn’t exactly fresh—it smelled of heat and dead dog—but her breaths deepened and she regained some focus. As she approached her Buick, a Metro police cruiser—light bar whirling—ripped along Sierra Vista and pulled into Ramón’s driveway.

Tera checked the clock on her phone. Sixteen minutes had passed since she’d called Kraemer. She’d lost most of that time to her bleak, quicksand thoughts. These uniforms hadn’t wasted a second of it.

“You guys were quick,” Tera said as they stepped out of their vehicle.

“We’re based in Searchlight,” the senior officer said. The name above his shirt pocket read cardona. He had a good face. “We stick close to Pale Bone after sundown. The locals have a thing for mescal and guns. News flash: they don’t mix.”