Normally, Sandman takes hours to flush out of the bloodstream, but Doc Holliday came up with something she calls JumpStart. It wakes a Sandman victim up pretty fast, but there are some unfortunate side effects. The woman’s eyes popped open. She pissed herself, and then vomited onto her lap.

Despite her feeling what was probably a level-ten pounding headache, and the obvious humiliation of having puked and soiled herself, the woman’s head snapped toward me. She fired off a tirade in Romanian that would have stripped the flesh from a rhino carcass. The woman had a truly poisonous mouth, and I let her vent for maybe fifteen seconds, impressed with her creative vulgarities. They were very specific. She told me I was the slimy aftermath of a Turkish ass-fuck orgy. She accused me of fornication with my mother on Easter morning. She said that I buggered baby goats.

It was the baby goats one that pissed me off. I like baby goats. Ever see those videos of them in pajamas? Adorable.

I removed the fake glasses and the fake mustache, then squatted down in front of her. I said nothing. Her words trickled down and stopped as she caught sight of my smile. And then my face. Despite the side effects, JumpStart clears the head pretty quickly. It’s intended for situations like this. The drugged glaze cleared away, and I saw the exact moment when she recognized me.

Her eyes snapped wide and filled with horror. Her skin blanched to a corpse pallor, and her lips began to tremble. “No…”

I smiled. “Yes.”

CHAPTER 130

HOTEL TIMIȘOARA

TIMIȘOARA, ROMANIA

“You’re him. Oh, sweet Jesus on the cross, you’re going to kill me,” she said, not framing it as a question. She spoke in Romanian, which was fine. That was one of my languages, and I’d brushed up on it in anticipation of this moment. Not with her, specifically, because I still had no idea who she was, but for a moment like this.

She tried to shrink back through a hole in the dimension. She tried to twist free of her bonds. She tried to kick me. She tried to scream, but all I did to stop that was to lay my hand on the pistol next to me and give a single shake of my head. She fell into a shivering silence, tears cutting lines down her cheeks.

I gave her the old Joe Ledger smile. The one that crinkles the skin around my baby-blue eyes and makes my teeth look like an ad for good dental hygiene.

“I have questions,” I said softly. “You’re going to answer them.”

She forced a smile onto her face and moistened her lips and—god help me—tried to look seductive. Despite what looked like Campbell’s Chunky soup smearing her mouth and lap, despite sitting in a cooling pool of her own urine, she was actually trying to work her charms on me.