Antonia hangs up and joins the rest of the Fiends by the motel’s swimming pool, drops onto a chaise next to Elijah. Real Deal, Bob 1, and Johnny Kickapoo are roughhousing in the water like unruly children. The rest of the gang slam dominoes on a round metal table with a metal umbrella hovering above it. A transistor radio blares a rock ’n’ roll station. The motel’s owner has asked them twice to turn the music down, but they crank it back up as soon as he returns to the office. Nobody’s worried about him calling the cops. The motel is lousy with hookers, thieves, and dopers.

Johnny Kickapoo climbs out of the pool. He got his nickname because he hung around the Kickapoo reservation while growing up in Oklahoma. He doesn’t have a drop of Native blood in him—his black hair and eyes come from his Italian mother, his prominent nose from his German father—but he pretends he’s part Indian, even wears a feather in his hair. He bares his ass at the other swimmers and jumps back in with his knees pulled to his chest. The resulting explosion sends the pool’s pale blue light skittering over the dying palms drooping overhead. Above them the stars, unmoved, as Antonia and Elijah discuss the hit.

Normally, the next team up in the rotation, in this case Real Deal and Yuma, would do the job and split half the payment—minus ten percent to Monsieur Beaumont—and the rest of the gang would divide the remaining half equally. The baby Moore has promised throws a wrench into the works. An infant is special for a rover. Feed on one and instead of having to feed again the next month, you can go a whole year. Something about the blood.

You’d think, then, it would be open season on babies, but in the same way that con men are known to be as gullible as their marks, rovers are a superstitious lot, and a venerable bit of lore keeps most of them away from infants: Steal a child, the warning goes, and you’ll wind up dusted soon after.

Antonia scoffs at this fear. She understands that it’s simply the childish spookifying of the real danger connected to snatching babies: The disappearance of an infant upsets the public much more than if a vagrant or a whore suddenly drops off the face of the earth. It makes people much more likely to form posses, mount searches, and scrutinize strangers, all of which could mean disaster for a rover.