Trevor Stone had made his threats, and Jay believed him, but he also knew that Trevor didn’t have long to live. With two hundred thousand dollars, Jay and Desiree might not be able to hide deep enough to elude Trevor’s grasp for six months.

But with over two million, they could elude him for six years.

Desiree didn’t want anything to do with it. Price, she told Jay, had tried to kill her when she found out about the money he’d stolen. She’d only survived by cold-cocking him with a fire extinguisher, then bolting from their hotel room at the Ambassador in such a rush, she’d left behind every piece of clothing she owned.

Jay said, “But, honey, you were casing the hotel again when we met.”

“Because I was desperate. And alone. I’m not desperate anymore, Jay. And I’m not alone. And you have two hundred thousand dollars. We can run on that.”

“But how far?” Jay said. “He’ll find us. It’s not just the running that matters. We can run to Guyana. We can run to the Eastern bloc even, but we won’t have enough money left over to buy off people so they’ll answer questions right when Trevor sends people looking.”

“Jay,” she said, “he’s dying. How many more people can he send? It took you over three weeks to find me, and I left a trail, because I wasn’t sure anyone would be coming after me.”

“I left a trail,” he said. “And it’ll be a hell of a lot easier for someone to find me and you than it was for me to find just you. I left reports behind, and your father knows I’m in Florida.”

“It’s all about money,” she said, her voice soft, her eyes refusing to meet his. “Fucking money, as if that’s all there is in the world. As if it’s anything more than paper.”

“It is more than paper,” Jay said. “It’s power. And power moves things and hides things and creates opportunities. And if we don’t take down this douche bag, Price, someone else will because he’s stupid.”

“And dangerous,” Desiree said. “He’s dangerous. Don’t you get that? He’s killed people. I’m sure of it.”

“So have I,” Jay said. “So have I.”

But he couldn’t convince her.

“She was twenty-three,” he said to us. “You know? A kid. I’d forget that a lot, but she had a kid’s way of looking at the world, even after all the shit she’d been through. She kept thinking that somehow everything would just work out, all by itself. The world, she was sure, had a happy ending in it for her somewhere. And she wasn’t going to have anything to do with all that money that had caused all this shit in the first place.”