So Jay began to tail Price again. But Price never went near the money as far as Jay could tell. He had his meetings with his drug dealer friends, and Jay bugged Price’s room and ascertained that they were all concerned about a boat lost at sea off the Bahamian coast.

“That boat that sank the other day?” Angie said. “The one that sent all the heroin up onto the beaches?”

Jay nodded.

So Price was worried now, but he never went near the money as far as Jay could tell.

While Jay was out tailing Price, Desiree would read. The tropics, Jay noticed, had given her a taste for the surrealists and the sensualists he’d always favored himself, and he’d come home to find her lost in Toni Morrison or Borges, García Márquez or Isabelle Allende, the poetry of Neruda. In the fisherman’s shack, they’d cook fish Cajun-style and boil shellfish, fill the tiny space with the smell of salt and cayenne pepper, and then they’d make love. After, they’d go outside and sit by the ocean, and she’d tell him stories from whatever she was reading that day, and Jay would feel as if he were rereading the books himself, as if she were the writer, sitting beside him and spinning fantastical yarns into the darkening air. And then they’d make love again.

Until one morning Jay woke to find that his alarm clock had never gone off and Desiree wasn’t in bed beside him.

There was a note:

Jay,

I think I know where the money is. It matters to you, so I guess it matters to me. I’m going to get it. I’m scared, but I love you, and I think you’re right. We wouldn’t be able to hide long without it, would we? If I’m not back by ten a.m., please come get me.

I love you. Completely.

Desiree

By the time Jay reached the Ambassador, Price had checked out.

He stood in the parking lot, looking up at the U-shaped balcony that ran along the wall on the second floor, and that’s when the Jamaican housekeeper began to scream.

Jay ran up the stairs and saw the woman bent at the waist and screaming outside Price’s room. He stepped around her and looked through the open door.

Desiree’s corpse sat on the floor between the TV and the minifridge. The first thing Jay noticed was that the fingers and thumbs of both her hands had been severed at the joints.

Blood dripped from what remained of her chin onto Jay’s LSU sweatshirt.

Desiree’s face was a shattered hole, pulverized by a shotgun blast fired from less than ten feet. Her honey hair, which Jay had shampooed himself the previous night, was matted with blood and speckled with brain tissue.