“Yeah?” I said, my eyes closed.

“When I got out of the ambulance on the bridge, and they walked me to the cruiser, I, ahm…”

I opened my eyes and looked at her. “What?”

“I think I saw something strange. And I don’t want you to laugh.”

“You saw Desiree Stone.”

She came off the wall and slapped me in the abdomen with the back of her hand. “Get out of town! You saw her, too?”

I rubbed my stomach. “I saw her, too.”

“You think she’s a ghost?”

“She’s no ghost,” I said.

Our hotel suites had been trashed while we were gone. At first I thought it had been Trevor’s men, maybe the Weeble and Cushing before they came after us, but then I found a business card on my pillow.

INSPECTOR CARNELL JEFFERSON, it read.

I refolded my clothes and placed them back in my suitcase, pushed the bed back into the wall, and closed all the drawers.

“I’m starting to hate this town.” Angie came into the room with two bottles of Dos Equis and we took them out to the balcony and left the glass doors open behind us. If the room was bugged by Trevor, we were already high on his shit list anyway; nothing we said was going to change his mind about dealing with us the way he’d dealt with Jay and Everett Hamlyn and was trying to deal with his daughter, who didn’t have the decency to die easily. And if the cops had bugged the room, nothing we said would change what we’d told them at the station because we didn’t have anything to hide.

“Why does Trevor want his daughter dead so badly?” Angie said.

“And why does she keep popping up alive?”

“One thing at a time.”

“Okay.” I propped my ankles up on the balcony rail and sipped my beer. “Trevor wants his daughter dead because somehow she found out he killed Lisardo.”

“And why did he kill Lisardo in the first place?”

I looked at her. “Because…”

“Yes?” She lit a cigarette.

“I don’t have a clue.” I took a hit off her cigarette to quell the adrenaline that had been chewing through my blood since I’d shot from the car twenty hours ago.

She took her cigarette back and looked at it. “And even if he did kill Lisardo and she found out—even if—why kill her? He’d be dead before a trial, and his lawyers would keep him free till then. So what’s the big deal?”

“Right.”

“This whole dying thing, too…”

“What?”

“Most people are dying, they’re trying to make their peace—with God, with family, with the earth in general.”

“But not Trevor.”

“Exactly. If he really is dying, then his hate for Desiree has to run so deep it can’t even be measured by most human minds.”

“If he’s dying,” I said.