“Price took the money you two stole and hid it. Right?”

“Yes.”

“But why’d you let him do that, Desiree? Why didn’t you just torture the information out of him and kill him?”

“He was a pretty dangerous guy,” she said, her eyebrows arched.

“Yeah, but come on. In the danger department, I bet you made him look like a sissy.”

She leaned forward and looked at me with mild approval. She shifted again and crossed her legs up on the desk, held the ankles with her hands. “Yeah, in the end, I could have got the two million back within an hour if I felt like it. It would have been bloody, though. And Price’s drug deal wasn’t half bad, Patrick. If that ship hadn’t sunk, he would have had a ten-million-dollar payday coming.”

“And you would’ve killed him and taken the money the moment he collected.”

She nodded. “Not bad, eh?”

“But then heroin started floating up on the beaches in Florida…”

“So the whole scam was null and void, yes.” She lit another cigarette. “Then Daddy sent you and Clifton and Cushing down there, and Cushing and Clifton took Jay out of the equation, and I had to improvise once again.”

“But you’re so good at it, Desiree.”

She smiled, her mouth open, the tip of her tongue running lightly under her upper teeth. She lowered her legs to the floor and came off the desk, walked around my chair several times, smoking, and looking down at me with a radiant sheen in her eyes.

She stopped and leaned against the desk again, her jade eyes holding my own.

I’m not sure how long we remained that way, staring into each other’s eyes, waiting for the other to blink. I’d like to say that as I looked long and deep into Desiree’s shimmering green eyes, I understood her. I’d like to say I recognized the nature of her soul, found the common link between the two of us, and therefore, among all human beings. I’d like to say all that, but I can’t.

The longer I looked, the less I saw. Porcelain jade gave way to hints of nothing. And hints of nothing gave way to an essence of nothing. Except, maybe, naked greed, brazen wanting, the polished soul of a machine that knew only how to covet, and very little about anything else.

Desiree stabbed her cigarette out on the desk beside the other one, and dropped to her haunches in front of me. “Patrick, you know what sucks?”

“Besides your heart?” I said.

She smiled. “Besides that. What sucks is I kind of liked you. No man has ever rejected my advances before. Ever. And it turned me on actually. If we’d had the time, I would have gotten to you.”

I shook my head. “Not a chance.”