“There are lots of bad men out there,” Angie said. “Bad women, too.”

“True,” he said. “Very true. Jeff Price, though? That fucker deserved a lot slower death than I gave him. I guarantee you that.” He took a good-sized slug from his beer. “He had to pay. Had to.”

“Pay for what?” Angie said.

He raised the beer bottle to his mouth, and his lips trembled around it. When he placed the bottle back on the table, his hand was as tremulous as his lips.

“Pay for what, Jay?” Angie repeated.

Jay gazed out the window again as the rain continued to clatter against the roof and boil and snap in the puddles. The dark hollows under his eyes reddened.

“Jeff Price killed Desiree Stone,” he said and a single tear fell from his eyelid and rolled down his cheek.

For a moment, I felt a deep ache bore through the center of my chest and leak into my stomach.

“When?” I said.

“Two days ago.” He wiped his cheek with the back of his hand.

“Wait,” Angie said. “She was with Price all this time, and he just decided to kill her two days ago?”

He shook his head. “She wasn’t with Price the entire time. She ditched him three weeks ago. The last two weeks,” he said softly, “she was with me.”

“With you?”

Jay nodded and sucked at the air, blinked back the tears in his eyes.

The waitress brought our food but we barely looked at it.

“With you?” Angie said. “As in…?”

Jay gave her a bitter smile. “Yes. With me. As in, Desiree and I were falling in love, I guess.” He chuckled but it only half left his mouth; the other half seemed to strangle in the back of his throat. “Hilarious, ain’t it? I come down here hired to kill her and I end up falling for her.”

“Whoa,” I said. “‘Hired to kill her’?”

He nodded.

“By whom?”

He looked at me like I was retarded. “Who do you think?”

“I don’t know, Jay. That’s why I’m asking.”

“Who hired you?” he said.

“Trevor Stone.”

He looked at us until we got it.

“Jesus Christ,” Angie said and hit the table with her fist so loudly the three truck drivers turned in their seats to look at us.

“Glad I could bring you both up to speed,” Jay said.

20

For the next few minutes, none of us spoke. We sat in our booth as the rain spewed against the windows and the wind bent the row of royal palms along the boulevard, and we ate our sandwiches.

Nothing, I thought as I chewed my sandwich without really tasting it, was as it seemed just fifteen minutes ago. Angie had been right the other night—black was white, up was down.

Desiree was dead. Jeff Price was dead. Trevor Stone had hired Jay not just to find his daughter, but to kill her.