He looked incredulous, but she was achieving the desired effect: he was just surprised enough to be disarmed, and just angry enough to want to get away from her. “You’re turning into a cradle-robber in your old age. I mean, what’s he, fifteen?”

She glanced again at the speckled surface of the river.

“You fucking him?”

“Not yet.” She didn’t want to make him too mad. “I just want to go back.”

“I’ll bet you do.”

“Now,” she said.

Her hand was clutching the door handle, and he looked over and saw it, then glanced up at her face with a foreign expression that approximated sadness.

A moment later he was steering the car back up the runway. She hadn’t realized how shallow her breathing had become until she felt her lungs expand as they reached the strip of asphalt that connected to the tarmac. When they were almost to the gate, the door of the trailer opened. A man in pajamas stepped onto the landing and hollered at them that he was calling the police.

Colby slowed down. He opened the knife and extended one of his skinny arms out the driver’s window, pointing the blade at the center of the man’s chest. “Do it, you old bastard, and you’ll wake up tomorrow with your heart cut out.”

The man took a step back into the trailer and watched them drive through the open gate.

When they rounded the corner of the terminal, Winkle and the twins were standing around the Newport. Talbot was stretched out on the hood holding a beer can against his belt buckle, staring at the night sky.

Colby parked the Firebird alongside them. He turned to Karen, his face suddenly dull with disinterest. “You getting out, then?”

She opened the passenger door and stepped out of the car.

“How was the airfield?” Talbot asked, but Colby ignored him and looked at Winkle.

“Lefty.”

Winkle straightened up.

“She’s all yours.”

“She’s—?”

“All yours,” Colby told him. “You can have her.”

“Someone’s torn a chapter from this potboiler,” Talbot said, glancing from Colby to Winkle to Karen.

Fuming, Karen lifted her purse strap onto her shoulder and walked around the Firebird. She crossed in front of Winkle and puckered her lips at him. Then she opened the back passenger’s door on the driver’s side of the Newport and got in.

It was warm and stifling in the car. Her face continued to burn, but as she sat waiting for Talbot to get the hint that she wanted to leave, she began to shiver inside her leather jacket. How could she have been so stupid as to think anything good could come of meeting up with Colby again? He was the same now as he’d been when they were sixteen. He’d be the same forty years from now, only gray-haired.