“It’s not a bad house, as far as bolt holes go,” he said, taking the seat opposite Eugene. “If you had to hide out anywhere, I mean.”

“I’m being held hostage.”

“You’re not tied up. You could have walked out the front door any time all afternoon. We weren’t even watching you.”

Eugene looked at the door. It was black and formless in the half-light, as likely to be a portal to some other world as it was to open to the tangled weeds of the yard. It had never even occurred to him to run.

“I promised you a story if we ever met again,” Walker said. “I’ll tell you, if you still want to hear it.”

He looked so sure of himself, one ankle propped over his opposite knee as he leaned back in his chair, his suit sharp despite the eternal humidity of the Deep South. He didn’t wear his hat indoors; without it, his hair and face were properly visible. He had large dark eyes, so dark they looked black, and they drew Eugene in like they held every secret in the world. Familiarity shivered and writhed in the back of Eugene’s mind. Walker’s nose was small and straight, his lips full like rosebuds, and his hair—that was what caught people up, even more so than his features, which were too pretty to ever be called handsome. His hair was long enough to tuck behind his ears, cut in that sharp, sleek bob the girls had favored in the ’20s, sweeping down in points along his cheekbones.

“I already know your story,” Eugene said. “The papers pieced it together well enough. The rest, I can guess.”

Walker dropped both feet to the floor and leaned over the table, lacing his fingers together as he smiled. His teeth were sharp and white in the lamplight. “Tell me what the papers won’t talk about, then. Tell me what they won’t put in print.”

Eugene wet his lips and Walker followed the motion with his gaze. “There are rumors you killed Monnet’s husband, but the police all agree that he fell down the stairs, drunk. It was an open-and-closed case. But still, people talk.”

“They do.”

“Most everyone agrees that you and she are an item, but you’re not, are you? Not in the way they mean it.”

“We're not what you'd call partners," Walker allowed. "Not in the traditional sense.”

“There are other rumors.”

Walker smiled like something feral and a shiver crawled up Eugene’s spine, that strange spark of familiarity again. “Tell me.”

“Ones that never make it to print. The kind that get talked about in bars, once the veneer of respectability’s been peeled away.”

“My favorite kind.”

They were the ones that said Walker was too pretty, his hair too long, his clothes too neat. Rumors of a partner before Monnet, when he had just crashed onto the scene and was still knocking over local shops for a quick buck. A young man, barely nineteen, who travelled with him and drove the car. There was one photo of them together, so faded it could scarce be said to be Walker at all, not for sure—his arm slung around the boy’s shoulders, both of them grinning wide at the camera, posing with their guns. No one knew what had happened to him after that. No one even knew his name.