Still with those eyes in the mirror. Maybe she thought if he’d already killed two of them, he might as well stay on a roll. Easy enough to make it a few more, or however many were needed. He looked at the road, and eventually she went back to her window watching. They made it down to Cabrillo, and Vincent turned left, LA-bound.

He said, ‘It’s your call. And you have to reach a decision that you’re happy with.’

He was oddly aware of his own voice as he said it—like he was outside himself. Maybe that’s what happened when you passively endorsed payback murder.

Erin took her time. She said, ‘But it’s not only my situation, is it? You were part of it, and they would’ve killed you, too, if they could. So what do you think I should do?’

Vincent said, ‘I don’t feel like I have a dog in the race.’

That was disingenuous. He wasn’t that detached—he was already helping her. But he wanted to hear her own views, and he didn’t want to steer her toward something illicit if she was in two minds.

Vincent said, ‘I’ve been shot at before, and I didn’t take it personally. In fact, someone burned my house down, and I let it go.’

Sounding like more of a Zen master than he’d intended, but it was true. She asked him about what happened, and he told her the Billy Ellis story—fighting those three guys by the East River back in March, and then the score-levelling Molotov through his living-room window.

Erin said, ‘So you came out here looking for civility?’

‘Something like that.’

She didn’t answer, and he felt like they were off the payback topic for now. Maybe she was struggling with the legal side of it—asking him straight if he was up for murder—or if some moral aspect of it bothered her. Interesting to think she could advocate for foreign war—a billion-dollar-per-day project with a six-figure body count—but something small-scale had her stranded in a grey area. He thought about that a moment, not sure if he should go there, given the circumstances. Then again, she didn’t strike him as being easily offended. He said, ‘Look …’ Waited for her eyes in the mirror. ‘Do you ever regret saying Iraq was a good idea? The invasion, I mean?’

Erin took her time with that. She was back to looking out her window. She said, ‘I’d be lying if I said I never entertained the thought. It came at an enormous cost. In lives, I mean. As well as the financial. Obviously.’

He could have helped her add to the list—maybe mention the flow-on effects of regional instability, how the invasion was predicated on Saddam’s arsenal of nukes, which proved nonexistent—but he thought they could leave it there for today.