He said, ‘It’s the same as this, more or less. Hasty retribution feels pretty good. You know, six hours in, shooting someone seems like a good idea. But if we pull the trigger on someone tomorrow, you’ve got another forty or fifty years’ worth of nights to think about it.’

Eyes in the mirror again, and she said, ‘Who said anything about we?’

He glanced at her.

She said, ‘I’m not asking you to shoot anyone. I’m asking you to watch my back.’

That shut him up for a second. In the console beside him, his phone buzzed: Beauden Ash.

Vincent silenced the call and said, ‘All I’m saying is, it’s easy enough to do something drastic, but living with it is harder. You’ve got the whole of the rest of your life to think about whether there was a better option.’

Erin said, ‘And the same goes for not doing something drastic. You’ve got the whole of the rest of your life to regret not doing it. That’s the thing with decisions. There’s no point of comparison. You can’t pull the curtain back on the parallel world and weigh up which is best.’

He wondered if he was better just to drive, and stay out of the philosophical discussions.

Erin said, ‘Never listen when someone says you made a wrong decision. You never know what worse options were waiting in line.’

He didn’t know if she was talking about shootings or foreign wars or both. His phone buzzed again—a text from Beauden: Holy shit, I’ve just heard. Call me.

Erin said, ‘They told me he had a panic room with assault rifles, and there was a revolver in the trunk of his car.’ Saying it neutrally, wanting his take on it.

Vincent said, ‘It was in the glove compartment, initially. I moved it.’

She watched him in the mirror—three, four, five seconds. Then she said, ‘So who do you think he was in business with, that he needed that kind of protection?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve only been here a week.’

Still watching him. She didn’t trust him yet—or at least, didn’t trust him to be candid.

He said, ‘Like you said, they tried to kill me, too. So I’d really like to know.’

‘And if you had to guess?’

He shrugged. ‘Death squads, thirty-million-dollar debt—it’s either a drug cartel or some kind of organised crime. But I’m not sure that narrows it down much.’

He could see her thinking about it, reflected eyes moving in the mirror.

She said, ‘How big’s your board? Six–two?’

That was quite a pivot: killings to surfboards. Vincent said, ‘Not quite. Six–one.’

Erin said, ‘All right. Let’s stop at Rincon. I need to catch a wave to clear my head.’