WHERE THE HELL WAS SHE? By midnight, Panda had checked every bar in town before he remembered The Compass. Lucy had taken his car, so he’d had to come into town by boat, leaving Temple alone. For all he knew, Temple had downed the rest of the chocolate Lucy had bought. He no longer cared.

He surveyed the crowd and spotted her right away. She was dancing in front of the band with a skinny, long-haired kid who looked like a young Eddie Van Halen. If you could call that pelvic grind she was doing “dancing.” Both the lead guitarist and bass player were singing right to her, a cover of Bon Jovi’s “Runaway.” She looked tough, dangerous, and barely legal in her trashy top and trashier shoes. Her skirt wasn’t much more than a handkerchief and showed way too much leg, along with a new tat of a snake coiling up one calf, its fanged head pointed toward Nirvana. Hard to remember that two and a half months ago this tough-as-nails man-eater had been wearing pearls and preparing to settle into domestic bliss with the most respectable guy in Texas.

He was attracting his own kind of attention, but he’d long ago lost his taste for coeds. The song came to an end. She hooked her arms around the young stud’s neck, leaned into him, and kissed the son of a bitch. Long and hard.

Panda plowed through the crowd and gave the punk a nudge on the shoulder. “Get lost.”

She turned her head just far enough to lift her phony-pierced eyebrow at him, then tightened her hold on the kid’s neck and stuck her lips near his earlobe. “Ignore him. He’s not as tough as he looks.”

Panda didn’t have to stare at the kid more than a few seconds before the kid figured out that wasn’t true. The boy broke Lucy’s hold. “Later, okay?”

Lucy watched the kid hurry off, then glared at Panda. “Go away,” she shouted over the music. “I’m drunk, and I was just getting ready to make out with him.”

He gritted his teeth. “Congratulations. At this rate, you’ll be done with your list in no time.”

She stomped her metal-studded shoe. “Damn it, he’s leaving, and I was going to sleep with him. Now it’ll have to be the greyhound.”

Like hell. He didn’t know who the greyhound was, only that this she-devil wasn’t sleeping with anybody but him tonight. “Here’s the thing, babe … I don’t share my woman.”

She looked way too outraged. “I’m not your woman. And I’m not your babe!”