“Second message, received yesterday at nine-twelve: Miriam, dear? It’s me.” Iris, she realized. There was a pause. “I know I haven’t been entirely candid with you, and I want you to know that I bitterly regret it.” Another, much longer pause and the sound of labored breathing. Miriam clutched the phone to her ear like a drowning woman. “I’ve…something unexpected has come up. I’ve got to go on a long journey. Miriam, I want you to understand that I am going to be alright. I know exactly what I’m doing, and it’s something I should have done years ago. But it’s not fair to burden you with it. I’ll try to call you or leave messages, but you are not to come around or try to follow me. I love you.” Click.

“Shit!” Miriam threw the mobile phone across the room in a combination of blind rage and panic. She burst out of her chair and ran for the back room, grabbed her jacket and was halfway into her shoes by the time Paulette stuck a curious head out of the day room door. “What’s going on?”

“Something’s happened to Iris. I’m going to check on her.”

“You can’t!” Paulette stood up, alarmed.

“Watch me,” Miriam warned.

“But it’s under—”

“Fuck the surveillance!” She fumbled in her bag for the revolver. “If the Clan has decided to go after my mother I am going to kill someone.”

“Miriam—” it was Brill—“Paulie and I can’t get away the way you can.”

“So you’d better be discreet about the murder business,” said Paulette. She fixed Miriam with a worried stare. “Can you wait two minutes? I’ll drive.”

“I—yes.” Miriam forced herself to unclench her fists and take deep, steady breaths.

“Good. Because if it is the Clan, rushing in is exactly what they’ll expect you to do. And if it isn’t, if it’s the other guys, that’s what they’ll want you to do, too.” She swallowed. “Bombs and all. Which is why I’m going with you. Got it?”

“I—” Miriam forced herself to think. “Okay.” She stood up. “Let’s go.”

They went.

Paulette cruised down Iris’s residential street twice, leaving a good five-minute interval before turning the rental car into the parking space at the side of her house. “Nothing obvious,” she murmured. “You see anything, kid?”

“Nothing,” said Miriam.

Brill shook her head. “Autos all look alike to me,” she admitted.

“Great…Miriam, if you want to take the front door, I’m going to sit here with the engine running until you give the all-clear. Brill—”

“I’ll be good.” She clutched a borrowed handbag to her chest, right hand buried in it, looking like a furtive sorority girl about to drop an unexpected present on a friend.

Miriam bailed out of the car and walked swiftly to Iris’s front door, noticing nothing wrong. There was no damage around the lock, no broken windows, nothing at all out of the usual for the area. No lurking Dodge vans, either, when she glanced over her shoulder as she slipped the key into the front door and turned it left-handed, her other hand full.