“So you can shoot me, maybe kill me, or get the painting back to the museum. Or shoot me and get the painting back to the museum, if you like, but you’ll get pulled right into it either way.

“You can run.” He looked her over. “You’ve obviously done a good bit of that. But after a break in the Gardner heist? After all this time? After what we did to the Anningers? And you a missing person, a seriously scarred hottie on the loose? Nah. I don’t think you know the meaning of the term lying low yet.”

Marcelline’s tongue felt paralyzed.

He sucked in a big loud breath. “Well, this has been something, but I have to get back. The email, you know, and all the ticktock ticktock.”

He moved his hand across his lap, and the zip and clatter of his seat belt sliding up into its slot startled her. He opened his door. She might as well have been pointing her finger at him. The gun meant nothing.

Jonathan turned and straightened out of the car, then ducked his head back under the roofline to look at her as if she were an idiot. “Get the fuck out.”

She switched the gun to her left hand to fumble for the door latch, minding that her fingers stayed outside the trigger guard of the stupid thing. Useless. Mortifying.

They faced off across the roof of his car.

He shook his head in disappointment. “I just want to point out that I offered to bring you back into this. I didn’t have to do that. I tried to do right by you. Because of what happened. I want you to remember that. This isn’t on me.”

She couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

“Go away, Marcelline. And leave Carly alone.”

Jonathan got back in his car and keyed the engine to life. He rolled down the passenger window.

“Or don’t. You know as well as I do that, in the end, I really don’t care.”

•  •  •

Marcelline drove in circles all night. She nearly drove her tank dry and filled it up again as the dark sky drifted into Saturday’s dawn. She caught her reflection in the window as she fought the gas cap with fatigue-numb fingers. The yellow light of the station’s canopy lit up the window and turned it into a mirror, and she wished it hadn’t. Jonathan was right. She looked haggard. Desperate. A little insane.

I shouldn’t be here.

It kept coming to her. Bitterly too late now. It felt true. It felt like the reason for every bad fact of her life, all the way back to the memory of the dirty-metal smell of the blood-soaked asphalt under her head.

I shouldn’t be here.