I’d kept coming into the office because there wasn’t much else I could think of to do. I was waiting, but I didn’t know for what. I’d moved Lou’s chair out of her office—it had a better cushion than mine—and I’d flipped through her desk, looking for anything with my name on it. I’d found nothing, which should’ve been a relief but wasn’t. I did find dozens of pictures of a younger Eve Dawes with six or seven different men. Staring at them, I understood why she’d kept ferrying Lou’s bribes to the police in order to keep them secret. They were truly lurid, but it was the look on her face she’d want to protect, I thought. The blankness in her eyes that made you wonder. It didn’t square with the woman she was trying to be now. It must have seemed worth the price of acting as an extra layer between Lou and the police. To keep being used by Lou.

The phone rang when I was on my second glass of bourbon. On the other end, a voice I’d never expected to hear again. “You must really not be scared of me,” Carrigan said. “You didn’t even bother to change your phone number.”

“I was sorry to hear about the election,” I said. I was a little surprised to find I meant it. “But at least you know I had nothing to do with it.”

There was a pained pause, and then Carrigan said, tightly, “Thanks. I don’t dwell in the past.”

“And yet here you are,” I said, “calling me.”

“I’d like to engage your services,” Carrigan said.

“I don’t fuck for money.”

“Since when?” he fired back. “Anyway, that’s not what I meant. I’d like to employ all of your services. I assume you’re still . . . in business?”

It was a good question.

I’d gotten lucky. MacLeish, not Lafferty or Escobar, had been the one to pull open Lou’s door that night. When he saw me, soaked and shivering, he’d shouted to his partner to phone it in, a 10-16. Whoever it was trudged back to the car, and MacLeish shut the door and looked at me, those droopy hangdog eyes, and said: “We’ll have five minutes, tops. Go out the back. Where is she?”

That’s how long it took us to reach a new understanding.

Later that night, MacLeish had called me from a number that showed up on my phone as Unlisted. He hadn’t bothered with pleasantries.

“The chief wanted me to pass something along,” MacLeish said.

“Yeah?” I thumbed Lou’s lighter, back and forth, back and forth. Trying to place my fingertips right over the dulled fingerprints I could catch in the light. If I pressed hard enough, maybe I could feel them pressing back.