I thought about all of that and then I said, “Yeah, okay. I’d like that.”

We hung up, but not until after we’d agreed to meet the next week for a drink. I wondered what his company would be like when I wasn’t playing defenseless. I told Carrigan to pick someplace expensive. I told him to consider it an investment.

Somewhere during the phone call, I’d finished the bourbon. I crossed to the bar cart, uncapped the bottle, and poured a little more brown into my cup. Topped it off with a squeeze of lime juice from a warming green plastic bottle shaped to look like the fruit. A spritz of club soda on top of that. A proper cocktail.

Lou had asked me once, early, whether I thought what we did was evil. Testing me, maybe, when I was green and tender-fresh. “Not evil,” I’d said, surprising myself by how much I meant it. “Everything is currency.” And it was true: everything was currency of a sort. A smile applied at the right time like a crowbar—that was currency, a kind word the same. My body was mine to spend as I wanted. It wasn’t evil to not have good intentions with sex. I didn’t owe men pure motives. It wasn’t kind, what we were doing, it might not have even been right, but it wasn’t evil. Not then.

And some part of me still believed it. We’d done evil things. But that didn’t mean the game was flawed from the ground up. Not when men who shot their wives in the face could plaster their names all over the city and be remembered as good men, not when men’s potential was considered more important than women’s bodies, not when the game was so rigged against us all.

I’d learned things from Ellen, invaluable things. I would do it differently this time. I wouldn’t give this new girl, Laura, the chance to feel too much. You left someone in the orbit of charisma and of course she’d fall for it. It wasn’t her fault. It didn’t matter how tough she was; sometimes it couldn’t be helped. Particularly if she was heartbroken, or lonely, or borderline homeless, sleeping out of a car.

I’d watch Laura carefully. I’d take my time, make sure she was ready for it all, that she was more than ready for it: that she wanted in on it, too. I’d drill Lou’s one good lesson into her head: Never love anyone more than yourself. I’d be straight with the police. I’d send the pictures right to the papers. I wouldn’t give Carrigan Sr. a chance to barter his way out of it. This time, there’d be no Jackal, no other partners to complicate things, to play their own games in the dark. No distractions.