Ellen’s mouth dropped open, a who, me? thing that made me want to slap her.

“A . . . drink?”

“Gin. Straight.”

Ellen reached down on autopilot, hand hovering over the black glass bottle, and I felt a little smile in my chest, aha. I still had her. But then she pulled her fingers back like she’d been burned and said, “You want me to pour you a glass of gin?”

“Not all the way full. A few fingers, not the whole hand. It’s still early.”

She didn’t like it, but because I’d done my job well and picked a girl who could take a few slaps but couldn’t figure out if she minded, she yanked the top off the bottle like it had done something ugly and personal to her and dunked a few splashes into two separate tumblers.

She slammed the glass down on the desk, a few drops of gin splashing up onto my neck, and sat down in the chair across from me with even more force, crossing her legs and bouncing her foot up and down. It was a practiced move, not comfortable, like she’d seen someone do it in a movie once. She swirled her glass of gin and bent her face to it, sniffing. She took one big slug and her nostrils flared. But to her credit, she choked it down. I almost laughed.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Do you have any ice, at least?”

“No,” I lied.

She nodded, up and down, up and down, a little sad about the state of the world she’d found herself in. But I still had her. And even better, she was so distracted, she didn’t seem to have picked up on anything she might’ve overheard between me and Lou. Good.

I kept it brisk and all business. “Klein’s free Thursday afternoon. I’ve booked the St. Leo already so all that’s left is for you to call him—”

Ellen was turning red, and she started to shake her head. She mouthed something, but no sound came out, and I watched her face as I talked until the words exploded out of her: “No! No, no, Thursday isn’t going to work. No!”

The hangover was making it hard for me to focus on anything other than the blotchy red spots spreading across her cheeks.

“What, you have other plans? Okay, if Thursday’s no good, we could—”

“Thursday isn’t going to work because I’m not doing this anymore,” Ellen said. “Any of it. I mean it. I’m out. Finish the job without me because I’m done.”

Chapter 4

It was lucky for me that Ellen was not a good negotiator. After her outburst, she couldn’t stop talking—she didn’t uncork so much as explode.