In the dark the trickling liquid from the trunk might have been oil if it wasn’t for the sucked-penny smell of Klein’s blood. Lou turned her eyes back to what had once been Hiram Klein, and she leaned in close to his sort-of face, gone soft and mushy now, collapsing in on the crater of what was once an eyeball.

“Good shot,” she said finally. “Where did it happen?”

Somewhere in the distance a coyote moaned and Ellen mimicked the sound. I still didn’t want to think about her.

I told Lou everything I knew, which wasn’t much. Somewhere in the middle of my story, Lou’s cigarette burned out, but she didn’t make a move to light a new one and she let it burn down to her fingers.

Ellen was keening from the car like something dying, and Lou’s gaze kept flicking toward the back seat. I could see it clearly in that moment. I had a choice: pin it all on Ellen or decide that she was one of our own. And Lou and me, we protected our own.

“Maybe he did it to himself,” I said. “Maybe it was a suicide.”

Lou’s eyes glittered at me in the dark. I knew better than to get close to any of the girls we worked with. And I never would have considered myself close to Ellen, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it: Make him pay. I shuddered.

“You think he got bored of waiting for her to slip into something more comfortable and put one in his own eye? You think that’s a story we could sell?”

My hands were shaking. I put them on top of the trunk and squeezed the metal with my thumbs. My nails rattled against the paint. “He hit her, you know,” I said. “Maybe it was self-defense.” Lou was silent. “She’s fucked if she goes to the police, I promise you that. She won’t say anything. I know she won’t say anything.”

“Okay.” Lou leaned closer to the trunk so that she was nearly eye level with Klein. My arms bridged over them both. “Okay. So what do you want us to do with him? Call Robert?”

I imagined Jackal coming to our aid in his fresh white shirt and dry-clean-only slacks. I imagined the worry on his face at the stains a body would leave. I imagined a scene in which he got hysterical and I had to slap him back and forth across the face screaming, SNAP OUT OF IT, BE A MAN.

But that wasn’t Jackal at all. Maybe that was me. I didn’t want to see his face, I thought, and then I realized maybe it was truer that I didn’t want him to see mine.

“We don’t need him,” I said.