Rooney had been deeply suspicious. “How are we gonna go back? Everybody there knows you. And me. They’ll call the cops the minute they see us.”

Chuck patted his pocket. “We’ll wait a couple days, go over there late at night. I’ve got the passkey. I tell you what. Let’s go back to the strip club. I know a couple dancers there. We’ll get a room, get laid, then tomorrow night, we’ll pick up the stuff, right where I hid it.” He grinned. “And then we’ll move on down the road. A two-way split. It’s not like you were planning on staying with Tanya—am I right, partner?”

“Hidden, where?” Rooney demanded, deliberately avoiding the question about Tanya. “I’m not fucking around here, Chuck. You try and cheat me, I promise it won’t end well for you.”

“Cheat you?” Chuck looked offended. “I would never.”

Rooney had started hatching his own plan while they were on the way to the strip club. He’d get Chuck drunk. It wouldn’t take long; the guy really couldn’t hold his booze. He’d wait until his “partner” passed out, grab the key, and leave him behind in a puddle of piss and regrets.

But he hadn’t counted on scoring coke from one of Chuck’s dancer friends. Hadn’t counted on Chuck getting in a fight with the club’s bouncer as they were leaving with the girls and pulling a knife. And he really hadn’t counted on watching his “partner” rolling away from the strip club that night in the back of a police cruiser—with the motel passkey securely in his pocket.

In the end, he’d done just what Chuck advised. He kept on driving.

The kid wriggled in Rooney’s arms. She was feisty, like her mother. He could feel her jaws working beneath his fingertips. “Shut up,” he whispered fiercely. She clamped down and bit his fingers, her sharp little baby teeth digging into his flesh.

He released his hold, only for a moment, but it was long enough. She was off, like a shot, screaming at the top of her lungs. “Stranger! Stranger! Mommy! Stranger!” She ran toward the end of the culvert, toward sunlight.

Rooney hesitated for an instant. Get the kid? Or cut his losses and get out now? He was thinking of all that money, all of it, locked up in that storage room. Fuck it. He’d come back. He was out of the culvert, heading toward his car, blinking in the sudden flood of sunlight.

A champagne-colored van with a handicap license plate was parked directly in back of Rooney’s car, blocking it in. The driver laid on the horn. Once, and then twice. The passenger-side door opened and a heavyset elderly woman wearing white surgical hose slowly climbed out. She slid the back door aside and retrieved an aluminum walker.