Tommy’s shop, a desert-baked building rearing up from the sand in off-the-Strip Vegas, looked like an auto shop from the outside. Few people knew its location, and fewer yet had earned the right to visit. Tommy kept a surveillance camera at the door, which he‘d unplugged when Evan called on him.

Tommy took a swig of black coffee across a lower lip packed with Skoal Wintergreen. “I got no interest in working out no more. Makes no sense at this point. Spend what? Two hours a day? They say exercising can add seven years onto the end of your life. But I figure those seven years are about what you get if you add up all the hours you’d spend sweating your sorry ass on a treadmill. So I figure, why not skip all that misery, live out the good days, and hit the dirt when it’s time?”

He rolled the chair away from the ammo and over to his smoking station, an ashtray made from a ship’s battered porthole. A Camel Wide lipped out from the edge. He pulled on the cigarette, then dropped it into a red keg cup filled with water.

A kick of his combat boots set him shooting back across the floor toward Evan. Even as he glided, he popped a new slide assembly onto the aluminum frame. “Don’t get me wrong. I don’t wanna slow down. You know me—Animal from the Muppets is my spirit animal.” He leaned over the pistol at his bench, adding the extras. “But man, I’ll tell ya, more and more I feel like I been shot at and missed and shit at and hit.” He paused to flex his remaining nine fingers, working out a cramp.

Evan thought of Assim with his hand tremors and unsteady gait, the physical toll of a lifetime of rough play. Was this what was in store for them all? A hard end to a hard life?

I wanted you to get out. I wanted you to have a chance.

It was nearly impossible for Evan to recalibrate to the fact that Jack was still alive, that when he heard Jack’s voice in his head, it was not from beyond the grave.

Tommy had said something.

Evan snapped to. “What?”

“You lose your holster, too?”

“Yeah. I need a Kydex high-guard.”

“I know what you use.” Tommy scooped the wad of long-cut tobacco from his lip, thumbed it into an empty Red Bull can, washed out his mouth with more java sludge. “How’d you misplace your gear? Got held up by a troop of Girl Scouts?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Ain’t they all.”