It was more than an hour later before he finally began to drift off to sleep. The last thing he remembered thinking was that something was coming. It wasn’t here yet, but it was on the way. Like bad news in the mail.

It was coming, and Pryce couldn’t do a damn thing to stop it.

5 JESSICA

5

JESSICA

A voice hauled Jessica back from the memory of Tony’s funeral in Blissville two years earlier to where she was sitting now in a dive bar in LA.

She pulled her eyes away from the television screen and Jason Pryce’s face. Looked at the acne-scarred, limp-bearded one belonging to the bartender. He was staring at her with an expression someplace between concern and impatience.

“Sorry, did you say something?” she asked.

The guy wore black flesh tunnels in his ears that had stretched the lobes to the size of quarters, and she realized she was talking to the gaping holes instead of his face.

“I asked if you were okay?” he said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Just a bit freaked out by that business in Hollywood, I guess.” She gestured to the television above the bar. The blonde with the big hair was back on screen. “Not exactly what you want to hear when you’re staying in a motel yourself tonight.”

“Ten bucks says she was a hooker. What can I getcha?”

The bartender was tall and skinny and didn’t look old enough to buy alcohol, never mind sell it. Definitely not Ace Freeman, the bar’s owner, who had given Eleanor Lavelle a job. This kid wouldn’t even have been born when Alicia Lavelle had disappeared. In other words, less than useless when it came to getting pumped for information.

“I’ll have a Scotch. And a beer.”

“What kind of Scotch?”

“Decent.”

“What kind of beer?”

“Cold.”

He shrugged, his bony shoulders bobbing up and down beneath a T-shirt with the name of a band she’d never heard of emblazoned across the front and faded patches under the armpits. He sloshed two fingers of Royal Emblem into a glass. Then he popped the top on a bottle of Busch and placed it on the counter in front of her. Beads of condensation rolled down the dark glass. Jessica picked up the bottle and drank a third in one go.

As she gazed around the room, one of the outdoor workers caught her eye. He smiled and tipped his Dodgers baseball cap in her direction in a greeting that was supposed to be genteel but was just plain sleazy. He looked like he’d been wearing the cap since the team’s last World Series win back in ’88. He also looked old enough to be her father. Jessica gave him a disapproving look and turned away.

“Does Ace Freeman still work here?” she asked the bartender.

“Yes, he does.”

“He around just now?”