“We already talked about it,” she said. They both knew it was that man’s sudden appearance that had kept them up all night, and prompted them to push on Eddy Rabbit so hard so early this morning. Neither of them had slept anyway.

“No, I talked, and you didn’t say much of anything.” Danny looked like he was going to put a hand on her arm, but stopped short. “Do you believe him? Those things he said last night?”

She took a step back. “You asked me that last night, again and again and again. My answer is no different. I do, and I don’t know what choice I have.”

“All because he talked about a gun?”

“No, because he talked about the gun, la pistola. The only one like it. No one else knows about it.”

“Not even the sheriff?”

“No. No él.”

“And your brother used to own this fancy silver gun?” Danny was shaking his head, still confused.

“No, not exactly the same. It’s different.” She couldn’t explain how she’d last seen her brother’s gun in a hotel room outside Houston. It had been silver and pearl, etched with images of the Virgen de Guadalupe and Pancho Villa and Jesús Malverde; stamped also with several grinning calaveras. She’d left it with Máximo, when she foolishly thought it would be easy to walk away from her life in the Big Bend.

When she thought she would never see one like it again.

“This one is mine. It was sent to me. By him.”

Danny searched her eyes, and she didn’t look away. She wanted him to see whatever was there. “All this time you’ve never mentioned it, never showed it to me? Not once?”

He wasn’t hurt by her words a moment ago, but he was by this. He wanted to be hurt, but she wouldn’t apologize. Sí, they’d spent the past year together, but the history tied to that pistola went beyond them. It went back much further than that, into a darkness that Danny couldn’t see and that she didn’t know how to show him. It was a hole as dark as the one her brother had been buried in.

Her gun wasn’t the same as Rodolfo’s; some of the same calaveras, but no Jésus Malverde or Virgen de Guadalupe. Instead, there was only one figure, clearly a woman, but skeletal and horrible. She was wrapped in a massive cloak, with her own tiny smiling skull, her hands holding a scythe and a globe.

Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte.

It was a skinless skull with no face, but America always believed it had been carved to look just like her.

“So what does it mean?” he asked. “This damn gun. Is it a message, a threat?”