“Oh, I got some,” Tony said, yawning. “You know that blond woman with the chipped tooth who checks out at the Piggly Wiggly? DeeDee.”

“I do,” Angie said with great seriousness. “I do know DeeDee.”

“Well.” He slumped into a chair and ran his fingers through his hair until it stood up. “My Piggly Wiggly days are over.”

“What was it this time?” Angie asked.

Tony put back his head to study the ceiling. “Day-of-the-week thongs.”

She considered for a moment, and then decided that Tony needed no coddling. “This from a man who owns not one but two pairs of Home-of-the-Whopper boxer shorts. No good ever came from looking into a woman’s underwear drawer, you mope.”

Tony’s mouth twitched. He yawned again, loudly, but he was smiling. “Time for bed. We aren’t shooting anything important, are we?”

“I’m afraid we are,” Angie said. “We’re getting on a train for Savannah at exactly a quarter to one this afternoon, with Miss Zula. To go visit a retired high school teacher. If you’ve got to sleep you’d best get to it, and I’d forget the coffee.”

Tony groaned, heaved himself out of his chair, and headed for the stairs. Over his shoulder he said, “You’ve got a cruel streak, Mangiamele. Someday it will come back to bite you on the ass. Someday very soon.”

When Rivera had neither showed her face nor answered her cell phone by eleven, Angie roused Tony out of bed and pointed him toward the shower. Then she stood outside the door and shouted questions at him.

It turned out he remembered very little about the woman Rivera had left the bar with: dark-haired, lots of makeup, nervous laugh. “Your average closeted lesbian,” he said when he came out of the bathroom with a towel around his middle, water running down his face and chest. “Or at least she was last night. Today, who knows?”

He leaned over to look at his face in the oval mirror over the dresser, pulled down an eyelid with a thumb. “Christ,” he said balefully. “No wonder I can’t get laid.”

“Didn’t get her name?” Angie asked again, in desperation.

“Meg,” he said patiently, rubbing his bristled cheeks. “But I don’t know her last name. We can do this without Rivera, you know.”

Outside, the first rumbling of a storm echoed in the distance.

“Of course we can,” Angie said. “No problem at all.”

NINE

Ogilvie Bugle

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