Erika turned in their seat to keep whatever they passed as eyes on the spot in the desert where the lights had been until the desert was no longer visible. They turned back.

There was a comfortable quiet between Erika and Jackie, only breaths and breeze and faint traffic.

After a few moments of this, Jackie asked, “So, seriously, man, no gas money?”

“All right, I think I have maybe ten bucks,” said the angel.

15

“What are you looking for?” Dawn asked to the back of Diane’s head.

Diane stopped. She had felt fine a second ago, but now a sharpness of nerves hit her chest. She knew how this looked, crouched low, lifting up the trash can in the custodial closet near the office elevator.

“I lost something last week, a slip of paper.”

“They’d have already taken last week’s trash.”

“I know. I just thought maybe it had fallen out. Loose paper. Never mind.” Diane stood.

She was significantly taller than Dawn. At least five inches taller. Diane did not see herself as taller.

“What did you lose? Maybe I can help.”

Diane hadn’t exactly avoided Dawn since their conversation at the Moonlite All-Nite Diner, but she had allowed the natural processes of work to wear away any bridge that might have been formed between them. She was okay with distance. She was okay with being a stranger. And thinking about that day at the diner brought back the nausea; the egg on Dawn’s lip, the two realities in Dawn’s stories, and the blood dripping from Laura’s branches. Dawn’s face made her dizzy with memory.

“No, it’s fine. It’s fine. It was a small piece of paper.”

“Like a receipt?”

“Yeah, but with handwriting, I think.”

“So a note?”

“Yeah, a note.”

“What did the note say?”

Diane was unintentionally not breathing. When she noticed, she started breathing again.

“It’s fine. You don’t have to tell me.”

“KING CITY,” Diane said without knowing how she knew to say it.

“King City.”

“I think it said ‘KING CITY,’ in pencil, all caps.”

“That’s all it said?”

“Yes. It just said ‘KING CITY.’”

Dawn stared at her, and Diane didn’t know what else to say.

“I don’t know how to help you, Diane,” Dawn said, a perfect mix of confused and disappointed, and went back to her desk.

Diane stayed at work, not working on work, as everyone else left—Dawn, Catharine, the men (all named Shawn) who worked in sales, Piotr, Celia, Maya, Martellus, Ricardo, and Tina.

Once everyone was gone, she logged on to Tina’s computer (as something of a party trick, she was excellent at guessing passwords based on a person’s personality, and had long ago correctly guessed that Tina’s password was “WhoAmIReally” followed by nineteen question marks), and looked up the office phone records.