“She’s in detention. You happy?” Eddie finishes his beer in one long swallow.

Rose isn’t happy. She is not happy at all. But that is blood under the bridge. “Okay. I’m sorry. Now that they can’t hold Mom hostage, what happens if you don’t kill me?”

“I don’t know. I guess they repo the truck. Or come after me. Or Tania. Or Amy.” He glances at the two girls he wants to become his family, then back at Rose. She can feel him struggling with life in prison on the one hand and life as a victim on the other.

Before he can come to his own conclusions, Rose says, “Don’t even think about it, Eddie. You don’t kill me, maybe they come after you, maybe they don’t. They’re not going to want the exposure of going near Tania or Amy. Citizens don’t like people who kill young women and children. And, face it, you’re not a high-end employee. They can undoubtedly write off the cost of a used truck and never even feel the bite. So you don’t kill me, you will probably be okay.

“You do kill me, and nothing will ever be okay again. You will go to prison, Tania will marry a fabulous man and have a beautiful family, watch them grow up, have kids of their own, and all that time you’ll be folding other men’s boxer shorts and eating off plastic trays. And,” Rose says, dropping her voice for the coup de grâce, “you know as well as I do what’s coming down the road. Within a year or so all prisons will be nonsmoking.”

“Shit,” Eddie says.

Rose watches him as he uses his cocktail napkin to wipe his mouth. “Eddie, would you really have murdered me?”

Eddie’s eyes narrow and he looks at her shrewdly. The muscles of his face relax, and he lets out a gust of beer-scented breath. “Sure.” He sucks in his lower lip, then releases it with a small pop. “I don’t know. Then? Probably not. Now? I’m warming up to the idea.”

Rose pats him on the knee. She sets the backpack on the bar and unzips it. Using Marion’s ATM, she’d withdrawn five hundred dollars. Counting out five crisp twenties, she says, “This is for telling me about Goodman’s. There will be another hundred for anything you think of that helps.” Rose tucks the remainder of the cash into the backpack and zips it shut. She’s nervous about flashing the cash but wants Eddie to know viscerally that there is more where his came from.

Shouldering the backpack, she stands. “Remember, Eddie, dead I am worth a life sentence. Alive I am worth one hundred dollars a clue.”