After brining Marcella to her car, I thought about taking the night to cool off. Wished I could. If I laid down and closed my eyes, it would have been nothing but feverish rolling and flashes of Ethan’s face, trapped and screaming to be set free.

I drove straight to Virginia’s house. The lights were on, so I knew she was home, but I didn’t want to park right outside. There was still a bit of daylight left, and I wanted the option to sit back and watch her for a bit.

Dolores rumbled around the next corner, but when I started for the place Marcella and I had camped during our stakeout, her headlights bounced back red off the lenses of another car in the spot. The glossy black finish suggested the car was too new and too well cared to belong to anyone in that neighborhood, but it wasn’t until I saw a laurel-encircled shield slapped onto the center of the hood that I knew how insidious it was. Just when I was beginning to believe the black Cadillac was a figment, here it was in front of me.

I pulled in behind it with Delores’s front bumper sticking over the curb and her rear end jutting into the right lane. I made it three steps toward the Cadillac before I dove back in. The keys jangled like alarm bells in my fingers and the seconds stretched out as I found the right one and jabbed it into the glove compartment’s lock.

The mechanism flipped after a few turns of the key, and the hatch shot open from the spring load of compressed papers it held back. I punched through the flurry of receipts, parking tickets, and expired licenses, and grabbed my gun.

The instant my hand felt the grip, I shot up in my seat and leveled the barrel at the Cadillac. I waited for a door to open or for someone to creep around the side and aim back at me, but it remained still. Without taking my eyes off the car, I swung out the revolver’s cylinder and checked the load. I tested the hammer by rocking it back half a degree, then adjusted my grip.

I waited a long fifteen seconds for something to happen. When nothing did, I pushed myself out of Dolores and, leaving the door open, crept up on the twenty-foot yacht of a car. I walked in a hunched-over crouch to stay below the tinted rear windows, then sprang up in front of the driver’s side, gun out. My sights fell on an empty headrest.

I leaned from side to side, looking at the front passenger seat, then the rear compartment. Both were eerily empty. The absence of crumpled fast foot wrappers and cigarette butts in the ashtrays could be excused by a penchant for cleanliness, but the lack of dust or even a grain of dirt on the floor mats set my teeth on edge. It was uncanny, as if the car had been airlifted from the showroom and dropped on the street.

I reached for my flashlight and looked at the tire treads, trying to match them to the partial imprint the cops pulled from the scene of Al’s murder. I forgot about it in a hurry when I thought about where the driver had gone.

The fastest my body had moved in the last half decade was the occasional drunken tumble out of a barstool. Now I challenged land speed records as I sprinted down the street and around the corner to Virginia’s house, my eyes open for any hulking figures hiding in the bushes.

I hurtled over the downed bike in Virginia’s yard and bypassed the steps with a single bound. My hand was already on the door when I heard a woman shriek. The fear in the yell blanked my mind. An instant later, I was standing in a dark foyer with child-sized boots spilled across the floor and coats draped over the railing of a stairway going up. My gun was raised and my shoulder was sore. The splinters of wood falling around me and the ringing in my ears suggested I had burst the door open.

Virginia whimpered, and I heard a harsh shush as the shadows projected into the end of the hall by the light in the kitchen shifted. A monstrous form press against the door frame, and I diverted, slipping into the living room that opened off the foyer. It connected to the kitchen with another doorway at a right angle to the one I entered through.

“Who’s there?” the man said. Floorboards creaked as his prestigious bulk eased around the corner.

I moved in turn, rotating toward the kitchen and Virginia. Leaning against the doorway with my gun up in both hands, I saw Virginia pushed up against the sink, quivering as she watched the dark portal to the hallway where the other man had disappeared.

She hissed when she noticed me, but cut herself off when she recognized who I was.

Virginia mouthed something, but her beak was chattering too much for me to make any sense of it. I got the meaning from her hand signal—a finger and thumb extended from a fist.

Another creak came from the hallway before the man who made it exploded back into the room. I saw the scene as if looking at a flash photograph. The gun he raised was a full-sized revolver, but it looked smaller in his boxing-glove hands than my snubnose looked in my mitts. He wore a tailored black suit, white shirt, and black tie, all sized to fit his massive frame. The hooked horns growing out of the top of his long head scraped dust off the ceiling with each step—two lines at the same offset as the matched lines on the dumpster where we found Al’s body.

His gun went from Virginia to me, tracking the path of her eyes. I saw his finger flex on the trigger before he was lined up with me, but I was a hair faster.

I didn’t think. I just put my sights on his center of mass and squeezed. The first round caught him on the right side of the chest. His gun went off, but I was already blind from my own muzzle flare and deaf from the concussive report ricocheting around the ventricle of Virginia’s living room.

Virginia hadn’t been hit, but she fell back into the counter while the wildebeest stayed on his feet. His gun arm started swinging back, so I fired again. And again. And again. I pumped bullets into his chest until my gun was empty, then pulled the trigger a few more times for good measure.

The wildebeest staggered forward and I changed my grip, ready to grapple if I had to. Two shot would have been overkill for most men, but even with six leaky faucets, this guy was still moving.

His throat made a wet sound just loud enough for me to hear over the persistent—and probably permanent—ringing in my ears. A seventh trickle started at the corner of his lips, and he teetered forward. The sound of his body hitting the floor was louder and more final than any gunshot. It shook the house like a crash of thunder, rattling the foundation and loosening flakes of paint from the ceiling.

I stayed coiled like a spring, ready to pounce, but the intruder didn’t move. His back was still and black like moorland on a moonless night. Spatters of blood on the counters and backsplash behind him shone like red stars.

I eased forward, my footsteps silent through the muffs of my shattered eardrums. His gun was on the floor, inches away from his limp fingers. I kicked it away just to be safe before prodding the man himself.

I saw something move in the hallway out of the corner of my eye. My gun was raised just past my belt buckle when I saw the shadow was too short to be a man. An emergency brake slammed on inside my shoulder, arresting the movement at the cost of shredding some muscle already weakened from the door and the hammering recoil.

The shadow trembled as it came into the room. I had just enough time to see a lamb’s terrified face before Virginia snapped out of her shock and swept the kid up. She cooed as she carried him away. “It’s okay, Tommy. Just firecrackers. I know I shouldn’t play with fireworks. It won’t happen again, all right?”

“Tommy?” the name pinged around my head as it tumbled off my lips. Who the hell was Tommy? It took me a second to get my bearings and remember. Virginia hadn’t hidden Tommy from me. I’m sure I had heard people talking about him, but I had been so focused on Virginia’s older son, none of it had stuck.

When I was sure the wildebeest would never move again, I dared turn away from him to pick up his gun and holster my own. His didn’t feel as familiar, but in close quarters it wouldn’t matter how well I could aim. The compact space worked doubly to my advantage when I went to clear the first floor. There wasn’t anywhere for a second intruder to hide from my flashlight, and I swept the place in under a minute.

The wildebeest was where I left him, but the kitchen wasn’t perfectly still. A tide of blood moved out from under the thug’s chest, washing over the tiles and flooding into the grout lines like irrigation canals. The spatters on the wall had dripped, making long thermometer streaks, forming bulbs wherever the drops were heavy enough for gravity to grab them.

I turned away from the gore and went to the phone on the wall. The ashtray next to it on the counter was a cemetery of ash with crumpled butts sticking up like crooked tombstones. Virginia had spent many hours camped out there in the last several days.

My fingers worked the rotary dial by themselves, inputting the numbers to connect me to the local precinct’s dispatch directly. The phone rang twice before some kid answered. I fed him the address and the important information—home invasion, shots fired, unidentified suspect dead, no other injuries. The kid asked some questions for clarity, but I wasn’t in the mood to chat. I hung up as soon as I had confirmation that police were on the way.

I returned to the body and tried to roll him over. The corpse was too heavy to manage with just my foot. I had to squat down and lift with my legs to get him on his back. The police would give me hell for tampering with the evidence, but if I wanted to get any answers out of this, I had to take them before the cops showed up.

The man’s Swiss-cheese shirt was no longer white, but a tie-dyed red, deep and glistening where it was soaked on the front and faint pink where the blood seeped up through capillary action toward his shoulders and collar. The face, like a cow’s but stretched and widened at the bottom, was frozen in a mean rictus.

In the cold light of the aftermath, I recognized the face. I had seen it the night before, guarding a back room at Club Callout. Heifer might have been able to tell me more about him, but I’m not sure he would. For all I knew, the two were in cahoots on the fire, but I couldn’t think of a good reason why Heifer would send someone to wave a gun at Virginia.

I used the barrel of the man’s own gun to poke open his jacket and feel out the pockets. When I found a wallet, I risked getting my fingers messy to pull it out and flip it open. There were a few crisp bills and a license with the man’s mean mug on it. The name listed was Guy N. Urban; the birthdate said he was pushing forty. His card was a bit different than mine, so I looked closer. Instead of “Driver’s License” the line at the top said “Chauffeur’s License.” The immaculately maintained car made more sense give that context and gave me a lead, provided I could find his employer.

With Virginia clomping back down the stairs, I hoped I wouldn’t need to do any more digging myself. Now that she’d had a gun pointed in her face, she might be more forthcoming with the facts. Especially since the guy the gun had come with had begun his transition to worm food.

Virginia came back in, but drifted past me and the body, toward the phone. She was shaking.

“I already called them.”

“Huh?” she said, still deaf and dazed. She didn’t reach for the handset, but the cupboard above it. She grabbed a crumpled pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

Her hands shook and the lighter wouldn’t stay lit long enough to start the cigarette clamped in her bill, but she kept trying. The sparks highlighted flecks of blood marring her white feathers. No way the kid hadn’t noticed.

I took the lighter out of her unresisting fingers and got a solid flame going. She sucked until the tip glowed red and a trickle of smoke slipped out of her nostrils. Her shaking steadied after the first long drag.

She looked at me as if she had only then realized I was there and held out the pack.

“I don’t smoke,” I said, tossing the lighter down on the counter.

“Right. You’re one of those people.”

“Lady, I got nothing against busting up my body. I just can’t stand the smell following me everywhere.”

She smirked as she took another pull. With the blood on her face and the body behind me, it was a gruesome expression. “Lady? Whatever happened to ma’am.”

“Ma’am is reserved for women who don’t kidnap their own kids.”

“Kidnap their own…” Virginia repeated. Her head popped back down from the clouds. “What the hell are you talking about? You think I kidnapped Ethan? How dare you? I was almost killed.”

“Yeah. What’s that about? Bad business? He decide to change the terms of your contract?”

“I had nothing to do with Ethan’s disappearance, except that I wasn’t there.”

“Is that so? You have to know something. Why else would this asshole drop by? He’s been following me, too, you know. Come on Virginia, shoot the works.”

“I…” Virginia looked on the precipice of saying something insightful, lifting up on her toes to take the dive. Her eyes darted to the body, then the stairs through the hallway, and she balked. “I’ve never seen that man in my life.”

“You’re lying.” I hoped saying it outright would shock her into responding, but it only hardened her resolve. The end of her cigarette flared as she took another puff. “I know you went to Heifer asking for money. He said you were willing to do anything to get it.”

Virginia’s hand pulled away from her mouth and fell to her side. She stared at me through the curtain of smoke escaping her half-opened beak.

“That’s right. I talked to your old friends from the Barnyard days, too. They seemed to think you wanted to get back in the spotlight. Everyone’s got their own take on what you’re after, but they all agree you were desperate.”

I waited for her to speak up for herself, but not even her eyes betrayed her this time. The muscles in her face twitched with the strain of holding them on me.

“Desperate as you were, I’d have thought you would be trying to work doubles at Sal’s, not playing hooky. Poor, sweet, Darlene had some choice words for you, but not even she knew where you went.” The guilt-trip was starting to work, but Virginia was strong and I had to keep pushing. “So where have you been? Acting classes? Visiting wherever Ethan’s stashed away? Whoring?”

Virginia flinched, but still didn’t talk. I hadn’t taken a single step toward her, but still she had backed up until her tail feathers were flat against the cabinets. Given the gravity of the situation, the police would be there soon. I needed to get something out of her before they came.

“I followed you today,” I said.

She choked and her beak clacked.

“I don’t see any feral animals around here, so I’m guessing the pet hospital’s services were for you. Well? What did you go in for? Beak surgery? Breast augmentation? Or were you just preening your feathers before the lights and cameras sure to follow Ethan’s miraculous rescue?”

Virginia’s statuary face finally broke. She didn’t speak, but she didn’t need to. Her eyes pointed me to a drawer near my hip.

I ripped it open and found the bag I had seen her walking out of the pet hospital with. I tore open the top, where it was sealed with a few staples along the folded edge. Pill bottles spilled into the open drawer and I snatched one up.

I searched The label, but nothing about opiates or benzodiazepines splashed up from the choppy seas of tiny letters on the bottle. Unfortunately, I left my novelty magnifying glass with the rest of the Delinquency Dog persona. When I held the bottle real close and squinted, my sight unfocused and the word “antiemetic” appeared like the subject of a magic eye picture.

I fumbled for another bottle, this one filled with tablets as big as my fingertip. The label was almost black with script enumerating all the health hazards and liability deferrals. This time, the word that stood out to me was “cytotoxic.”

I looked at Virginia with the bottle held loosely in my hands. She snatched it back and shoved all the bottles back in the drawer.

“Cancer?” I said, working it out as I spoke the word.

The kitchen’s sickly pale fluorescent light cast heavy shadows across her face, and I noticed the hollow pits of her cheeks. From up close, I saw missing patches of feathers and the deep tiredness in her eyes. She wasn’t scraping together money for attention or to reclaim the glory days; she was just trying to hold on to what she had. She was trying to live.

Virginia tried to stand her ground against my pitying stare, but her legs were weak. She lost her noble fight against gravity and slumped into the nearest chair. The short drop forced the air from her lungs with a fwump, and she replaced it with a breath filtered through her cigarette.

I was ashamed. The revelation solved the mystery of her odd behavior, but it did nothing to address the elephant—or wildebeest corpse—in the room.

“This guy? You’ve seen him before.” I didn’t put the right inflection on my words to make them a question, but I spoke as gently as I could. We didn’t need to be adversaries.

“You needed help paying for your medications—even on the gray market they were expensive. You took out a loan with someone dangerous, couldn’t pay it back after you split with Peter. Is that right?”

Virginia shook her head, looking past me at the blood spattered cupboard. “That isn’t it. There was no loan. I thought things were going to be okay when Ethan got the acting gig. I was going to scrape a few bucks off the top to pay for my treatment and figure out how to make it up to him later. Even if I…” She stopped to suck on her cigarette, but it was down to the filter. She stamped it out against the table, swallowed hard, and tried again. “Even if I didn’t make it, I knew Ethan was going to be okay. He’d take care of Tommy if Peter never stepped up. I thought everything was finally going to work out.”

“It isn’t too late.” I leaned down and put a hand on Virginia’s shoulder, making her look me in the eye. “We can get Ethan back. But now that this guy’s bumped off, we need to move quick. What else do you know?”

Virginia’s eyes brimmed with tears as she stared at me. Her mouth moved, but before she said anything, blue and red lights flashed across her face. Colored fireflies danced in her corneas as she turned to see the police cruisers approaching.

“Shit,” I said. Virginia got up, and I helped her out of her chair. “You go see to Tommy. Make sure he isn’t scared. I’ll handle these assholes.”