Marcella had spent the whole time thinking of questions to ask. She unleashed a barrage as soon as I got in the car. I kept quiet and slouched in my seat, peeking through the corner of the window trim and the B-pillar. When she had exhausted her fusillade, I gave her the highlights: Regis had bought the story and the phones were still down. The only way for him to warn his guys watching Ethan was to send one of his Steel Polaris thugs.

Marcella hounded me some more, but I was focused on the parking garage. Boris would be out any second.

Headlights flashed as a car came up the ramp, and I tapped Marcella’s arm. “Here he comes. Get ready.”

Marcella twisted the key in the ignition, and the engine roared without a single sputter. Even if bringing Marcella turned out to be a mistake, bringing her car had been the right call. This was the kind of situation Dolores would shit out on me. Now, the only thing I had to worry about giving out was my heart. I hadn’t had a thrill like this in years, and those years had been filled with shitty fast food and even worse exercise habits.

My breath was too shallow to gasp when I saw the bumper come up the incline, but I caught it in time to shout as the vehicle leveled out. A street light shined on the garage’s outlet, allowing me to see through the tinted windshield to the yak hunched over the steering wheel. “That’s him!”

Marcella cranked the gear selector, but I grabbed her arm. “Hold on. Don’t want to spook him.”

I watched him turn out of the garage and head up the street toward the I-18 ramp. He flicked on his left turn indicator and I stared at it, memorizing the shape of the taillights. The stoplight at the corner turned green, and he eased into the intersection. Marcella’s muscles twitched, but I clamped down harder. I was holding myself back as much as I was holding her. Every instinct I had told me to hop out and run after the car, barking and growling.

The black car turned, and my stomach lurched. Marcella flinched again, and I felt her eyes boring into the side of my head. The prongs of the taillights disappeared behind a building as Boris accelerated out of the curve, and I went from squeezing to lightly slapping at Marcella’s shoulder. “Drive! Drive! Drive!”

Marcella drove. Her car’s tires kicked up loose gravel as she peeled out of the spot. The light ahead switched to yellow when Marcella was thirty yards from the stop line, but she put her foot down. I didn’t need to tell her how important it was that we made the light.

The car’s body rocked like a pontoon hit on its broadside by a speedboat’s wake, but Marcella stayed in her lane all the way through the turn. I searched for Boris and found his taillights trundling along with the flow of traffic three cars ahead of us.

Boris made predictable turns, cruising toward the ramp to the freeway. I tried to catch my breath, but had to keep telling Marcella to stay in her lane and keep her distance. She wasted an equal amount of oxygen sighing and huffing about it.

We were only one car behind Boris when we hit the ramp, but he pulled ahead as traffic cleared. He drove fast but steady, smoothly piloting around cars that were driving close to the speed limit as if they were standing still.

Marcella drove more erratically to keep up. I can’t say I would have done much better—especially if I was stuck driving Dolores—but it didn’t stop me from groaning every time she slammed on the brakes or brought her engine up to the redline.

He must have seen us. I expected him to keep on driving straight on ‘til sunlight, leading us out of the city while he radioed back to base to send someone else to check on Ethan. I looked over, expecting to see the steering wheel bent out of shape in Marcella’s white-knuckle grip, but the only deformation I saw was her face. The mad ferret’s needle-toothed grin stretched from ear to ear. She leaned forward, her eyes flashed, then she flipped on her turn signal.

“What the fuck are you—” I started to say, but when I looked at the road, the taillights I had been tracking had shifted off the axis of the street, diverging down the path of an off-ramp. “Shit. Okay, take it easy. We’ve come too far to get careless now.”

Boris had led us past the most pitted parts of The Margin, toward the southern end, which survived on the airport’s life support system. The corridor leading to the airport was wide and well-lit, with frequent branches leading to clusters of hotels, warehouses, and lots for trucks that hauled freight to and from the airport.

This late at night, not many people were commuting, so we shared the road mostly with loaded trailers. It would have been risky to keep up with Regis’s man, so I told Marcella to park herself behind a boxy semi truck while I watched out the window. I saw him pull off a few blocks in and steered Marcella after him like a marine navigator interpreting the stars and maps.

Marcella didn’t understand the exact reasoning behind my directions, which took us away from the hotel at the end the of the cul-de-sac, but she followed them. After seeing my stalking prowess when we tracked Virginia, she trusted my experience.

We waited in the parking lot of an Elmwood Inn, but kept an eye on the Haverford Hotel at the end. It wasn’t a five-star place, but compared to the fleabag motels the city was rife with, Regis could have thought of a worse place to stash his bastard. Maybe the sociopath had a heart after all.

Boris slowed and did a full circuit around the hotel’s lot. He was careful with his turns, so he lit up every car parked on the fringes with the beams of his headlights. These Steel Polaris guys weren’t amateurs.

If he saw one police car or something that looked like one, he would have turned around and driven back downtown to deliver the bad news. He wasn’t a coward—afraid to go out in a firefight like his late colleague, Guy—but was doing what was best for his client. The more people the police had in custody, the more evidence they would have, and the more likely they would be to trace the whole thing back to Regis.

The car hid itself behind the c-shaped building. I waited half a minute to be sure he wasn’t doing another round, then nudged Marcella. “Okay. Drive. Just do it slowly, real casual like.”

Marcella nodded and eased off the brake. The car rolled forward at a snail’s pace. “A little faster than that.”

She worked the accelerator and cruised down the last stretch up to the hotel. The first rows of parking in front of the door were full, but the rest of the lot was open. There were even fewer cars around back and no lights to see them by. I saw a few dark shapes with their noses pointed into the grass verge at the far end of the lot, but I made sure Marcella kept her distance. The cars all looked the same with their lights off, and any of them could be the one we were tracking.

I pointed Marcella to a spot at the far side and held up a finger when she tried to ask what my plan was. I lifted my ear to listen to the sounds of the lot while I looked out for movement.

My ears were still sore from shooting Guy, and my eyes weren’t what they used to be. I didn’t need a hawk’s vision to see a curtain switch on the third floor. A black shadow blocked out the slit of light between the sheets. It lingered for a few seconds, then pulled away, dropping the curtains closed again.

I heard Marcella swallow hard and saw her staring at the same spot. “You think they saw us?”

“Don’t know. Too late now.”

“What are you going to do? Should we go in and call the police?”

“Too risky,” I said. “We don’t know how long the police will take to get here—if they even bother to send anyone. In the time we take waiting around to find out, Regis’s guy could move Ethan somewhere else or… Well, whatever he has planned, we can’t let him get away with it. I’m going in.”

I grabbed my coat and hat from the back seat. The time for blending in was over. Boris knew I was coming and I wanted to be sure Ethan would recognize me.

When I came back up, Marcella had her hat on and her hand on the door.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” I asked.

“I’m coming with you. Did you expect me to wait out here while you had all the fun?”

“Fun? This is life and death, Marcella. Your story will be the same if you stay out of harm’s way.”

“Not so,” Marcella said. “All the events might be there—could probably get ’em in the right place, too—but it will be missing a certain joie de vivre.”

“The story won’t get written at all if you get your vivre knocked out by a .38 Special. You’re staying here.”

“But what if you need backup?”

“Backup? What are you going to do? Wave your press badge at them?” I chuckled. “Maybe if you weren’t so giddy about the whole, ‘The only weapon I need is the Truth,’ rhetoric, you might have thought to pack a heater. The war of words will come later. Save your energy for that.”

Before Marcella could bite back, I let myself out and put my coat on. I had shrugged off my mourning suit, but I still felt like I was dressed for a funeral.

I felt my gun in my holster. It was the only hope I had of making sure it wasn’t me laying in the casket when the preacher took the podium.

I double- and triple-checked the window to make sure Boris wasn’t watching, then tip-toed across the parking lot. I counted the rooms from the safety of a wood-paneled station wagon’s rear bumper. There were a few other lights on in the hotel, but I knew the one I was eying was Boris’s. It would have been an incredible coincidence for anyone else to spontaneously look out at the dead parking lot and the blasted waste left clear around the runways right as we showed up.

I got a bad feeling someone was watching me, but the window was empty—just a vertical slit of light where the curtains failed to mesh. My hand found the butt of my gun, and I looked back at the parking lot. I saw the burning ember of Marcella’s glare in her rear-view mirror, watching my every move.

I wondered what florid prose she’d use to describe my final moments should this be the last time she saw me. Whatever she printed, Detective Henry and the rest of my enemies would get a kick out of reading it. They’d hang the obit up in their lockers next to the vintage Barnyard pin-ups.

I refused to balk on their account, and pushed forward to the rear door. The hallway was quiet, and antiseptic-clean. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead and the smell of caustic pool chemicals stung my sensitive nose.

A sign stuck on a door to my right showed a stick man with a round head high-kneeing it up a sawtooth incline. I followed his lead into a stairwell of echoey concrete steps and whitewashed brick walls. The door sealed behind me and I waited in the quiet, gawking up the chute of switchbacks between me and the fourth floor and listening for movement.

I pulled my gun out and kept my finger on the trigger as I jabbed it at the corners each time I turned. It was poor gun safety, but this was one of those cases where guns weren’t meant to be safe. My eyes dried out in the cold, still air, but I couldn’t afford to blink.

When I reached the fourth floor, I let out a premature sigh of relief and adjusted my grip before opening the door. The sweat on my hand squelched against the knurled and textured metal.

The fourth floor hallway was like the first, except the latent stink left by hundreds of travelers had replaced the smell of the pool. Boris’s room was eight doors down from the stairs, but the hallway appeared to stretch as I took my first step. The distance between each set of doors was exponentially larger than the last.

Blood pounded in my ears, so I couldn’t tell if my footsteps were the soft pads I was aiming for or the loud work-boots-on-wood-decks clomping I felt. A metallic click broke through the stuffing in my head, and I dodged to the side, pushing my back against the wall to get both hands on my gun.

I aimed at the center of the refrigerator-sized mass from which the noise had escaped and almost blew a hole through a larger-than-life cherry bursting out of a glistening wet orgy of fruit. The vending machine’s compressor switched on with a hiss, and the floor shook when a fan with loose bearings came up to speed.

I rested against the wall only long enough to be sure my heart was still beating, then rolled around and stalked down to Boris’s room. A line of light cut out from the gap beneath the door, highlighting the loose strands and tufts sticking out of the carpet in front of it. I leaned against the frame and watched the projection on the floor for crossing shadows.

When I forced my ears to hear past my heartbeat, I heard a voice. I hadn’t heard Boris speak at the party, but any noise his massive chest produced would have been much lower and louder than the small, energetic whistle on the other side of the door. It had the tone of a shout, but its volume was far too low, making it sound far away.

A high-pitched tweeting answered the first voice, and the two traded verbal blows before things got physical. The ensuing crash, smash, and rumble, had the same distant, shrunken quality as the voices—the sound of a diorama destroying itself.

Or of a TV tuned to classic cartoons.

My heart and the clock ticked out of sync. It didn’t sound like Boris was in any hurry to get out. He must have thought he was safe and was waiting for word about what to do with Ethan. I could still catch him off guard.

My shoulder hadn’t recovered from busting Virginia’s door down, and the metal plate around the doorknob looked sturdy. I didn’t have time to go down to the front desk for the key, nor did I have the mental energy to concoct a reasonable lie when I got there. It was just me, my wits, and the basic lock-picking kit in my coat’s hidden pocket.

My hands shook until the second I had the tension wrench and the pick in the lock, then I was all business. The lock was simple, and I got most of the tumblers up with a few slow rakes. I wiggled the last one like a child poking at a loose tooth until it caught, too.

I dropped the pick and grabbed my gun when the lock cylinder started to turn. The door opened a crack, and I held my breath. The TV’s sound got clearer, but no one shouted. No hammers cocked and no safety switches clicked to the off position.

I pushed until the door stopped, caught on a thin metal chain that bridged the door and the frame. I used the hooked arm of my tension wrench to flip the chain out of its channel and tried to lower it gently, but it slipped and clattered against the jamb.

“Ethan…” a reproachful voice said from behind another wall. It still sounded small for the yak. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing. God!” a child answered. My heart stopped again, this time from sheer disbelief. All logic said I would find Ethan here, but I’d run down so many dead ends it was still hard to believe I actually had. “Can’t I watch some fucking TV without you—”

Ethan looked over, and his voice hit a glottal stop. “Hey, you’re not the pizza guy.”

“What the hell was that?” the man inside the bathroom yelled back.

I pressed my finger to my lip, then motioned for Ethan to come to me. He looked hesitant and shifted toward the edge of the bed, but stopped when he saw the gun in my hand.

“Ethan?” the man in the bathroom said.

Ethan and I stared at each other, silent until the man grunted and the toilet flushed. The rushing water covered my whisper. “God damn it, Ethan. I’m here to save you.”

Ethan cocked his head, more confused than before. I started to say, “Your mom sent me,” but the bathroom door flew open before I had the first word out. I was looking at the end of a short-barreled shotgun, stabbed like a spear toward my belly. My gun’s sights were lined up with the chest of the pig holding it.

“Who are—” I said. “I thought you were—”

“Looking for me?” a sonorous voice said behind me. I knew better than to make any sudden movements, so I didn’t turn to look, but the voice fit Boris.

“Boris,” the pig said, his pink cheeks red with the blood rushing through them. “What the hell’s going on here?”

“You didn’t answer your radio. Seems the Delinquency Dog couldn’t wait one more day for Ethan to show up.”

“Fuck!” The pig was happy to jump past the accusation of his carelessness. “We have to go.”

“The Delinquency Dog?” Ethan drifted up from the bed to get a better look at me. “Woah, you are the Delinquency Dog. Why are you working for them? Did you do something to my mom?”

“Your mom’s fine, kid. She sent me.”

Boris took a step forward so the cold barrel of his gun pressed against the back of my head, just under the band of my hat. “Linus, get the kid packed up. We need to move.”

“You’re too late,” I said. “The police are on their way. Might be enough time for you two to make a break for it. They won’t look too hard once Ethan’s safe.”

Linus looked past me to Boris. “How long do we have?”

“Minutes,” I said, cooler than I felt.

Boris bumped me with his gun. “I don’t think they’re coming, but we can’t be too safe. Let’s get the kid moved just in case. It’s almost over, but we still need to be cautious.”

Linus pulled two black duffel bags out from under one of the beds and stuffed clothes into them, dropping his shotgun onto the duvet so he could use both hands.

“Help him, Ethan.” Boris nodded to the mess spilling across the floor near Ethan’s bed.

Ethan had been relaxed when I opened the door, then spooked when he saw my gun. Now that he saw a glimpse of his captive’s true colors, he was terrified.

“Still got to take care of you,” Boris said to me. “You want to make it easy for everyone and do it in the bathroom?”

I tested my luck by trying to duck out of the way, but the pressure of Boris’s gun didn’t leave my head. I made it half a foot before his meaty fist slammed down on my shoulder and locked me in place.

He hauled me back in front of the door, then noticed the gun still dangling in my hand. “Why don’t you go ahead and hand over that bean shooter?”

“Think that’s my line,” a new voice said behind me. It was a snarky, feminine voice. Marcella’s.

“Shit.” I looked over my shoulder at the same time Boris looked over his. I expected to find Marcella showing her hubris with an unfolded pocketknife or a finger stuffed in her coat pocket to suggest a gun. Instead, I saw two inches of steel sticking out of her fist.

With its short barrel and smaller cartridges, her J-Frame didn’t come close to the accuracy or stopping power of the .44 in Boris’s hand, but at that distance it didn’t matter. If she pulled her trigger, Boris would be as dead as I would be if he pulled his.

“Fuck me,” Linus said, dropping the crumpled white shirt he had been packing.

He dove for the shotgun on the bed and a lot of things happened at once: I stepped forward and to the side, out of the way of Boris’s gun; Marcella threw herself into Boris and jammed her gun into his jaw—as high as she could reach; Boris’s gun went off next to my ear, bursting the already battered eardrum, but sending the bullet into the ceiling near the wall; Ethan dropped onto the floor behind the bed; and I fired one deliberate shot at Linus.

My shot landed just before his fingers touched the shotgun’s grip, punching his shoulder back. If he were armed, I would have kept pumping, but I used the time taken up by his recoil to whip around and help Marcella. She had Boris pinned against the door, but his gun was still waving. I snatched it and fanned my arms out, straddling the doorway to put one gun on each of the Steel Polaris thugs.

Linus had fallen onto the second bed, where he sat, cradling his arm and staring vacantly like a tired man waiting for the bus. He would have looked peaceful if not for the blood welling up between his fingers.

Ethan’s knobby horns poked up from behind the bed, then the rest of his head came out as he pushed himself up for a peek. His slit-pupiled eyes went from the man on the bed to me, to Marcella and the other thug in the hallway.

“All right everyone, just keep calm. It’s over. No reason to make yourself dead now, eh?” Neither of the Steel Polaris guys said anything. “Now, Ethan, if you wouldn’t mind… Please phone the police. Someone would have called about the gunshots, but they’ll drive faster if they know you’re here.”

I moved into the room, leading Marcella with the yak, then switched my pistol with the shotgun Linus had left on the bed. Ethan got moving after a delay and I gestured for Marcella to put Boris next to Linus so I could keep my gun on him. By not blowing Boris’s brains out before he shot at me, Marcella had proved her trigger finger wasn’t as strong as mine.

“Now,” I said as Ethan dialed. “Let’s all just sit here quietly and think about what we’ve done.”