sidearm in the commission of a felony. Desperate. The gun twists into my side.
“Where is she?” he asks again.
“Where is who?”
“Nico.”
Oh, God. Nico. It’s raining harder and harder while we’re standing here. I’m not even wearing a raincoat, just my gray blazer and blue tie. A rat darts by, out from behind a Dumpster, bounds across the square and out toward Main Street. I track it with my eyes while my assailant licks his lips.
“I don’t know where Nico is,” I tell him.
“Yes, you do, you do know.”
He jams the pistol in harder, digs it deeper into the thin cotton of my dress shirt, and I can feel him itching to fire it, his anxious energy warming the coldness of the barrel. I picture the hole that had been left in Naomi, just above and to the right of her left eye. I miss her. It’s so cold out here, my face is soaked. I left my hat in the car, with the dog.
“Please listen to me, sir,” I say, raising my voice over the drumbeat of the rain. “I do not know where she is. I’ve been trying to find her myself.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s true.”
“Bullshit.”
“Who are you?”
“Don’t worry about who I am.”
“Okay.”
“I’m a friend of hers, okay?” he says anyway. “I’m a friend of Derek’s.”
“Okay,” I say, and I’m trying to remember everything Alison told me about Skeve and his ridiculous organization: the Catchman report, secret bases on the Moon. All nonsense and desperation, and yet here we are, and if this man twitches just one finger just a little bit, I’ll be dead.
“Where’s Derek?” I ask, and he snorts, angrily, says, “You asshole,” and heaves back with his other hand, the one not holding the gun, and punches me closed-fist on the side of my head. Instantly, the world loses focus, blurs, and I double over and he hits me again, an undercut rushing up into my mouth, and I bounce backward against the wall of the plaza, my head banging against the bricks. The gun is immediately back in place, grinding into my ribcage, and now the world is spinning, swimming, rain overflowing around my eye patch and flooding my face, blood oozing from my upper lip into my mouth, my pulse roaring in my head.
He comes in close, hisses into my ear. “Derek Skeve is dead, and you know that he’s dead because you killed him.”
“I didn’t—” my mouth fills with blood, I spit it out. “No.”
“Oh, okay, so you had him killed. That is a pretty cutthroat technicality.”
“I promise you. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
It’s funny, though, I’m thinking, as the world slowly stops rotating, the furious face of the mustache man comes back into focus with the cold desolation of the plaza behind him, I sort of did know. I probably would have said that Skeve was dead, if you’d asked. But I haven’t really had time to think about it. God, you wake up one day and everybody is dead. I turn my head, spit out another black stream of blood.
“Listen, friend,” I say, bringing my voice to an easy place. “I promise you—no, wait, look at me, sir. Will you look at me?” He jerks his head up, his eyes are wide and scared, his lips twitching under the heavy mustache, and for a second we’re like grotesque lovers, gazing into each other’s eyes in this cold wet public square, a gun barrel between us.
“I do not know where Nico is. I do not know where Skeve is. But I might be able to help you, if you tell me what you know.”
He thinks it over, his fearful inner debate playing out in his big, dolorous eyes, his mouth slightly open, breathing heavily. And then, suddenly and too loudly he says, “You’re lying. You do know. Nico said her brother had this plan, some secret policeman plan—”
“What?”
“To get Derek out of there—”
“What?”
“Nico says her brother has this plan, he gets her a car—”
“Slow down—wait—”
The rain is pounding.
“And then Derek gets shot dead, and I barely get out of there, and when I get out she’s nowhere.”
“I don’t know about any of this.”
“Yes, you do.”
A cold metal snap as he clicks off the safety. I yelp twice and clap my hands, and Mustache Man says, “Hey—” and then there’s a ferocious bark from the street side of the square, and he turns his head toward it, and I raise my hands and shove him hard in the face, and he stumbles backward and