Even so, I was moved that Alissa’s love for her sister had driven her to put off the easing of her earthly pain so that she could warn me of the danger to Sarah. And I was moved by a more anonymous love I witnessed when Sarah was delivered into the care of strangers whose job it was to repair the damage done by those who used the need to love as a weapon against their own children.

The woman who welcomed Sarah into her foster home had seen it all before. Her heart was hidden beneath a veneer of efficiency, but only because it had been broken too many times to count by the stories she’d heard from the children who passed through her life. She remained a loving woman, despite the overwhelming evidence she’d seen of man’s cruelty. She had felt Sarah’s fear at once, understood her pain, and welcomed her into the safety of a temporary home. I knew Sarah would be okay in the sprawling, life-filled house crammed with toys and chaos. She could begin her new life here.

Maggie was reluctant to leave her. She waited with Sarah in the front room of the foster home until the social worker could arrive, asking gentle questions about the most ordinary of topics—school—in order to help Sarah create the illusion she would need to survive: the illusion that normalcy was possible.

It was close to midnight by the time Maggie left. As she drove through the dark streets, I felt her mind switch directions and she homed in on Alan Hayes. All empathy vanished and the kindness in her hardened to a nonnegotiable resolve to stop him. Oh, but she wanted to bring him down. I sat beside her, thinking of myself as a sort of spiritual co-pilot, rooting her fury on. Her mind never stopped trying to figure him out. She retrieved her cell phone from the depths of a knapsack tossed carelessly right in my lap and made a call, despite the lateness of the hour. When she started talking, I knew it was Morty.

“Is he back yet?” She frowned. “That means he’s on the run. He knows.” She was silent. “Could be. How about her? Is she awake?” She nodded in the darkness. “He could be wherever it is he’s been going at night. I’ll keep the two men outside until dawn and get Gonzales to authorize replacements.” She listened intently. “Are you sure? Okay, then. Let’s both get some sleep.”

Maggie would not get much sleep. The phone rang as soon as she laid it back down on the seat. This time, she pulled over to the curb to take the call, pressing a palm against her free ear to muffle all other sound. “I can’t hear you,” she said loudly. “Slow down and talk louder.” Her face strained with effort as she listened—and then she paled.

“Don’t let him leave, Roger,” she shouted into the phone. “Just tell him I’m on the way. And thanks. I owe you one.” She listened again. “Yes. I can do that. Favor made, favor repaid.”

She tossed her cell phone on the seat, flipped a switch on the dashboard, slammed her foot down on the gas pedal, and just like that, I was riding the lights at night again, watching the purple and blue beams sweep the traffic away from the road in front of us. God, it felt good. We flew through town, blowing through stoplights, leaving other cars in our dust. As she took the final turn out of town and headed down the blacktop, I knew where we were going: the Double Deuce bar on the outskirts of town. Why?

Before we reached the Double Deuce, Maggie switched off the blue light, not wanting to trigger a mass exodus. We glided into the parking lot in a spray of gravel. She cut the engine and was out the door in seconds, running toward a crowd clustered near the front entrance of the bar.

It was Bobby Daniels, the man I’d put in prison for the murder of Alissa Hayes. Somehow he had been released and ended up here at the Double Deuce, the last place on earth he should have gone.

I sat on top of her car for a better view. Bobby was lying on the ground, surrounded by onlookers, his back propped up against the brick building. Roger, the well-muscled owner and bartender of the Double Deuce, was holding a cloth to the side of Bobby’s head. It was soaked with blood. The neon signs above them blinked pink and blue in a steady rhythm, rendering Bobby first a healthy pink, then a sickly blue, then pink and blue again.

The surrounding crowd was at least six people deep, each one shamelessly sipping from a beer as they enjoyed the Double Deuce’s specialty show: watching blood flow. I scanned the faces in the crowd, looking for anyone I recognized. And an odd thing happened. Every now and then, I’d find someone staring back at me—face still, eyes unblinking, but their attention undeniably on me perched atop Maggie’s car. Two were men and one was a woman. But my attention was diverted by a side scuffle that broke out and was quickly quelled, and when I tried to find the trio among the crowd again, all three were gone. They had vanished.

I thought of the way they had looked at me. I thought of the black shapes I could sometimes see out of the corner of my eye. And I decided they had been of my world, not of the living. Had they left disappointed that they were taking no one with them? I wondered if that meant Bobby Daniels would live.

I watched Maggie fight her way through the crowd to the front. “Let me through,” she said impatiently, not wanting to pull rank. She wisely kept her badge in her pocket as she tossed aside bikers and women twice her size with a strength that impressed me. “Let me through. Coming through.” She finally reached the front and knelt down beside Daniels. His face was covered with blood. “What’s the story?” she asked Roger.

“He’ll be fine,” the bartender said. “It missed his eye and all major arteries, but it sure looks like that was what they were going for. It’s a long gash and it’s on his face, so it’s going to bleed a lot. Might need a stitch or two.”

“No,” Daniels croaked. “No hospitals. I don’t want a record of this.”

Roger did not ask why. “Might get by with some butterfly bandages. I can give you a handful. We got plenty behind the bar.”

“Thanks,” Maggie said, examining the slice that curved down the side of Bobby’s face. It had been made by a very sharp and very thin blade. There were no hesitation marks or stabbing wounds. Someone had known what they were doing, they just hadn’t gotten close enough to do it properly.

“I need you to keep this one off the books,” Roger said. “One more call this month and I could lose my liquor license.”

“Not a problem,” Maggie assured him. “This definitely stays off the books.”

I don’t know who looked more relieved: Bobby Daniels or the bartender.

“Can anyone tell me what happened?” Maggie asked Roger.

The bartender rolled his eyes. “How many burnouts, goofballs, meth heads, and dusters do you have time for?”

Maggie surveyed the crowd. “As many as actually saw it happen.”

“I can give it a shot,” Roger promised as he rose to his feet. He raised his hands high and the crowd fell silent, as if waiting for a benediction. “Free drinks all night long for anyone who saw what happened and can help this officer out. But, if you’re contradicted by anyone else and I find out you lied just to get free drinks, then you’re eighty-sixed from here permanently. Got it?”

Roger had the wisdom of Solomon. His pronouncement presented most of the patrons, none of them anxious to talk to a cop, with a deep moral dilemma. I had to admire the bartender’s ingenuity, though I figured most people would pass up the offer altogether. I was wrong.

“Well?” Roger asked. “Let’s have it. If you want to stay outside and tell her what you heard, stay and talk. The rest of you, get the hell back inside so some do-gooder driving by doesn’t call in more cops. I’ve told the girls to take off their tops for the next half hour.”

That got them going. Most of the crowd stampeded back inside, but some stayed behind to talk to Maggie. I joined the line, curious to find out what they knew. It was a cross section of lowlifes, ranging from a toothless old man in sawdust-covered Levi’s to a trio of bikers, two overweight women who’d been rode hard and put away wet, one bleary-eyed older woman with frizzy hair who looked like she’d been drinking the last thirty years away, a skinny kid who seemed terrified at being where he was, but was determined to tough it out, and one decent-looking woman on the right side of thirty wearing a pair of tight jeans and a bikini top. She should have been shivering, but she looked like she’d just stepped off the bar top and had plenty of body heat worked up.

“Come on, Jeanna,” the bartender said when he saw the young woman in the bikini top. “Get back inside. You’re my moneymaker.”

“No way,” she said, snapping her gum at him. “I want to talk to her. It’s important.”

“You can send her back out after her next time up,” Maggie told the bartender. “I’ll talk to the others first and wait for her if I have to. And I’ll tip her. You’ll get your cut. I promise I’ll make up for any time she loses.”

“Deal. You can use those tables over there.” He pointed to a pair of picnic tables in the side yard left over from way back when the Double Deuce had been a souvenir stand for tourists, before the new interstate had bled them all away. “The cold will sober people up and there’s no way you’ll hear a word inside. Unless you want to take these people into your car.”

Maggie looked at the old man in filthy Levi’s. “The tables are fine,” she said.

Roger tossed the blood-soaked rag to Maggie and headed back inside, his dancer close behind. Maggie caught the towel and knelt next to Daniels, murmuring in his ear. “Listen to me, Bobby. I need to talk to these people first so we can get the hell out of here. I don’t want you to listen because I need to hear your story straight from you. I can’t have their versions affecting yours. But when they’re done, I’m going to take you to where you’re staying and I want you to tell me every single thing you can remember. You’re going to be okay. I think we can get away with some butterfly bandages on that cut. Just sit tight, keep the rag pressed to your face, and start going over every minute of tonight. And don’t worry about anyone finding out. I’m not telling anyone about this; I’m not reporting it back. It stays between you and me.”

Bobby nodded, too overwhelmed to do more than obey. I wondered what it was like to leave the narrow confines of prison life, where everything was prescribed, only to be tossed into the chaos of a place like the Double Deuce.

“Over here,” Maggie told the witnesses. “I’ll take you one by one.”

“Ah, man,” one of the bikers complained as he tugged on his ZZ Top beard. “This is gonna take all night.”

“If you’re at the back of the line, you can go inside and get your free drinks while you wait. Just come back,” Maggie told everyone. “And you two”—she pointed out the biker and his friend—“when you get back, I want you to stand on either side of the guy who was cut and make sure no one gets within twenty feet of him. There’s twenty bucks in it for each of you if you do.”

“Cool,” the friend said. “I can drink next to anyone for twenty bucks.”

When I died, my price had been hovering around five.

While most of the men in the group headed back in to start drinking on Roger’s dime, the old man with dusty Levi’s and the women stayed put. First up was the old guy and he got right to the point.

“Satan did it,” he told Maggie, sitting down and leaning toward her like they were the best of friends, enjoying a cup of coffee and swapping secrets.

“Satan?” asked Maggie calmly. She’d done this kind of thing before.

“Yup. Looked real sharp, too. Dark hair, nice clothes. Mean face though. I don’t care how pretty he was. He walked in, I saw him and I knew there would be trouble. It was Satan. I tell you that now to save you time.”

“Okay,” Maggie said. “I appreciate the heads-up. I’ll watch my back. Now go tell Roger you’ve earned your free beer.”

The old man smiled his toothless thanks and made room for the older woman with frizzy hair. Maggie took one look at her prematurely aged face, the swollen flesh and broken veins of her body, and sighed. She recognized the signs of a hard-core, cirrhosis-suffering alcoholic when she saw them.

“And what did you see?” Maggie asked. “Because the guy before you claims he saw Satan.”

“I didn’t see no Satan,” the woman said. “I saw a television guy.”

I had taken a seat next to Maggie and was enjoying watching her work. Unfortunately, that meant I caught a blast of horrific halitosis from the frizzy-haired woman. It was an occupational hazard of being on the job.

“A television guy?” Maggie asked. “You recognized him from TV?”

“Hell no,” the woman said. “That shit kills your brain. But he looked like a television guy. You know what I mean? Plastic hair? Phony smile? Clothes that look like someone ironed them right onto him?”

Hayes. She was describing Alan Hayes. I’d bet my tombstone on it.

I couldn’t tell if Maggie realized it or not. I don’t think she did.

“How tall was he?” she asked the woman.

“Way taller than me.” She cackled. Not a good combination with that frizzy hair of hers. Throw in a cauldron and she’d be ready for business.

Real police work again had made me giddy. I’d gotten a lot funnier in death, I decided. It was too bad there was no one around who could hear me.

“And you saw him attack that man?” Maggie nodded toward Bobby Daniels, who was sitting patiently while Roger applied a series of small butterfly bandages down the length of his gash. The bikers had done as Maggie asked and were flanking Daniels like a pair of stone lions guarding a library entrance.

“No,” the woman admitted. “I didn’t see him attack anyone. It’s just that he didn’t fit in. I mean, look at us.” She waved a hand boozily toward the others. “He didn’t fit and I think he had something to do with it. For one thing, do you see him here now?”

I thought she had a point. So did Maggie.

“Okay,” Maggie conceded. “I appreciate it. Tell Roger I said you earned your free drinks.”

The woman staggered off and a scared-looking kid took her place.

“You old enough to be here?” Maggie asked him bluntly.

“Oh, yes, ma’am,” he said, whipping out a wallet and producing a military ID. “I’m twenty-four years old. I just look young for my age. Always have.”

Maggie handed his ID back without even looking at it. “You on leave?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m shipping out tomorrow.”

“Better get good and drunk tonight then,” Maggie said.

The kid was surprised. It took him a moment to realize she was joking, and when he finally laughed, it made him look about twelve years old. I tried to get a feel of what his fate held in store for him, especially if he was headed for active duty. But all I could get from him was an image of two older people, dressed for church, arms outstretched to hug him. Not a bad memory to take with you to bad places.

“What did you see?” Maggie asked him.

The kid blushed spectacularly, turning a tomato red all the way from the base of his neck to the tips of his ears. What a thing to live with.

“What is it?” Maggie asked him more kindly, seeing his distress.

“I got tossed,” he mumbled.

“What?”

“I got tossed.” He looked up at Maggie, ashamed. “You know, like dwarf tossing?”

“No, I don’t know,” Maggie said firmly.

“I was standing there, minding my own business, watching a real pretty girl dance on the bar, when someone picked me up by my waistband and the back of my pants and kind of threw me through the crowd. I hit some fellows sitting at the end of the bar and went down. That’s when about fifty people landed on top of me and I got dragged outside, and I can’t tell you much else.”

Maggie was staring at him. “You got tossed?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said emphatically. “And I don’t have to tell you how embarrassing that is.”

“No,” Maggie said. “You don’t. You have no idea who did it?”

He shook his head. “I reckon he was pretty big.”

Maggie did not correct him, although I am sure she was thinking the same thing I was: so far, just about every customer we’d seen, with the exception of the old man in Levi’s, could have tossed this kid across the room. Especially the women. But Maggie did not pursue the point. She was like a perfectly calibrated interrogation machine, and what was more: I could tell she liked it. I was getting a glimpse into the real Maggie at last. She liked being among these people.

“Okay,” Maggie said. “Thanks. Go on inside and have your drinks. And good luck tomorrow.” She hesitated, then took his hands and squeezed them. “Don’t be a hero. Just put your head down and get through it. It’ll pass.”

He looked at her a little strangely as he walked away to his fate.

I wondered if he’d ever come back.

Two over-the-hill and overweight biker chicks took his place. “We want to testify together,” they announced in unison.

“You’re not testifying,” Maggie explained patiently. “This is all off the record. I just need to know who started it and who came after that guy.”

“We still want to do it together,” one of them said.

“Okay by me.” Maggie waved at them to take a seat.

They sat side by side, illuminated by the neon lights. They were definitely old before their time and it was likely alcohol and smoking were the reasons why. But for a pair of women who’d been hanging out at a bar all night, they seemed pretty damn sober to me. They took turns telling their story, like that children’s game Connie used to play with the boys: one person would make up a sentence, then the next person would add their own and so on, no matter how absurd it got.

“That guy was sitting at the end of the bar,” the bottle blonde of the pair explained as she pointed out Bobby Daniels. “Minding his own business. Not saying anything.”

“We figure he was laying low on account of he’s right out of the joint,” the second woman said. “Anyone can tell. A couple of the working girls approached him, knowing that and all, but he just waved them off.”

“Might have gone gay inside,” the first woman confided to Maggie. “Happens to some of them.”

“That’s true,” her friend agreed. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Then this sweaty fat guy comes up,” the first woman said. “Sat next to him and you could tell they knew each other. But I can’t say they liked each other. It was like they had to talk to one another but neither one of them wanted to be there. Like what they really wanted to be was arguing, but there was too many people around.”

“I understand,” Maggie said. “What did this fat guy look like?”

“A loser,” the first woman offered.

“Like a really bad car salesman,” her friend explained. “One who hasn’t sold a car in, like, twenty years. Fat. Sweating. Losing his hair. Bad suit.”

“He had red hair,” the first woman offered.

“No, he didn’t. I have red hair,” her friend said, running her hands through it to prove it. It was nice hair, too. She took good care of it. “That guy had brown hair. What was left of it.”

“Okay, he had reddish brown hair,” the first one decided. “And he stunk of bad aftershave and way too much of it. Like we couldn’t smell the booze underneath it?”

Danny. Danny had been there, too.

“What happened next?”

“They were arguing,” the second woman explained. “Me and Tammy tried to get closer. You know. We were bored. There’s this new girl,” she explained, then stopped to make a face. “She was in line earlier to talk to you. Every time she climbs up on the bar, you’d think Miss America had arrived and decided to tear off her clothes and do lap dances. The men go wild and we’re invisible.”

“Yeah,” the first one agreed angrily. “And they throw all of our money at her. Because, let me tell you, we bring in steady paychecks, which is more than I can say for most of the men in this place.”

“And then?” Maggie asked firmly, leading them back to the point.

“They were sitting at the end of the bar, near the front door,” the first one explained. “I figured it was because the young guy had claustrophobia. You know, he didn’t like little spaces on account of just getting out of the joint.”

“That’s probably true,” the second woman said in admiration. “I didn’t get that far in thinking about it.”

“And?” Maggie asked less patiently.

The first woman was ready: “All of a sudden, someone shoves Tony into the two of them. I mean, he just comes flying out of the crowd and slams into them, and they topple over on Charley, and some girl he’s trying to pick up, and drinks are spilling everywhere, and Charley and Tony come up swinging, and before you know it, everyone has pushed out the front door and they’re rolling around in the parking lot, and the whole place empties out and you can’t see a thing, but people are hitting the dirt right and left and fists are flying.”

“Yeah,” the second woman added. “It was way better than the dancing.”

“How did he get cut?” Maggie asked, gesturing toward Bobby Daniels.

Both women shrugged. “That’s kind of the weird part,” the first woman said. “I mean, we were looking and we didn’t see nobody pull a knife. So whoever it was had to be quick. Now, I did see maybe a chain or two, but these guys got records. Most of ’em got two strikes against ’em. They’re not going to pull their weapons unless it’s serious.”

“Are Charley and Tony waiting to talk to me?” Maggie asked, nodding toward the two men standing on either side of Bobby Daniels.

“Tony is,” the second woman said. “Charley split with the girl he was hitting on as soon as Roger came out swinging a bat and broke up the fight.”

“Yeah,” the first woman agreed. “Charley’s a lover, not a fighter.”

Maggie suppressed a smile. “Okay.” she said. “Thanks, you guys. I appreciate how observant you are.”

“Yeah?” the first woman said eagerly. She looked at her friend. “Maybe you and me ought to be cops?” They were still laughing as they stumbled back inside, anxious to start drinking on someone else’s tab for a change.

None of these people had bothered Maggie. She was able to see beyond their rough exteriors and bad teeth and lack of money to the human beings beneath. She was able to find some sort of point in common with them, somehow, and they could feel it, and that was why they talked so easily to her. What a woman. I marveled at what I felt coming from her. She was calm and organized inside. She knew this was a distance game and that the starting pistol had just been fired. She was going to piece it all together before it came to an end, no matter how long it took and how many kooks she had to wade through to get to the truth.

She waved over Tony the biker. He was so big that the picnic table tipped to his side when he sat down and Maggie had to put out her hands for balance.

“Sorry, Officer,” he said in a low, rumbling voice as he settled in and slammed two big mugs of beer down on either side of him, like a modern-day Viking drinking his mead after a hard day’s worth of raping and pillaging. I took in his yellow-turning-to-white beard, the little pigtails he’d braided into the mass of it like a pirate, saw his big blue eyes, and recognized him: my friend from the other night, the one I’d hitched a ride into town with on his chopper.

“You’re Tony?” Maggie asked him carefully.

He nodded. “I don’t think last names are necessary, do you?”

“No, I don’t,” Maggie agreed. “You got shoved from behind, is that right?”

He nodded, drained one of the beers in a single series of gulps, wiped his hand on his beard, belched like rumbling thunder, and launched into his story. “I was standing there admiring Jeanna—she’s like the best dancer they’ve had here in years and Roger only lets her get up there maybe once an hour, on account of it keeps the crowd hanging on and drinking while they wait.” He waited for Maggie to nod her understanding and continued. “So there’s Jeanna up on the bar, dancing away, and I’ve got a frosty one in my hand to cool things down.” He hoisted a beer mug in salute. “And all of a sudden some son of a bitch headbutts me from behind.”

“Headbutts you?” Maggie repeated.

“Yes, ma’am,” Tony said indignantly. “Had to be a head-butt. Cowardly, but true. I got headbutted from behind, and while I am a big man, as you can see, I can’t be expected to hold my own when attacked from behind like that.”

“No, of course not,” Maggie murmured, and she was smart enough not to tell the guy that she knew who had been tossed into him from behind. The poor kid had a shaky enough future in front of him as it was.

“I go flying forward, knock two guys off their stools, slam into Charley, who is not too friendly even on a good night, and drinks got spilled and all hell broke loose. Charley came up swinging at me, someone tried to crack a bar stool on my head, I got kicked in the nuts, and well, after that, things went a little red, you know what I’m saying?”

Maggie nodded.

“We all end up outside and everyone is jumping into it, and I just kept swinging until I notice that the guy over there”—he gestured toward Bobby Daniels—“is bleeding pretty bad. I helped Roger stop the fight after that. I mean, fun is fun, but I could see the dude had been cut with something serious. Not a beer bottle. A serious blade. Now, I know Roger, he’s a buddy of mine. Stuff happens like that at his place too often and they could shut it down. They’re looking to shut it down, believe you me.”

“Did you see who had the knife?”

He shook his head. “I was swinging first and looking second.” He hesitated and glanced at Bobby Daniels. “I know that guy’s fresh out. I know the look. But you got to tell his parole officer, he had nuthin’ to do with it. Really. He was just sitting there.”

Maggie seemed genuinely touched by his concern. “It’s okay. He’s not on parole. He’ll be all right.”

The biker nodded, satisfied.

“Anything else?” Maggie asked, sounding hopeful.

“Hell, yeah. But you better talk to Barney about that, and maybe you better fasten your holster before you do.” Tony popped a thumb over his shoulder. “He’s got something pretty damn interesting to share.”

“Thank you, Tony,” Maggie said as she handed him the twenty she had promised him for guarding Daniels. “You are a prince among men. Now go on and finish your guarding duties, then go get your money’s worth out of Roger. I want you to drain an entire keg for free.”

“Will do, ma’am,” he rose from the picnic table and Maggie went tilting backward. She grabbed the wooden edge to keep from falling off. “Care to join me in a beer when you’re done?” Tony asked as he tugged hopefully on one of his beard’s pigtails.

“I appreciate the offer,” Maggie said sincerely. “But I’ll be on the clock.”

“No problem,” Tony said magnanimously. “And if someone don’t cooperate, you just tell them Big Tony will kick their ass until they do.”

Maggie smiled. “Thank you, Tony. I appreciate that. Would you mind sending Barney over? Nicely?”

Tony’s idea of sending Barney over nicely was to nearly launch him in the air, but Barney did not seem to take of fense at Tony’s enthusiasm. He had something important to tell Maggie.

“It was a cop,” he said before he’d even sat down.

Maggie froze. A sadness filled her. I think she finally put it together with what the two biker chicks had told her and knew who he was going to name before he’d said a word. “A cop?” she asked quietly.

Barney held up a hand. “God as my witness. I know you aren’t going to want to believe me, but it was a cop.” He had a massive gut that was splitting the sides of his black leather vest and his bald head gleamed first pink and then blue in the neon glare.

“Who was a cop?” Maggie asked. “The man with the knife?”

“The dude who started it all.”

“Tell me from the beginning,” Maggie said. Her appreciation of the people she was questioning and their quirks had disappeared. She felt weary and resigned, truly sad to hear another officer had been involved. And not, I realized, the least bit doubtful. She believed the biker.

“I walked in the door a couple minutes before it all happened,” Barney explained. “It’s my momma’s birthday and we had a little party for her so I got a late start. I was ready to catch up with my drinking and I’d heard about Jeanna.”

“Yes, I’ve heard about Jeanna, too,” Maggie said, her heart not really in it. But she was too good of a cop not to try and establish rapport.

“Well, then, you know she’s worth laying down for a drink or two. I come in the door and there he is: the biggest son of a bitch I’ve ever met. Sitting right there at the bar, next to that poor guy.” Barney nodded toward Daniels, who had closed his eyes and seemed to have fallen asleep.

“You recognized a police officer? When you walked in?” Maggie asked carefully. “With that guy?”

“Hell yeah, I did,” Barney said. “Asshole planted an eight ball on me twelve years ago. I did hard time for it, too. Missed my boy growing up. They pinned a whole operation on me. I’ll never forget his face.”

“What’s his name?” Maggie asked, though I think she already knew it.

Barney looked a little shamefaced. “I said I’d never forget his face. But as it so happens, his name does escape me.”

“Describe him,” Maggie asked.

“About five foot ten; maybe fifty pounds overweight; head the shape of a sixteen-pound bowling ball with ginger-colored hair kind of plastered over it so he can tell himself no one notices he’s going bald; big, fat bulb of a nose from hitting the bottle; a sweaty face filled with freckles; bad suit the color of dog shit; smells like cheap-ass aftershave.”

Maggie stared at him. So did I. He had just described Danny to a tee and there was no mistaking it. Danny was the one. And I knew he had probably planted the coke on good ole Barney twelve years before, too. That interested me almost as much as the fact that Danny had been at the Double Deuce an hour before. Because, while Danny and I had been sloppy and stupid and drunk and useless, we had never been dirty cops. At least I never had. I’d never planted a scrap of evidence in my life. That was the one thing I would not do, and I’d never known Danny to, either.

Now? I started thinking back to our drug busts, going over our cases. Danny could have been crooked the whole time. I may not have known him at all.

“Did you see anyone else you recognized?” Maggie asked. Her eyes were sad. She didn’t want Danny to be a part of this.

Barney looked apologetic. “Just the usual assholes who jump into every fight that comes along.”

“Okay,” Maggie said. The news had made her tired. She handed Barney his twenty wearily and he took it, looking a little ashamed.

“I shouldn’t take this from you,” he said to her. “You’re okay.”

“No, you take it,” Maggie said. “Buy your son a present. You’ve been very helpful. Can you send Jeanna over?”

“Sure.” Barney brightened. “I’ll escort her here myself.”

“That won’t necessary,” Maggie told him with a tight smile. “She looks like she can make it on her own.”

Jeanna had obviously just finished her shift on the bar. She was covered with sweat, breathing hard and counting a wad of dollar bills as she sat down in front of Maggie. Up close, she wasn’t as quite a pretty as I—and everyone else, no doubt—had hoped. Her jittery movements, pinpoint eyes, and the strange, disjointed energy she gave off told me why. I had seen enough meth heads in my career to know one when I saw one. She might be the best thing standing at the Double Deuce right now, but it wouldn’t be long before she, too, was old before her time and the grayish cast to her skin grew worse. It made me sad. I was wit nessing her last few months of glory, the final days of her beauty, and they would pass all too quickly before she became just another worn-out, washed-up woman sitting at the bar of the Double Deuce, hoping some man would be drunk enough to see her as beautiful.

I think she could see her future, too. She did not look Maggie in the eye the whole time she was interviewed.

“Here,” Maggie said, sliding two twenties over the table to her. “These are for you.” She slid another twenty toward her. “This is for Roger.”

“Thanks,” she mumbled, quickly pocketing the money in a slit in her low-slung jeans. She stuffed the wad of ones in a back pocket. She glanced at Maggie quickly before looking away. “I’ve got a kid and I need this gig.”

“I understand,” Maggie said and I think she truly did. “You make your money while you can.”

“Damn straight. I still got a few good years left in me.” Jeanna pulled out a box of Marlboros. “Mind if I smoke?”

“Go ahead,” Maggie said, noting the woman’s trembling hands.

Jeanna saw her looking. “It’s not what you think,” she explained, holding one hand out in front of her. “It’s what I saw tonight that’s scaring me.”

“What did you see?” Maggie asked quietly.

Jeanna took a deep breath and picked a fleck of tobacco from one corner of her mouth. Her fingernails had been bitten to the quick. “You’re just going to think I’m crazy,” she said. “Or drunk. Or both.”

“Try me.”

Jeanna fixed her eyes on the neon signs blinking out their promises. “I’ve been dancing here for about a month. The money’s real good and Roger keeps the creeps off. I mean, we pretend to be college girls who just got the urge to dance on the bar and take their clothes off for the marks, but the regulars know we’re here all the time. I’m a professional, just like you.”

Maggie didn’t argue and Jeanna looked encouraged. “I dance maybe five, six times a night. Just for the tips. And all I do is dance. You know what I’m saying? I’m not one of the girls who starts working the minute she steps down from the bar.”

“I know that,” Maggie said, but then her voice grew surprisingly harsh. “But they all started out like you. You do understand that?”

Jeanna looked up at the sky. “Course I do. I’m not stupid.”

“And there’s no going back once you start,” Maggie added.

Jeanna stared down at her hands before taking a deep drag on her cigarette, ignoring both Maggie’s comments and the possibilities for her future. “I’ve seen a lot of creeps come in the Double D. I mean, face it, it’s not the classiest of joints.” Her laugh was bitter. “We get a lot of guys right out of the pen down the road, like that one.” She nodded toward Bobby Daniels, asleep with his head against the bar wall. “I pegged him as soon as he walked in the door, even if he is nicer-looking than most. It’s the bad haircuts that give them away, but it’s also this look they have. Like the world’s too much for them but they’re not able to keep themselves from walking right into the middle of it anyway.”

“What did you see tonight that scared you?” Maggie asked gently.

“There was this guy standing toward the back of the crowd. You know how it is. You start dancing and a bunch of guys gather and they’re drinking, and then they want you to take something off so they start handing you bills, and they kind of crowd closer until Roger has to step in and make them behave.”

“And this guy at the back of the crowd got too close?” Maggie asked.

Jeanna shook her head. “Just the opposite. Everything about him was just the opposite. He was too straight for this place, too well dressed.” She hesitated. “Too clean.”

“Can you describe him?”

“Sure. And that’s the scary part. He was standing in a dark corner at first, I think he wanted to be hidden a little, and I just figured he was some perv, you know, who needed a dark corner for what he was doing. Wouldn’t be the first time at the Double D.”

Ugh. Roger’s job had its drawbacks after all.

“But there’s this crazy kind of mini-searchlight that Roger turns on when you really get going, just to whip the crowd up and get the booze and money flowing. It turns in a circle, all through the bar.”

Maggie nodded. She’d seen it in action. So had I. It had always added a touch of surreal World War II escape-from-prison-camp atmosphere to my arrests when the spotlight was sweeping over me while I was handcuffing someone. But the crowd had loved it.

“So, I’m standing to one side of the bar, waiting for my time up, turning down guys that think I’m some kind of whore.” She cast another quick glance at Maggie, then looked back at the neon signs. “And I notice that every time this searchlight scans the room, it sort of freezes on this guy, just for a couple of seconds, before it moves on. And he can’t hardly move, you know, because he’s wedged in between a lot of hollering fools, and I don’t think he likes that this spotlight is stopping on him, but it’s all preprogrammed and no one really notices anyway and I don’t think there’s much he can do about it. The guy’s real tall, did I say that yet?”

Maggie shook her head.

“Well, he was. Real tall. So I can see his face and I noticed that he’s staring at Becky and Nan kind of funny.”

“Becky and Nan?” Maggie asked.

“They go on before me. Roger puts them both up there at the same time, hoping to draw a bigger crowd. They do this rubbing up against each other and pouring tequila on each other stuff. It’s kind of lame, I mean, take a good look at them. Would you really want to see either one of them naked, much less both of them at the same time? But I guess late at night, with everyone drunk, and the lights kind of low and those spotlights flashing around, well, people can make them into anyone they want them to be.”

She was smarter than she looked, I decided. I hoped she was smart enough to get out while she could.

“And this man?” Maggie prompted.

“It was the way he was staring at them that got me. I mean, I am halfway across the room but I can’t stop staring at him because even from there I can see his eyes. They were mean. They were really dark. Black, mean, hate-filled eyes, and he was just staring at them on the bar, and his whole face was real still, frozen, and real creepy and white each time that spotlight stopped on him, and he was just staring at Becky and Nan and I knew what he was thinking.” She paused. “He wanted to hurt them bad. He hated them. He didn’t even know them and I could tell he hated them. He looked mean and hungry and like he wanted to pull out a blade and start cutting them up into ribbons.”

She stopped, her voice quavering, and took a drag on her cigarette, inhaling deeply and holding the smoke in. I wondered how she knew what a man looked like when he was in the mood to cut. I figured she probably danced here so she could wear those low-slung jeans most of the time. They’d hide a lot of scars. But I didn’t question her authority. I knew she’d seen that look in men before.

“What happened then?” Maggie asked.

“It was my turn to dance. Roger puts me up there alone on account of I like to dance all over and, well, people like my dancing.”

“So I’ve heard a few times tonight,” Maggie said with a smile. She wanted the woman to keep on talking. Or maybe she was just being nice. She didn’t have the need to tear down others like most people did. I think she liked being kind to them. I think it made her feel better about all the ugly things she had to see.

Jeanna smiled back at Maggie, and for just an instant I got a glimpse of what Jeanna must have been like before she started taking off her clothes and dancing on top of a bar for a crowd of drunks. An image flashed through my mind: Jeanna, young, strong, healthy, tanned, dark hair blowing behind her as she stood at the prow of a powerboat, skimming the surface of an indigo lake, the sun shining bright above her. She was younger, happier, filled with hope.

How had she ended up here?

“I go up and start doing my thing,” she told Maggie. “But I couldn’t get that guy out of my mind. I was worried about Becky and Nan. They got bad judgment about men.” She laughed at the irony of her words, but it was not a humorous laugh. “I thought, oh, lord, what if one of them goes out into the parking lot with that man? They will not come back.”

She looked up at Maggie, her face frightened. “But he didn’t leave. He just stood there in that corner, staring at me with so much hatred I could feel it across an entire room. I could feel it across a hundred bodies. I could feel it washing over me each time that spotlight hit him.” She shivered. “I couldn’t take my mind off of it. I knew he was bad, and I knew he was looking at me and trying to decide where to cut me first.”

She was talking faster now and I wondered how much the speed had to do with what she had experienced and how much it was just that she had recognized Alan Hayes for what he was, when so many others had been fooled.

“Did he have something to do with the fight?” Maggie asked her.

“I can’t be sure. I didn’t see it start. First thing I know, there was trouble and chairs were flying and glass was breaking and I had to hop down behind the bar before I got hurt, and then people were rolling out the front door and the whole place emptied, and Roger was madder than hell and started outside with a baseball bat.”

“Did you see the man again?” Maggie asked.

The dancer shook her head and looked around her into the darkness. “I think I’m always going to see his face, though. In my nightmares. I get them a lot, you know. Nightmares.” She shivered. “I will tell you this. He may not have started that fight, but he had something to do with it. As soon as I saw him, I knew it—I knew that something real bad was going to happen.”

Maggie had put it together. Bobby Daniels. Danny. Alan Hayes. Their lives had all crossed paths at the Double Deuce. She didn’t know what they were trying to do, but she knew they had all been at the bar. Now she would question Daniels and maybe find out why.

“Here,” she said, sliding another twenty across the picnic table. “For the babysitter. And you make sure you get two guys to walk you to your car tonight.” She handed her one of her business cards. “Will you promise to call me if you ever see that man again?”

“Sure,” Jeanna said as she stared at the twenty in wonder. “You make a lot as a police officer?”

Maggie laughed. “Not as much as you.” Her smile disappeared. “The future’s a lot brighter, though.”

“What are you talking about?” Jeanna asked. “You could be shot dead at any time.”

Maggie didn’t want to say it—but she said it anyway. “I’ve still got a better chance at having a future than you do, at least if you keep on working here.”

Jeanna took her money and left.