Your Heart Belongs to Me

silence. “I don’t get creeped-out easily, but this place is getting to me.”
    “Me too,” he said.
    He slipped Teresa’s photo out of the plastic sleeve, set it aside, and closed the ring binder.
    “He’ll miss it,” the brunette warned.
    “Maybe he will. I don’t care. Let him wonder.”
    Ryan returned both ring binders to the bookshelf where he had found them.
    In the doorway, leaning against the jamb, arms folded across her breasts, she said, “We have a tail on them. They finished dinner. Now they’re back at her apartment.”
    She must have been between thirty and thirty-five, but she had the air of someone older. She radiated a self-confidence that seemed to be wisdom more than pride.
    “Would you let him?” Ryan wondered.
    “Let him what?”
    “Touch you.”
    Her eyes were not gravestone granite, after all, but castle ramparts, and only a fool would try to storm her.
    She said, “I’d shoot off his pecker.”
    “I believe you would.”
    “It’d be a service to humanity.”
    Ryan wondered, “Why does Rebecca let him?”
    “Something’s wrong with her.”
    “What?”
    “And not just her. Half the world is in love with death.”
    “Not me.”
    As if in quiet accusation, the brunette glanced at the photo of Teresa on the desk.
    Ryan said, “That’s just evidence.”
    “Of what?”
    “I don’t know yet.”
    Earlier, he had searched the desk. He returned to the drawer that contained stationery and selected a nine-by-twelve envelope, into which he slipped the photograph.
    “I’m done here,” he said.
    They walked the house together, turning off lights, pretending not to listen for the footfalls of corpses in their wake.
    In the foyer, at the security-system panel, she said, “The alarm was engaged when I got here. I have to reset it.”
    As she keyed in a code that she had somehow learned, Ryan asked, “How did you disarm it without setting it off?”
    “A few small tools and years of practice.”
    The tools were evidently sufficiently compact to fit in her purse, for she carried no other bag.
    Outside, she said, “Stay with me,” and after passing under the weeping boughs of the melaleucas, she headed south on the public sidewalk. “I’m parked a block and a half away.”
    He knew that she didn’t need him at her side for protection any more than did the hulking George Zane.
    In the absence of streetlamps and in the weakness of the moon, they cast no shadows.
    Here, miles from the flash of the casinos, the sky offered a desolation of stars.
    Like all Mojave settlements, regardless of size and history, this one seemed to have a tenuous existence. An ancient ocean had withdrawn millennia ago, leaving a vast sea of sand, but the desert was no more eternal than the waters before it, and the city markedly more ephemeral than the desert.
    “Whatever’s wrong in your life,” she said, “it’s none of my business.”
    Ryan did not disagree.
    “The way Wilson Mott runs his operation, I’d be fired for saying one word more than I’ve just said.”
    Curious about where this might be leading, Ryan assured her, “I’ve no reason to tell him anything you say.”
    After a silence, she said, “You’re a haunted man.”
    “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
    “I’m not surprised by that.”
    Across the street, Zane sat behind the wheel of the Mercedes. They passed him and kept going.
    She said, “Not ghosts. You’re haunted by your own death.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “It means, you’re waiting for the ax to fall.”
    “If I were paranoid,” he said, “I’d wonder if Wilson Mott has been investigating me .”
    “I’m just good at reading people.”
    With a thrum, a presence passed overhead. Looking up at broad pale wings, Ryan thought it might have been an owl.
    “The way I read you,” she continued, “you can’t figure out who.”
    “Who what?”
    “Who’s going to kill you.”
    Across the night, the monotonous song of cicadas sounded like razor blades stropping razor blades.
    As they walked, she said, “When you’re trying to figure out who…you’ve got to keep in mind the roots of violence.”
    He wondered if she had been a cop before she had gone to work for Mott.
    “There are only five,” she said. “Lust, envy, anger, avarice, and vengeance.”
    “Motives, you mean.”
    Arriving at her car, she said, “It’s best to think of them as failings, not motives.”
    Parking lights and the lazy engine noise of a coasting car rose behind