In the windows that flanked the front door of the narrow house, a blue neon sign in the left pane announced PALM READER, and in the right glowed an orange neon outline of a hand, bright even on a sunny morning. The cracked and hoved walkway led to a blue door featuring a painting of a mystic eye, but it also branched toward a flight of exterior stairs, most likely not originally part of the house, at the south side of the structure, where a discreet sign indicated that the detective’s offices were on the second floor.

The house stood among enormous phoenix palms, one of which shaded the stairs with its great green crown. The tree hadn’t been trimmed in years; a densely layered, twenty-foot-long collar of dead fronds drooped over one another and encircled the bole, creating a fire danger and an ideal home for tree rats.

Ascending toward the covered landing, Micky heard the rustle of busy rodents scurrying along vertical tunnels in the thatchwork of dry brown fronds, as though they were pacing her, keeping her under observation.

When no one responded to the doorbell, she knocked. When the knock was ignored, she leaned on the bell again.

The man who finally responded to her insistent summons was big, good-looking in a rough sort of way, with melancholy eyes. He wore tattered sneakers, chinos, and a Hawaiian shirt. He had skipped his morning shave.

“You,” he said, without preamble, “are a woman in some kind of trouble, but I’m not in that line of work anymore.”

“Maybe I’m just from County Vector Control, want to talk to you about the rat farm in this tree right here.”

“That would sure be a waste of talent.”

Expecting a nasty crack in the tradition of F. Bronson, Micky bristled. “Yeah? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It wasn’t an insult, if that’s how you took it.”

“Wasn’t it? Talent, huh? You think I should be turning tricks or something?”

“That’s never been your type of trouble. I just meant I think you could kick something way bigger than a rat’s ass.”

“You’re the PI, the detective?”

“Used to be. Like I said. Closed up shop.”

She hadn’t called ahead because she’d been afraid that he would obtain a quick financial report on her before she got here. Now, having seen the place, she figured most of his clients weren’t the type that American Express pursued with offers of platinum cards.

“I’m Micky Bellsong. I’m not with Vector Control, but you’ve got a rat problem.”

“Everybody does,” he said, and somehow managed to convey that he wasn’t talking about long-tailed rodents. He started to shut her out.

She planted one loot on the threshold. “I’m not leaving till you either hear me all the way through—or snap my neck and throw me down the stairs.”

He seemed to consider the second option, studying her throat. “You ought to sell Jesus door-to-door. The whole world would be saved by Tuesday.”

“You did good work for a woman I knew once. She was desperate, she couldn’t pay much, but you did good work anyway.”

“I take it you can’t pay much, either.”

“Part cash, part IOU. Might take me a while to pay you off, but if I don’t, I’ll break my own legs and save you the trouble.”

“Wouldn’t be any trouble. I might enjoy it. But the fact still is, I’ve gone out of business.”

“The woman you helped was Wynette Jenkins. She was in prison at the time. That’s where I met her.”

“Sure. I remember.”

Wynette had arranged for her six-year-old son, Danny, to live with his maternal grandparents while she did her time. She’d been in the can less than a week when her ex-husband, Vin, had taken the boy to live with him. The law refused to intervene because Vin was the child’s legal father. He was also a mean drunk and a wife abuser who had frequently knocked Danny around, and Wynette knew that he would terrorize the boy on a daily basis and eventually scar him for life, if not kill him. She heard about Farrel through another prisoner and persuaded her parents to approach him. Within two months, Farrel had provided the police with evidence of Vin’s criminal activities that got the man arrested, indicted, and separated from his son. They returned the boy to the custody of Wynette’s parents. Her folks said they suspected Farrel had taken the case, even at a loss, because it involved a child in trouble, and that he had a soft spot for kids.

Still employing her right foot as a doorstop, Micky said, “A little girl’s going to be killed if I don’t help her. And I can’t help her alone.”

This dramatic claim had an effect opposite of the one that she expected. The detective’s expression of weary indifference hardened into a glower, although his sudden anger seemed not to be directed at her. “Lady, I’m exactly who you don’t need. You want real cops.”

“They’re not going to believe me. It’s a strange case. And this girl. . . she’s special.”

“They’re all special.” Farrel’s voice was flat, almost cold; and perhaps Micky should have heard a dismissive platitude in those three words, or even callousness. But in his eyes, she thought she saw pain instead of genuine anger, and suddenly his glower seemed to be a mask that concealed an anguish he’d long kept private. “Cops are who you want. I know. I used to be one.”

“I’m an ex-con. The girl’s sonofabitch stepfather is rich and well connected. And he’s highly regarded, mainly by a bunch of fools, but they’re fools whose opinion matters. Even if I could get the cops to take me seriously, I couldn’t make them move fast enough to help this girl.”

“There’s nothing I can do for you,” he insisted.

“You know the deal,” Micky said stubbornly. “Either hear me out—or throw me down the stairs. And if you try throwin’, for starters you’ll need Bactine, Band-Aids, and a sitz bath for your balls.”

He sighed. “Pushing me like this is a mile past desperation, lady.”

“I never claimed I wasn’t desperate. But I’m glad to hear you think I’m a lady.”

“Can’t figure why the hell I answered the door,” he said sourly.

“In your heart, you were hoping for a flower delivery.”

He moved backward. “Whatever your story is, just spit it out plain and simple. Don’t bother strumming on the heartstrings.”

“Can’t strum what I can’t find.”

His living room also served as his office. To the left stood a desk, two client chairs, one file cabinet. To the right a single armchair was aimed at a television set; a small table and a floorlamp flanked the chair. Bare walls. Books piled in the corners.

The drab furniture had probably been purchased in the thrift shop on the corner. The carpet looked as cheap as any loom could weave it. Everything appeared to be scrubbed and polished, however, and the air smelled like lemon-scented furniture wax and pine-scented

disinfectant. The place must have been the austere cell of a monk with a cleaning obsession.

A cramped kitchen lay visible beyond one of two interior doors. The other door, closed now, evidently led to a bedroom and bath.

As Farrel sat behind the desk, Micky settled in an unpadded, rail-backed chair provided for clients, which was uncomfortable enough to serve as dungeon furniture.

The detective had been working at his desk, on the computer, when Micky had rung the doorbell. The printer fan hummed softly. She couldn’t see the screen.

At a few minutes past ten in the morning, Farrel had also been working on a can of Budweiser. Now he picked it up, took a swallow.

“Early lunch or late breakfast?” Micky wondered.

“Breakfast. If it makes me look any more like a responsible citizen, I also had a Pop-Tart.”

“I’m familiar with that diet.”

“If it’s all the same to you, let’s can the chitchat. Just tell me your sad story if you really have to, and then let me get back to my retirement.”

Micky hesitated, wanting to start her story well, and remembered Aunt Gen’s prophetic words from Monday evening, not yet four days past. She said, “Sometimes a person’s life can change for the better in one moment of grace, like a miracle almost. Someone so special can come along, all unexpected, and pivot you in a new direction, change you forever. You ever had that experience, Mr. Farrel?”

He grimaced. “You are peddling Jesus door-to-door.”

As succinctly as possible, Micky told him about Leilani Klonk, old Sinsemilla, and the pseudofather on the hunt for extraterrestrial healers. She told him about Lukipela gone to the stars.

She withheld Preston Maddoc’s identity, however, afraid that Farrel shared P. Bronson’s admiration for the killer. If he heard the name, he might never give her the opportunity to win his involvement.

More than once as Micky talked, Farrel gazed at the computer, as though her story wasn’t sufficiently involving to keep him from being distracted by whatever was on the screen.

He asked no questions and gave no reliable signs of interest. At times he leaned back in his chair, eyes closed, so still and so lacking in expression that he might have been asleep. At other times, his features once again seemed as hard as mortared stone, and he made eye contact of such discomfiting intensity that Micky thought he had lost patience and would throw her down the stairs regardless of her threat to put up a fight.

Breaking off a nail-you-to-the-wall stare, he abruptly rose to his feet. “The more I hear, the more I know I’m not right for this. Never would have been right, even when I was in business. I don’t even see what you could want from me.”

“I’m getting there.”

“And I suppose you insist on getting there. So to lubricate my way through this meeting, I’ll need another beer. You want one?”

“No thanks.”

“I thought you were familiar with this diet.”

“I’m not on it anymore.”

“Hooray for you.”

“I’ve already lost all the years I can afford to lose.”

“Yeah, well, not me.”

Farrel went into the kitchen, and a fog of gray discouragement crept into Micky as she watched him through the open door. After taking a beer from the refrigerator, he pulled off the tab, drained a couple ounces in one swallow, set the can on a counter, and spiked the remaining Budweiser with a shot of whiskey.

Returning to the desk but not to his chair, Farrel seemed to vibrate with a barely throttled fury that Micky had said nothing to evoke. As he stood there staring down at her, his voice remained low, weary rather than angry, but also tight with a tension that he couldn’t conceal. “You’re wasting my time and yours, Ms. Bellsong. But mine isn’t worth much. So if you want to wait while I use the John, that’s fine. Or are you ready to leave now?”

She almost left. Noah Farrel appeared to be as worthless as he was indifferent to her problem.

She remained in the rail-backed chair, however, because the anguish in his eyes belied his apparent indifference. On some level, she had reached him even though he didn’t want to become involved. “You still haven’t heard me out.”

“By the time I have heard you out, I’m going to need eardrum transplants.”

When he left the room, he closed the door to the bedroom-bath. And he took the spiked Budweiser with him.

He probably didn’t need to use the John, and he certainly didn’t need another breakfast beer. These were excuses to interrupt Micky’s story and thus dilute its impact. Leilani’s predicament had affected him, sure enough; but Farrel was determined not to be affected to the extent that he would feel obligated to help her.

From bitter experience, Micky knew how useful alcohol could be when making a morally bankrupt decision didn’t come naturally and when you needed to numb your conscience a little in order to do the wrong thing. She recognized the strategy.

Farrel wouldn’t return until he’d drunk the fortified Budweiser. More likely than not, he would visit the kitchen for a third serving before at last sitting down at his desk again. Tuning Micky out would be easier by then, and he would be able to convince himself that the wrong thing was the right move.

If she hadn’t known the great kindness he’d done for Wynette, she might not have hung in here as long as this.

But she also held on to a thread of hope because Noah Farrel clearly didn’t have long-term experience with morning drinking or perhaps with drinking binges at any hour. Evidence of his nouveau-drunk status was evident in the self-conscious way he handled the can, first pushing it aside as if shunning it, but a moment later turning it nervously in his hands, tracing the rim with one thumb, clicking a fingernail against the aluminum as if to assess by sound how much brew remained, utterly lacking the casualness of a seasoned lush’s relationship with his poison.

Micky’s history with drink convinced her that pressing Farrel harder, right now, would fail to move him and that this was one of those times when retreat—and special tactics—would prove to be the wiser course. She needed him for his expertise, because she couldn’t afford another detective; she was depending on the kindness that he had shown Wynette and on his rumored weakness for cases involving children at risk.

A lined yellow legal pad and a pen by among other items on the detective’s desk. The moment Farrel left the room, Micky snatched up the pen and pad to write a message:

Leilani’s stepfather is Preston Maddoc. Look him up. He’s killed 11 people. Uses the name Jordan Banks, but was married under his real name. Where were they married? Proof? Who is Sinsemilla, really? How do we prove she had a disabled son? Time running out. Gut feeling—the girl dead in a week. Reach me through my aunt, Geneva Davis.

She concluded the message with Aunt Gen’s phone number and put the legal pad on the desk.

From her purse, she withdrew three hundred dollars in twenties. This was the most she could afford to pay him. In fact, she couldn’t afford this much, but she calculated that it was a sum sufficient to make him feel obligated to do something.

She hesitated. He might spend this retainer on beer, of course. She had too little money to risk ten bucks on a gamble, let alone three hundred.

One thing about him, above all else, convinced her to put the cash atop the legal pad and weight it with the pen. Nouveau drunk or not, he was obviously a haunted man, and by Micky’s reckoning, that counted as a point in his favor. She didn’t know what loss or what failure haunted him, but her own journey had taught her that haunted people are not dissolute by nature and that they will try to exorcise their demons if a caring hand is extended to them at the right time.