After releasing a long breath, he looked at Vaughn and said, “Okay, arrest her.”

“What?”

A satisfied smirk spread across Vaughn’s face and an evil grin spread across the detective’s. “Just kidding,” he said.

Vaughn scowled in disappointment and stalked off as the detective sat beside me.

“What’s going on here?” he asked.

“I was carjacked.” Obviously, my telling the cops was the plan. Otherwise, Reyes wouldn’t have hit me. Or I hoped not. “And handcuffed to this bed frame with handcuffs.”

“I see.” The detective took out his notepad and jotted down a few notes right as a U.S. Marshal came through the door. “Does he still have your car?”

With a mental sigh, I realized this could take a while.

Annnnnnnnnnnd it did.

Two hours later, I sat in the back of Owen Vaughn’s patrol car waiting for Uncle Bob to pick me up. I’d been checked out by an EMT and harassed by a rascally officer named Bud. After that, I figured it was time to get the heck outta Dodge, so I called for backup in the form of my favorite uncle to convince Albuquerque’s finest to let me go. The black eye helped. Holy cow, Reyes packed a punch. And I doubted he was even trying. Which, thank God.

I looked into the rearview mirror at Vaughn. He was sitting in the driver’s seat, which was cool, since it was his car. “Are you ever going to tell me what I did?” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t pop a cap in my ass for the asking.

“Are you ever going to die screaming?”

That would be a big fat hopefully not. Man, he hated me, and I’d never found out why. I decided to try to humanize myself so he’d be less likely to kill me if ever the opportunity arose. I’d read that if you say a victim’s name repeatedly to, say, a kidnapper, then the kidnapper forms a mental attachment to the person they’re holding hostage.

“Charley Davidson is a fair person. I’m sure if you just told Charley what she did, she’d be more than willing to fix it.”

He stilled, then eased around to me, slowly, as though I’d mortified him. “If you ever talk about yourself in third person again, I’ll kill you where you stand.”

Okay, he was clearly sensitive about narrative forms. I wasn’t sure it was legal for a police officer to threaten a civilian like that, but since he had a gun and I didn’t, I decided not to question him on it.

I learned two things about Owen Vaughn as we sat there waiting for Ubie: First, he had the uncanny ability to stare a person down in a rearview mirror without blinking for like five minutes. I wished I’d had eye drops to offer him. And second, he had some kind of nasal deformity that made him squeak a little when he breathed.

* * *

Not long after my nerve-racking stretch in hell—otherwise known as Owen Vaughn’s patrol car—a very grumpy man named Uncle Bob gave me a ride to my apartment.

“So, Farrow carjacked you?” Ubie asked as we pulled into the parking lot, unconcerned with his bed head.

“Yes, he carjacked me.”

“And why were you at a convenience store in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night in the middle of a flash flood warning?”

“Because I got a text from … Oh! Gemma!”

I dug my phone out of my bag, which Reyes was nice enough to leave on the nightstand, and called hers. Still off. So I tried her home phone.

“Gemma Davidson,” she answered, her voice as groggy as I felt.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Who is this?”

“Elvis.”

“What time is it?”

“Hammer time?”

“Charley.”

“Did you text me? Did your car break down?”

“No and no. Why are you doing this to me?” She was funny.

“Check your cell.”

I heard a loud, sleepy sigh, some rustling of sheets, then, “It won’t come on.”

“Not at all?”

“No. What did you do to it?”

“I ate it for breakfast. Check the battery compartment.”

“Where the hell is that?”

“Um, behind the battery door.”

“Are you punking me?” I heard her fumbling with the phone.

“Gem, if I was going to punk you, I wouldn’t simply turn off your phone. I would pour honey in your hair while you slept. Or, you know, something like that.”

“That was you?” she asked, appalled.

She’d totally fallen for the open-window technique of throwing the victim off the trail of the true assailant. She thought Cindy Verdean did it for years. I was going to tell her the truth eventually, but after what she did to Cindy in retaliation, I changed my mind. Cindy’s eyelashes were never the same.

“Wait,” she said, “my battery’s gone. Did you take it?”

“Yes. Did you go out this evening?”

After another loud sigh, she said, “No. Yes. I went out for drinks with a colleague.”

“Did anyone bump into you? Drop something in front of—”

“Yes! Oh, my gosh, this man bumped into me, apologized, then about five minutes later, personally brought over a bottle of wine to make up for it. It was nothing. I mean, he barely touched me.”

“He took your phone, texted me from it, stole the battery, then put it back when he brought the wine over.” With Reyes’s circle of friends, I was hardly surprised a pickpocket was among them.