“You look like shit,” Angie told me.
I raised an eyebrow at the cuts on her face, the half shiner beside her right eye, the gouge in her left calf. “You, on the other hand…”
She gave me a weary smile and we leaned against the wall for a full minute of silence.
“Patrick.”
“Yeah?” I said, my eyes closed.
“When I got out of the ambulance on the bridge, and they walked me to the cruiser, I, ahm…”
I opened my eyes and looked at her. “What?”
“I think I saw something strange. And I don’t want you to laugh.”
“You saw Desiree Stone.”
She came off the wall and slapped me in the abdomen with the back of her hand. “Get out of town! You saw her, too?”
I rubbed my stomach. “I saw her, too.”
“You think she’s a ghost?”
“She’s no ghost,” I said.
Our hotel suites had been trashed while we were gone. At first I thought it had been Trevor’s men, maybe the Weeble and Cushing before they came after us, but then I found a business card on my pillow.
INSPECTOR CARNELL JEFFERSON, it read.
I refolded my clothes and placed them back in my suitcase, pushed the bed back into the wall, and closed all the drawers.
“I’m starting to hate this town.” Angie came into the room with two bottles of Dos Equis and we took them out to the balcony and left the glass doors open behind us. If the room was bugged by Trevor, we were already high on his shit list anyway; nothing we said was going to change his mind about dealing with us the way he’d dealt with Jay and Everett Hamlyn and was trying to deal with his daughter, who didn’t have the decency to die easily. And if the cops had bugged the room, nothing we said would change what we’d told them at the station because we didn’t have anything to hide.
“Why does Trevor want his daughter dead so badly?” Angie said.
“And why does she keep popping up alive?”
“One thing at a time.”
“Okay.” I propped my ankles up on the balcony rail and sipped my beer. “Trevor wants his daughter dead because somehow she found out he killed Lisardo.”
“And why did he kill Lisardo in the first place?”
I looked at her. “Because…”
“Yes?” She lit a cigarette.
“I don’t have a clue.” I took a hit off her cigarette to quell the adrenaline that had been chewing through my blood since I’d shot from the car twenty hours ago.
She took her cigarette back and looked at it. “And even if he did kill Lisardo and she found out—even if—why kill her? He’d be dead before a trial, and his lawyers would keep him free till then. So what’s the big deal?”
“Right.”
“This whole dying thing, too…”
“What?”
“Most people are dying, they’re trying to make their peace—with God, with family, with the earth in general.”
“But not Trevor.”
“Exactly. If he really is dying, then his hate for Desiree has to run so deep it can’t even be measured by most human minds.”
“If he’s dying,” I said.
She nodded and stubbed out her cigarette. “Let’s consider that for a second. How do we know for sure he’s dying?”
“One good look at him.”
She opened her mouth as if to argue, then closed it and lowered her head to her knees for a moment. When she raised her head, she flipped the hair back off her face and leaned back in her chair. “You’re right,” she said. “Dumb idea. The guy’s definitely got one foot in the grave.”
“So,” I said. “Back to square one. What makes a guy hate anyone, but particularly his own flesh and blood, so much that he’s determined to spend his last days hunting her down?”
“Jay suggested a history of incest,” Angie said.
“Okay. Daddy loves his little girl way too much. They have a conjugal relationship, and something gets in the way.”
“Anthony Lisardo. Back to him again.”
I nodded. “So, Daddy has him whacked.”
“Not long after her mother died to boot. So Desiree goes into her depression, meets Price, who manipulates her grief and enlists her in the theft of the two million.”
I turned my head, looked at her. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why would Price enlist her? I’m not saying he wouldn’t want her along for the ride for a bit, but why would he let her in on the plan?”
She tapped her thigh with her beer bottle. “You’re right. He wouldn’t.” She raised her beer and drank. “God, I’m confused.”
We sat there in silence and chewed on it as the moon bathed Tampa Bay in pearl and the fingers of rose in the purple sky faded and eventually disappeared. I went back in and got us two more beers and came back out onto the patio.
“Black is white,” I said.
“Huh?”
“You said it yourself. Black is white. Up is down on this case.”
“True. Definitely true.”
“You ever see Rashomon?”
“Sounds like a movie about a guy’s athlete’s foot.”
I looked at her from under hooded eyes.
“Sorry,” she said lightly. “No, Patrick, I never saw Rash-o-whatever.”
“Japanese film,” I said. “The whole movie shows the same event told four different times.”
“Why?”
“Well, it’s a rape and murder trial. And the four people who were there tell four completely different accounts of what happened. And you watch each version and have to decide who’s telling the truth.”
“I saw a Star Trek like that once.”
“You need to watch less Star Trek,” I said.
“Hey, at least it’s easy to pronounce. Not like Rash-aweed.”
“Rashomon.” I squeezed the top of my nose between my index finger and thumb, closed my eyes. “My point, anyway.”
“Yes?”
“Is that we might be looking at this all wrong. Maybe,” I said, “we accepted too many things as truth at the beginning and were wrong.”
“Like thinking Trevor was an okay guy and not a homicidal, incestuous nutbag?”
“Like that,” I said.
“So what else have we accepted as truth that we might be looking at from the wrong angle?”
“Desiree,” I said.