Fine by me.

I knew where she was holed up, and anyway I wasn’t ready to talk to her.

I came to the body and knelt beside him. There was a wide black puddle of blood around him that ran to the brick walls in either direction. The guy was in his early thirties, handsome. That is, he had been. Pale and feral. He had a patchy gold beard and a girl’s rosy lips. I assumed his hair, too, had been the color of dirty gold. I couldn’t be certain, as the top of his head now was a horrorshow of seeping blood, wrecked tissue, and exposed bone. And he had no eyes. His eyes were gone. She’d scooped them out with the tip of her knife. I glanced around and saw one of them, a bloody knot glistening in the dark.

And like the guy with ghost eyes in the street, this man was familiar. I knew where I’d seen them. Even mutilated, the likeness was easily apparent. The men were brothers. I had laid eyes on them once before in the flesh, in New Orleans. And I’d dreamed of them many times since. Thinking about it made my skin crawl. I felt nothing much, but I was glad this one was dead.

He was thin, wearing a faded jean jacket. The knees of my pants were soaked through with his blood. I could see that his carotid artery had been severed and he was about as dead as anybody can be. I bent over him and sniffed at his mouth anyway, an unorthodox little habit that I picked up somewhere along the way. I don’t know what this is about, but I could always tell the living from the dead with one whiff and the air that seeped from this guy’s hole was pure graveyard. I touched two fingers to his throat for form’s sake. There was no pulse to speak of.

I slapped at the guy’s pockets and found a fat ziploc baggie that contained small individual balloons of what looked to be generous dimes of heroin. I stared at them a moment, tempted sore. Then hissed at myself and threw the lot violently into the far shadows. I found a cell phone in his jacket pocket and dialed 911. The operator came on and I muttered the words dead man at Geary and Jones, then dropped the phone on the guy’s chest. I wiped my bloody hands on his pants and stood up. I wanted to make myself scarce before the cops showed, and besides I had an appointment with an old flame that was long overdue.

Here’s what happened. I arrived in San Francisco five days ago, having tracked Jude to California after losing her in New Orleans some five years back. I have been on the road so long I’ve about lost myself. For the past nine months I’ve been crisscrossing the southwest, eyeballing the sun like it was my blood enemy. By the by, saying I tracked Jude anywhere is generous as hell. I’m not much of a hunter, never was. And most of the time I was wandering around on foot, as the seizures and false visions have got progressively worse of late, making it dangerous for me to drive. I do know how Jude’s mind works, however, and I’ve had some okay luck just following my nose.

Anyway. Two weeks ago, I was laid up in a shitty motel in Bakersfield, where Jude’s trail had run cold. The only evidence that she had even been there were the busted collarbone of a bartender in Flagstaff named Rabbit and the severed hamstring of his buddy Steve, a bouncer by trade and former kickboxing champ who was never gonna walk right again. Rabbit and Steve told me they had run afoul of Jude a month or so prior when she blew into town and began sniffing around for two guys, brothers named Shane and Sugar Finch. These names meant nothing to me, but they did mean something to Rabbit and Steve, who told me between shots of whiskey that they had been best pals with Shane and Sugar since they were all still wetting the bed. Shane and Sugar had moved on years ago, they said, having graduated from freelance thugs to mercenary killers. But they were still practically family, Rabbit said, and when Jude showed up looking for them, Rabbit and Steve got nervous, and rightly so.

The woman they described had identified herself as Jesse Redd, and they had taken her to be a professional bounty hunter. They said she had a body that knocked you out at first glimmer, but when you examined her up close she was pure muscle and hard as cut glass with a scar at the corner of her mouth and long devastating legs and hair so black it looked wet, skin somewhere between yellow and pale coffee, and eyes shaped like almonds. They said she was wearing desert boots and army fatigues that fit her ass snug as a bug and a scuffed black motorcycle racing jacket and a little white T-shirt underneath so thin and tight you could see her nipples plain as day.

That freaked me out, said Rabbit. She caught me looking at those high beams and she stared through me so hard I caught a chill.

No shit, said Steve. It was her eyes freaked me out.

How so? I asked.

She didn’t seem to blink, for one thing. For another, she has this long white scar that starts just above the left eye and disappears into her hair, like somebody tried to damn near cut off the top of her head. And around the other eye, she’s got three small black tattoos, three stars, like her own little constellation.

This was Jude, without question. The physical description was dead on, and I had known her to use the name Jesse Redd when we were on the run in Mexico. Jude had fake passports in a dozen different names. Wendy Sweet. Emma Frye. She liked names that sounded like superhero secret identities. As for the scar above her left eye, she’d acquired that in New Orleans, the same night I came by the massive blow to the head that caused a goodly knot of scar tissue to form in my brain, which may or may not account for the seizures and false visions that developed slow but sure over the past years. And while I’d known Jude to have several tattoos, an eye between her shoulder blades, a Greek symbol on her forearm, and a small dragon on her hip, the stars around her eyes were new. Apparently she’s acquired more ink since I lost her.

The long and short of Rabbit and Steve’s story was about what I expected. Jude was looking for info on the possible whereabouts of their childhood buddies, Shane and Sugar Finch. She was asking nicely, at first. Everybody was getting along. And then Rabbit got a little too fresh with her, and maybe Steve gave her some static about hassling their friends. At which point she handed their asses to them, in exchange for the information that Sugar, which they swore upside down and sideways was his real name as shown on his birth certificate, used to have a girlfriend named Maggie who slung cocktails at a tittie bar called the Painted Lady, in Bakersfield.

two.

I HEADED FOR BAKERSFIELD THAT SAME NIGHT, where I learned that the Painted Lady had burned to the ground almost a year ago. Nobody knew anything about a waitress named Maggie, so I checked into a motel with a bottle of rum and a notion to get drunk and take a three-day nap before I contemplated my next move. I stretched out on the bed with a plastic cup of rum on my belly and stared at my boots. The heels were worn down to nothing.

I flipped on the TV, realizing I couldn’t remember when I last watched a baseball game, the news, or a stupid movie with explosions and chase scenes. I was barely aware who was even president these days, or who we were currently at war with. I surfed around until I came to CNN, which was airing footage of some political block party in Berkeley, where some guy in a suit was giving a speech. His name was MacDonald Cody, and after a while I gathered that he was a senator, recently elected, the prodigal son of a former California governor, Anderson Cody. This younger Cody was talking about jobs, healthcare, the environment, family values; he was covering all the bases. He had a smoke-and-gravel voice and rugged movie-star looks, with a glint of the rogue sparkle in his eye, silver blond hair, nice tan, healthy American teeth, and he looked vaguely familiar to me in that way that a lot of people on the box do. But then he raised his left arm to emphasize a point and I saw that he wore a prosthetic hand, and I popped upright like a half-drunk jack-in-the-box, my stomach in my mouth.