He had a powerful impulse to get up, walk out of the bathroom and the club and the city. To just go. Pick a direction and leave all this behind, all these questionable certainties and uncertain questions. To forget figuring it out, and just start again as someone new, somewhere else.

But as who? Where? Why?

You are who you choose to be. But does that mean you can choose again and again and again? Does nothing matter?

No. You’ve made decisions. Live or die by them. Besides, maybe there’s an explanation. Ask. Give her a chance to explain.

And then do whatever you have to do. One way or the other, it ends tonight. All of it.

Even if it means the end of everything.

He prepped the Sig, then tucked it in his waistband and climbed up on the back of the toilet tank.

5

From his shadowed table, Bennett watched Daniel walk out of the washroom. The man did not look good. Pale and shaky and wound too tight, ready to explode with the slightest touch.

His suit was nice, though. Gray and slim. The jacket buttoned. Hayes threaded his way through the crowd to the side bar, where Laney waited. She looked great, her dress cut for cleavage but longer at the leg, that balance that kept it from going slutty. The blond hair wasn’t really her; skin like that worked better with her natural brown. But there was no denying the sex appeal of the string of diamonds dripping down her neck.

Daniel slid in beside her. She smiled thinly. Her hands fidgeted with the strap of her purse. Hayes took the bag from her, hung it on the back of a chair, then said something to the bartender, who nodded.

Had he put the gun in her purse?

Bennett rested his camera on the edge of the table for stability. The digital display glowed as he focused. The lens magnified the image, brought him as close to Daniel’s midriff as if he’d been standing beside the guy.

No. There’s the bulge, on the left-hand side. The same place Hayes had tucked his gun before. People were predictable.

He slipped in the earbud and turned on the microphone. 5

“Chardonnay and a Booker’s neat, double.” The bartender set them down.

Daniel nodded, laid a couple of twenties on the bar. “Keep the change.”

“Thanks.”

“For luck?” Laney held her wineglass by the stem.

“Something like that.” Daniel raised his heavy rocks glass, took a swallow. The Sig felt strange tucked into the front of his pants, heavy and intimate. The sights dug into his flesh. He leaned back against the bar, glanced around. The place was filling up, and the flashes of glowing light reduced the crowd to anonymity, just teeth and shoulders and hair and sweat.

“Did it—”

“Yes,” Daniel said, and nodded to her purse, where he’d hung it over the back of the chair. “Just like we planned.”

He tracked her eyes, saw the panic in them. She hated guns. At least, he thought she did. That could be a lie too. “Can I ask you something?”

She looked up at him.

“Is there anything I don’t know?”

“What—how do you mean?”

“I have this feeling there’s something really important I’m missing. I keep almost getting it, but not quite. You know when you’re trying to remember somebody’s name, you know it starts with R, and you just keep thinking Robert, Ryan, Rick, Randy, Roger . . . Roger . . . Roger . . . I feel like that.”

“Well.” She shrugged. “You have amnesia.”

“I know,” he said. Come on, baby. Please. “But I feel like there’s something specific.”

“You haven’t slept in a week. You’re exhausted. Your head is probably playing tricks on you.”

He was tired. God, was he tired. Could that explain things? Paranoia and exhaustion were a dangerous combination. Daniel took a swallow of bourbon, didn’t taste it. You know what you saw on her phone. “Bennett will be here soon, and then we’re all in. Win and live or lose and die. And I guess I’m just asking if there’s anything you think I need to know.” He turned to her. “Anything at all.”

Laney sipped the Chardonnay, her lipstick leaving kisses on the rim of the glass. “What are you getting at, Daniel?”

“I’m not sure.” He stared. This is it, baby. This is your chance. Our chance. “I’m hoping you’ll tell me.”

For the tiniest fraction of a second, she hesitated. He let himself hope. Hope that it wasn’t all a lie, that she wasn’t tied up with the monster in their lives. That he hadn’t saved his life just to learn it was a ruin.

Then she said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Daniel stared at her. Kept his face smooth and still, while behind it, everything fell apart.

It was all for nothing.

All of it.

“But I hope you know,” Laney continued, “that I love you. More than you can imagine.”

“Me too,” said a voice from behind him. “I love you both.”

5

There was a reason he worked alone.

Bennett had listened in on their conversation, amused. Poor Daniel, knowing just enough to suspect he was being lied to, and drawing the wrong conclusion. Poor Laney, trying so hard to protect her man. Both of them pure and true and on a collision course. Neither the iceberg nor the Titanic had evil intent, but they still made for a hell of a smashup.

It was good TV. But he was on a timeline.

So he’d slipped out the earbud, set the camera on the chair beside the microphone, and given both a quick wipe before walking away from them. The crowd had grown, and he threaded his way between party people, Daniel and Laney now in sight, now out of it. He’d come up just in time to hear Laney’s proclamation of love.

“Me too,” he said, smiling. “I love you both.”

Laney started, took a fast breath in. But Daniel seemed almost calm as he turned, wearing the unsurprised look of a man who’d been expecting the worst. “You’re early.”

“I’m a go-getter.” Bennett glanced at Laney. “Lovely necklace.”

“Take it,” she said, one hand moving to her throat.

Daniel said, “Not here.”

No, you’ll want to go somewhere quiet, won’t you brother? “Where?”

“There’s an exit over there,” the man gestured across the crowded dance floor, “behind those curtains.”

“It might be alarmed.”

“It’s not. I checked this afternoon.”