“Well, she sure as hell meant something to me.”

“Look, what I did was wrong. I admitted that then, I admit it now. But I didn’t leave you, Savannah. I wasn’t looking for a way out. You were.”

She sank into one of my Kmart lawn chairs without asking if I minded and ran a hand through her hair.

“I didn’t come here to open old wounds,” she said, sighing.

“Old wounds? I don’t see you for six years. Not a phone call. Not a Christmas card. Then you show up unannounced and expect us to have a friendly little chat? Catch up on old times?” I got up from my desk and stuffed some papers into the filing cabinet. “What the hell did you come for anyway, Savannah? Because, as I’m sure you can appreciate, being a life coach and all, I really do have a life to get back to here.”

“Arlo’s gone.”

“And you expect me to give a shit? The guy ran out on his first wife, Savannah. What makes you think he wouldn’t run out on you someday?”

“I meant, he’s dead.”

Her words hung in the air like the rumble of distant artillery fire.

“Dead… as in died?”

She stared at her shoes. “Last month. I wasn’t sure if you’d heard or not.”

Arlo Echevarria. My old boss. The man she’d dumped me for. Dead. I wanted to punch my fist in the air. I wanted to dance like Snoopy come suppertime. I wanted to shout that the Buddha was right, that Karma is real! I looked back at my ex-wife from my make-believe paperwork, hoping the expression on my face didn’t betray the sudden, unbridled joy I felt inside, and said instead, as evenly as I could, “What happened?”

“Somebody came to his door dressed like a pizza delivery driver and shot him.”

My head was spinning. “You said his door.”

“We moved to LA last year, after Arlo retired. My father helped us buy a place in the hills, above Sunset, but Arlo moved out after a couple months. He was just… He’d changed. We fought a lot. He was renting a little house up in Northridge. We were…” Savannah drew a breath and let it out slowly, “separated.”

She unfolded a newspaper clipping from the Los Angeles Times and laid it on my desk. I snatched it up and skimmed it. A paid obituary. It was full of lies and half-truths.

“Who wrote this?”

“I did.”

She waited for me to say something comforting. I slid the clipping back to her across the desk and picked at a splinter in my thumb.

“Christ, Logan, you act like it was nothing. Did you hear what I said? Arlo was murdered.”

“Sorry for your loss.”

She gave me a hard look and made a little huffing sound through her nose and mouth, like she couldn’t believe anyone could be so callous, let alone a man to whom she’d once given herself so freely.

“You know, I’d forgotten what a complete bastard you can be.” Her chin quivered. Then she began to sob.

The air inside my office started to feel heavy. I turned the table fan on low, watching it oscillate back and forth, the blades riffling the pages of my wall calendar, while she wept. I thought about all the pain she’d heaped upon me and how hard I’d tried to drink myself off the planet after we’d divorced. I had long ago accepted the reality that the wounds she’d inflicted having left me for Echevarria would fester forever. And yet, bitter as I still was, I actually found myself feeling sorry for her as she sat there in obvious pain. Which made me feel even more bitter.

I yanked open the top drawer of my desk. Inside was a thick stack of brown paper napkins from Taco Bell. How the hell can any corporation possibly turn a profit when half the free world steals its napkins by the fistful? I backhanded her one.

“You want some water or something?”

She shook her head no, dabbing her tears with the napkin.

“Then what do you want, Savannah? Why drive all the way up here from LA? Because I know it wasn’t just to tell me Arlo’s gone.”

“I’d like you to tell the police what Arlo did for a living.”

“He worked in marketing.”

“His real job.”

“That was his real job.”

We both knew I was lying.

“Logan, the police are never going to find who killed him if they don’t know who he really was, what he really did. I need your help. Please.”

Something shifted in my gut, a moist sickness. Some nerve, asking for my help after cutting off my balls. I swallowed down the taste of bile and leaned back in my chair, my hands clasped nonchalantly behind my head.

“What are the police telling you?”

“That they’re not getting anywhere.”

Detectives assigned to the case, she said, had concluded that Echevarria’s demise was the result of more than some random act of violence in a metropolis whose middle name is random violence. But given what meager evidence they had to go on, investigators had been unable to gain much traction, according to Savannah. No arrests had been made. No viable suspects had even been identified.

“People die in LA all the time,” I said with a shrug. “Sometimes, for no reason at all.”

“Arlo died for a reason,” Savannah said. “I think it had to do with what he did, his work — his real work. Somebody out for revenge. If you could just talk to the detectives…”

She searched my eyes, waiting. I gazed at her evenly and gave back nothing.

“I told them that Arlo worked for the government,” Savannah said. “They said they couldn’t find any records other than when he was with the Army.”

“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t know anything about it.”

“You know that’s not true, Logan. You worked with him. You worked for him.”

“That I did. In marketing.”

Her jaw muscles tightened. She was getting nowhere, but she wasn’t about to give up. “I want to show you something,” she said, digging through her purse.

Outside, a regional jet began its takeoff roll down Runway Twenty-Six, its twin turbines rattling the walls of the hangar. I hiked the sleeves of my polo shirt a little and folded my arms across my chest, pushing my biceps up with the backs of my hands to give her a glimpse of what she’d given up for the likes of scrawny Arlo Echevarria, but she was too busy rummaging through her designer handbag to notice my mas macho gun show. She brushed a strand of hair from her eyes and tucked it behind her ear as she searched her purse. Why did she have to still be so goddamn gorgeous?

“I haven’t been over to his house yet,” Savannah said. “I can’t. It’s just too…” She cleared her throat, still going through her purse. “My father hired a company. They come in after somebody dies and pack up all their clothes, personal effects, clean up the mess. Can you imagine a job like that? Anyway, I was going through a box of Arlo’s things the other night, and I found this.”

She pulled out a wallet-size photograph from her purse and slid it toward me across the desk. I exhaled like I was doing her a big favor picking it up:

The photo was of Echevarria and me, taken in the Nubo-Sindian Desert. Our cheeks were streaked with camouflage face paint and eight days of Iranian dust. We were outfitted in battle dress devoid of rank or unit insignia. Sprawled at our boots was a bearded Arab, arms splayed above his head, his eyes half-hooded in death, the front of his white dishdasha man-dress splotched red from multiple gunshot wounds. In Echevarria’s right hand was a Kalashnikov assault rifle with a collapsible stock and extended banana clip. His left hand was clamped affectionately on my shoulder. He was beaming at the camera like a safari hunter posing with a trophy lion, while I stared grimly into the lens, thoroughly exhausted.

I’d forgotten how slight Echevarria was. His combat uniform hung from his bony frame like a protestor on a hunger strike, yet there was no denying his raw physical appeal. The pale green eyes so inconsistent with the bronze Mayan skin. The high cheekbones. The aquiline nose. The lips curved perpetually in an impish little boy’s smile.