I tapped our friendly meth- head on the shoulder with the barrel of the shotgun when it looked as if he’d gathered enough courage together to get back up. “What do we want? You don’t listen, do you? The phone. Just the phone… oh, and the gun. Or if you have a problem with that, we might also want to bang your head against the floor until it splits like a melon. Up to you. I’m flexible. You choose.”

He picked not having his head treated like a basketball. Some guys are no fun. Seemingly. But he pleasantly surprised me by yanking a bowie knife, or an el cheapo knock-off version he’d picked up at a swap meet, from beneath the couch cushion. Niko had taught me many disciplines of thought when it came to knife fighting, and there were many, although they all seemed to come down to two options: “You’re going to get cut, but suck it up and take the bastard down” versus “I will not be cut and dispose of my opponent like a child armed with a plastic picnic knife.” The second option was mostly held by those living in a fantasy world where they whacked off to martial arts magazines and Chuck Norris movies.

But there were times your opponent was so pathetic that you could actually get away without a nick. Our meth buddy was one of those. He may as well have been a poodle with a switchblade-a hyped-up poodle, but still a poodle. He wasn’t worth it. He definitely wouldn’t provide any entertainment or further my education in knife fighting. Instead, I kept my distance from his desperately jagged slashes and smacked him with the barrel of the shotgun again, this time on top of his head. He went facedown into some truly nasty carpet or the flat nap that was left of it.

Over the next forty minutes he occasionally got to his hands and knees, felt around with a floppy, uncoordinated hand for the knife while dripping a good dose of drool. I’d wait until he got the knife in his hand-he looked so proud at the accomplishment, like a kid graduating from kindergarten-and then I’d whack him over the head again. After two times, Rafferty stuck his head inside the door and told me to stop playing with my food and either fish or cut bait.

I almost protested that’s not what I was doing, but it would have been pointless. On the subject of food and playing with it, a Wolf would know.

Niko, while he wasn’t cutting the phone line, didn’t step up to defend me, which meant I probably was in the wrong and enjoying playing Whac-A-Mole a little too much. It was a boring forty minutes, the guy was stubborn, and I… I enjoyed my work. Just because he was human didn’t mean he wasn’t a monster that preyed on the weak. He deserved a whack or three, but to keep the peace with Niko and not annoy Rafferty, which more and more seemed like a bad idea, I hit the guy extra hard the last time. He’d stay down until long after we left.

We left behind us a nonfunctioning phone, not that that ass was in any position to call the cops. We also left that same ass unconscious on the floor. Maybe if we were lucky, his dog would come back and eat him. It was a happy dog, but happy dogs get hungry too. And an hour later we were back at the exit that had taken us on our side trip to Candy Land gone horribly wrong. We were all sprawled in Abelia- Roo’s RV. Catcher, Rafferty, and I were sprawled anyway. Robin was sitting perfectly upright, touching as little of the cushions as he could for fear the eye-searing pink roses would jump from the upholstered bench seat to taint his clothing beyond redemption. “Is there no limit to what you will do to disarm your marks?” He sneered at Abelia who sat in the kitchen booth.

She sneered back. “This from a trickster. I take that as the finest of compliments, goat.”

The old woman had answered Niko’s call and come back to pick us up. Branje had suggested she and the others go back to the exit while he went to the house to make sure we were doing our job. Waiting on gadje was no task for a queen like Abelia. It was the perfect line for Abelia- Roo and the only one she would’ve bought. Maybe because she did buy it helped her to blame us for his death. Suyolak had done the damage, but we had a healer. We could’ve saved him. Hell, I didn’t know. Maybe Rafferty could have, but Salome saw someone trying to kill us and she took care of the situation. Diplomacy and client relations weren’t concepts in her pickled little brain-if she had a brain. Didn’t they remove them during mummification?

It was not a subject I wanted to dwell on. One of the four men left was driving. He slowed at that same four-way stop I’d been so unimpressed with before. There was no way I’d be forgetting it now. “Should I stop, Bara?” he asked.

“Bah. Fool. Do you see any cars here to steal?” She tossed a bony finger at the window at the only building around: the post office. “Should they steal a mailman’s truck? Such a fool. You shame me. Go to the next exit. Perhaps there will be better pickings there.”

“And a computer,” Rafferty added. “We need a laptop. As soon as possible.” He looked down at Catcher who was sleeping. Unable to communicate on an in-depth level, there wasn’t much else he could do-sleep or gnaw on those ugly cushions.

Brilliant white, store-bought teeth-those were new-bared in a smile of the haggling kind. “Perhaps this I can help you with, doctor dog. You could not do for Branje, but you can do something for me.”

It wasn’t at the next exit but the one after that that we found a car. We didn’t steal it as Abelia suggested. We had more than enough of her money to pay for it, although with Robin, trickster and used car salesman, on our side in the negotiations, the guy we bought it from had to feel like he had been not only robbed, but mugged in an alley, then lost his retirement in a Ponzi scheme. We left him stunned with the key to the tiny car lot dangling from his hand, trying to get up the energy to close up. Goodfellow was smugly satisfied, Niko had another giant, ancient car, and I had air-conditioning. Genuine making-life-worth-living air-conditioning. It was almost worth the loss of my guns.

I closed my eyes and enjoyed the cool air in my face. Beside me was the clicking of a car lot ink pen against a keyboard-Catcher’s new laptop. There hadn’t been an exchange of money for it. From the looks of Rafferty and the car he’d left behind, he didn’t have much to spend. But there was no way Abelia- Roo would give anyone anything for free. “What’d she want?” I asked. “For the computer?” I wasn’t surprised she had one to trade in the RV. I’d bet the old witch had more stock than Kmart in there.

“She has a bad heart.” I heard the rustle of cloth as Rafferty shifted position and I opened my eyes to see him lean and read Catcher’s typing. He snorted in agreement, “Yeah, full of bitchiness too, but that I can’t cure.”

“So you could fix her heart?” I was surprised she had one at all.

“I improved the function some, but you can’t cure old.” Unless you were willing to do things only Suyolak would do. “Every heart has only so many beats in it. I gave her the maximum hers has. Another month more than she would’ve had-maybe. Not that I told her it was that little. We wolves can do creative bargaining ourselves; we just call it what it is: lying.”

“Well, it’s a month more than she deserves,” I said under my breath as I used my cell to finally call Delilah and fill her in on what had happened, now that I knew she wasn’t behind what had happened. She was still angry. I’d known that or she would’ve come looking for us. She would’ve sniffed us out, found us, made things considerably easier on our twenty-mile trek. But she hadn’t. In some ways that was almost worse than her possibly considering killing me. Killing me was an intimate thing; it was personal. Being ignored… that was like not existing at all. That wasn’t Delilah-like; it wasn’t even Wolf-like. Ninety-nine point nine percent of Wolves regarded me with loathing, fear, and murderous fury. Rafferty and Catcher had given me the benefit of the doubt years ago, because one was a healer and one was different himself; at least that was my best guess. I could’ve been wrong. Who really knew? Rafferty might be a healer, but he wasn’t handing out smiles and lollipops after exams in the surgery room of his house.