“Good. Then knock it off! I’m glad that you feel you have a frame of reference when grade-A sci-fi crazy is thrust into the middle of your life. But I don’t, OK? And I’ve had one of the craziest lives of anyone I know.

“I’m doing the best I can with this. But you’re going to have to forgive me for thinking we’re in uncharted waters here and that a lot of the old rules don’t apply anymore. This drug, wherever it came from, it was given to me by a man with crazy black ops skills who assumed a cover identity for three months so he could earn my trust. If you think I’m going to try to fight off a man like that with the FBI, who didn’t capture the Bannings for over a decade, by the way, you’re the one who’s not thinking clearly. I want to know how this pill works, and I can’t exactly walk into a CVS and ask the pharmacist, OK? But if me trying to get some knowledge here freaks you out, fine. I’ll clear out of here and figure out my next move, and you can forget we ever met up today.”

Kayla swallows, but Charley can tell what she’d really like to do is roll her eyes and groan. But she doesn’t do either. Instead she turns to Marty and says, “Why aren’t you helping me here?”

“I don’t know you that well, to be frank,” he says. “It’s Charley I’m here to help. And seems to me if this Dylan guy was such a threat to her, he wouldn’t have given her a bunch of pills that make it easy for her to rip his face off.”

“People can do a lot of harm from a distance,” Kayla whispers. “Especially powerful people. We need to find out how powerful this particular guy is.”

“Sure. But if he were all that powerful, what the hell does he need Charley for?” Marty asks. “I mean, no offense, darling. I’m crazy about you, but you’re not exactly the leader of the free world.”

It’s a damn good point, she thinks for the first time. Things have moved so fast these past few hours she hasn’t stopped to ask the most important question. Why me?

“Look,” Marty says. “Charley’s right. There’s no frame of reference for this stuff. I’d rather see her do something than worry herself into crazy by speculating about who this asshole is when she could be figuring out what he gave her. If she wants to try to make the most of a colossally shitty situation, I’m in. I’ve got a gun in my truck, and I know my way around some really sketchy places.”

Kayla’s chest rises and falls.

“Fine,” she finally says. “I’ve got a gun, too.”

16

The bar looks like the dirt beside the irrigation canal burped up an old trailer it couldn’t swallow.

There’s no sign, just a smattering of decrepit cars and pickup trucks that suggests most of the clientele inside is more meth than man.

According to Marty, it’s the kind of dive where the regulars find their favorite stool by noon, are singing along to every song on the jukebox by three, and then by dinnertime are lecturing anyone who’ll listen about how the world’s done them wrong their whole miserable lives. By eleven they’re ready for a fight. Or something worse, if they’ve managed to score a pick-me-up from one of the resident dealers, who may or may not also be the bartender.

It’s ten to eleven now. She’s showered and brushed her hair out, and she’s wearing a fresh outfit Kayla picked up for her at the nearest Walmart. Jeans and a baggy powder-blue T-shirt. She looks like a lot of women do when they go grocery shopping, but in this hellhole she’s bound to draw attention just because her clothes don’t stink of spilled beer.

Attention is exactly what she gets when she pushes the door open.

A blast of stale beer along with something more acrid and unidentifiable hits her with enough force to make her eyes water.

There’s a pool table off to her left. At first she thinks the men gathered around it are in the midst of some verbal altercation that’s about to turn physical. Two of them are nose to nose; one’s shouting into the face of the other in a high-pitched, barking voice. And he’s using lots of hand gestures while he does it. It takes her a second to realize the man’s aggression is reserved for the asshole supervisor he’s describing in his shrill tale of workplace woe. His volume and his movements are probably the result of whatever’s got him hopped-up, and the guy he’s talking to doesn’t put distance between them because he’s too drunk to be bothered. The most unnerving thing about this little scene is that no one, not his friends and not the bartender, is asking him to quiet the hell down.

Heads turn as she passes. She feels the men’s stares like pinpricks on her skin. Each look almost slides past her, then catches on the sight of her bare arms and braless chest and youthful features, and locks in like motion-activated security cameras finding an intruder.

She counts two other women in the place.

One’s passed out at one end of the bar; the other’s sandwiched in a corner booth in between two hulking guys who look like bikers. Her glazed eyes focus on nothing in particular while the men talk across her. Occasionally they slam the table with the sides of their fists to make a point. The impacts are strong enough to jostle their beer bottles, but the woman, who wears an outfit slightly more revealing than Charlotte’s, doesn’t even flinch. She’s somewhere far away from this place. Maybe someplace with blue sky and birds and men who acknowledge her presence.

Charlotte takes a seat at the bar.

The pill’s been in her system for an hour. That’s about the same amount of time it took her to get from Dylan’s office to her house.

To distract herself from the looks she’s getting, she makes a mental checklist of the symptoms she’s on the lookout for. The shaking hands, the throbbing in her bones—the phenomenon she’s nicknamed bone music. The former, she thinks, is a sign the drug’s about to kick in, the second that it’s in full bloom throughout her body. But these are just guesses. There’s a lot she’s still not sure of. Not yet. That’s what tonight’s about.

The nearest bartender glares at her, but he doesn’t come over. His glare seems both a warning and a dismissal.

When she hears the bar’s door open, she fights the urge to look over her shoulder. But she’s sure it’s Marty. He’s changed into a baseball cap and some paint-splattered clothes from his truck that conceal the gun he’s now carrying on his hip. The plan is he’ll keep her within sight at all times while he tries to hang back.

Marty only told her one story about this place. It was general, but it was enough.

One of his AA sponsees had to make a serious amends for something he’d done here. An amends that involved him turning himself in to the police and pleading guilty to a charge that got him ten years in Folsom. And the reason he’d had to turn himself in is because no one in this place reported what he and two of his buddies did to a woman in the corner while everyone else drank beer and played pool. Not even the woman, even though she’d lost most of her teeth during it.

Outside, Kayla has parked her car a short walk from the bar’s entrance, next to the tall, spiked steel fence designed to keep drunks from driving into the water supply for the nearby farms. If all goes as planned, she’ll have a front-row seat to Dylan Thorpe’s magic show. And so will Marty. And so will whoever makes the mistake of following Charlotte out of this place.

“Can I get a drink?” she asks.

It’s not that she’s rude; it’s that she doesn’t keep her eyes averted or soften her tone. She doesn’t ask the question the way these men believe a visitor, especially a female one, should. She doesn’t address them in a way that says, You’re in charge, big boy, and I remain here at the pleasure of your bad attitude. The wording alone calls attention to how brazenly the bartender’s been ignoring her and sends a ripple of tension through the two men seated at the bar next to her. They rouse like coiling snakes. One of them runs fingers over his sweating beer bottle; the other taps out a frenetic rhythm on his. Both study her, their jaws working, as if the five words she just spoke have awakened a predatory energy inside them.

The bartender comes over, stands in front of her. This isn’t the type of place where a napkin precedes a drink order.

“Diet Coke,” she says, staring him in the eye.

“You want a lemon in that?” the bartender asks.

“Sure.”

“There’s a Save Mart about ten minutes from here. I hear they got ’em on sale.”

The bartender departs. The guy closest to her at the bar cackles, punches his friend lightly in the elbow.

Charlotte locks eyes with him.

For a second she worries that her gaze is too steady, too intimidating. That her knowledge of what she might be able to do to him if he tries to harm her has given her a confidence that might frighten the guy into submission.

She’s wrong.