Have you ever had one of those moments when time just freezes? You know, when the world suddenly goes deathly still, and you could hear a pin drop, and the squishing sound your heart makes is so loud in your ears you feel like you’re drowning in blood, and you stand there in that suspended moment and die a thousand deaths, but not really, and the moment passes and dumps you out on the other side of it, with your mouth hanging open, and an erased blackboard where your mind used to be?

I think I’ve been watching too many old movies lately, in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep, because the disembodied voice that offered counsel at that moment sounded a lot like John Wayne.

Buck up, little buckaroo, it said, in a dry, gravelly drawl. You wouldn’t believe how many things that advice has gotten me through since. When everything else is gone, balls are all any of us really have left. The question is: Are yours made of flesh and blood, or steel?

When I shook Derek O’Bannion’s hand, the spear I’d stolen from his brother before I’d led him to his unwitting death burned like a brand from hell against my inner thigh. I ignored it. “Goodness, is your brother missing?” I blinked up at him.

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“He was last seen two weeks ago.”

“How awful!” I exclaimed. “What brings you to our bookstore?”

He stared down at me, and I suddenly wondered how I could have missed the resemblance. The same cold eyes that had watched me two weeks ago from inside a mobster’s den wallpapered with crosses and religious iconography gazed down at me now. Some would have pegged Rocky and his brother Derek as Black Irish, but I knew from Barrons, who knows everything about everyone, that the fierce, ruthless blood of a long-ago Saudi ancestor runs in O’Bannion veins.

“I’ve been stopping in at all the businesses along this street. There are three cars in the alley behind this shop. Do you know anything about them?”

I shook my head. “No. Why?”

“They belong to…associates of my brother. I was wondering if you knew when they’d been left there and why. If you heard or saw anything. Maybe a fourth black car? A very expensive one?”

I shook my head again. “I really don’t go out back at all, and I don’t much notice cars. My boss disposes of the trash. I just work here. I try to stay inside most of the time. Alleys scare me.” I was babbling. I bit down lightly on the inside of my cheek to stop myself from talking. “Have you spoken to the police?” I encouraged. Go there, leave here, I willed silently.

Derek O’Bannion’s smile was sharp as knives. “O’Bannions don’t trouble the police with our problems. We take care of them ourselves.” He studied me with clinical detachment, all flirtation gone. “How long have you been working here?”

“Three days,” I said truthfully.

“You’re new to town.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“What’s your name?”

“Mac.”

He laughed. “You don’t look like a Mac.”

Was this safer ground presenting itself? “What do I look like?” I asked lightly, leaning a hip against the counter and subtly arching my spine. Go back to flirting with me, my body posture invited.

He scanned me from head to toe. “Trouble,” he said after a moment, with a faint, sexually charged smile.

I laughed. “I’m really not.”

“Too bad,” he parried. But I could tell his mind wasn’t fully on flirting. It was on his brother. And something else I could completely understand; it was on a hunt for the truth, for retribution. What vagaries of fate had made kindred souls of us—me and this man? Oh, excuse me, it hadn’t been vagaries. It was me.

He took a business card from his wallet, a pen from his pocket, and scribbled on the back. “If you should see or hear anything, you’ll tell me, won’t you, Mac?” He took my hand, turned it palm up, and dropped a kiss in it before the card. “Anytime. Day or night. Anything. No matter how inconsequential you think it seems.”

I nodded.

“I think he’s dead,” Derek O’Bannion told me. “And I’m going to kill the fuck that did it.”

I nodded again.

“He was my brother.”

I nodded a third time. “My sister was murdered,” I blurted.

His gaze sharpened with new interest. I was suddenly more in his eyes than another flirty, pretty girl. “Then you understand vengeance,” he said softly.

“I understand vengeance,” I agreed.

“Call me anytime, Mac,” he said. “I think I like you.”

I watched him leave in silence.

When the door closed behind him, I raced to the bathroom, locked myself in, and leaned back against the door, where I stood staring at myself in the mirror trying to reconcile dual images.

I was hunting the monster that had killed my sister.

I was the monster that had killed his brother.

When I came out of the bathroom, I glanced around, relieved to find no customers had entered the store. I’d forgotten to slap one of the Back in five minutes signs that I’d made up yesterday to cover my bathroom breaks on the front door.

I hurried now to turn over the sign. Once again I was closing early. Barrons was just going to have to deal with it. It wasn’t much early, and it wasn’t like he needed the money.

As I flipped the placard, I made the mistake of glancing out the window.

It was nearly dark, that time of day folks around these parts call “gloaming,” or twilight, when the day gently bruises into night.

And I was unable to decide which was worse: Inspector Jayne sitting on a bench a few doors down to the right not even pretending to be reading the newspaper he held; the black-shrouded specter standing directly across the street, watching me from beneath the ashy shadows of a dimly flickering streetlamp; or Derek O’Bannion exiting a shop two doors down, turning left, and heading straight into the Dark Zone.

“Where the hell have you been?” Barrons yanked open the cab door and pried me out with a hand around my upper arm. My feet left the ground for a moment.

“Don’t start with me,” I growled. Shaking off his grip, I pushed past him. Inspector Jayne’s cab was just pulling up behind me. I wonder if he missed his family yet. I hoped he’d get tired of me soon and go home.