“Damn, Davidson, have you learned nothing from me?”

Now it was my turn to stare incredulously. “Dude, you’re the one who taught me what Frank Ahearn taught you on how to teach people how to disappear. Why did you think I needed that information?”

“Not for you to get involved in domestics.”

“My entire client base is domestics. What do you think private investigators do?”

Of course, he was a licensed PI as well and could private investigate circles around me, but he focused his business on skips. Bond recovery pays well when you’re as good as he is. And, actually, I had to agree with him on this one. I’d gotten in way over my head. But it all turned out okay in the end.

The case, otherwise known as Rosie Herschel, got my number from a friend of a friend and called me up one night, asking me to come to a Sack-N-Save on the Westside. It was all fairly cloak-and-dagger. To get out of the house, she told her husband they needed milk, and we met in a dark corner of the Sack-N-Save parking lot. The fact that she had to make up an excuse just to leave the house set my nerves on edge. I should have turned tail then, but she was so desperate and so scared and so tired of her husband taking out the fact that he was a certifiable loser on her that I couldn’t turn her down. My jaw doesn’t compare to the horrific shiner she was sporting the first time I met her. She knew, and I believed it, too, that if she’d tried to leave her husband without help, she would never have seen another birthday.

Since she was originally from Mexico and had relatives there, we cooked up a plan for her to meet her aunt in Mexico City. The two of them would then travel south with a deed and just enough cash to open a small inn, or posada, on a beach not far from her grandparents’ village.

From what Rosie told me, her husband had never met any of her relatives from Mexico. The chances of him finding the right Gutierrez family in Mexico City were slim to none. But just in case, we had new identities drawn up for them both. An adventure in itself.

In the meantime, I sent an anonymous text to Mr. Herschel, pretending to be an admirer and inviting him for drinks at a bar on the Westside. Though I longed for the security of my dad’s bar, no way could I risk someone blurting out my real name. So I dropped Rosie at the airport and took off across the Rio Grande. Rosie would have to be there a few hours before her plane departed, but I had a plan to keep Herschel busy for the entire night. I goaded him into hitting me and pressed charges. Not that it was easy. Flirting like a vixen in heat then pulling the emergency brake in such a way that the mark felt like I’d just slapped him took skill. And naturally, a man like Herschel would take great offense to being led on. Throw in a few insults about small penises and a degrading giggle or two, and the fists start flying.

While I could have just gotten him drunk-off-his-ass wasted, then dumped him in an alley somewhere, I couldn’t risk him finding Rosie gone until the morning. One night in jail was all we needed. And now she was well on her way to an esteemed career as a posadera.

“This is it,” Elizabeth said.

“Oh, here,” I said, relaying the info to Garrett. “This house on the corner?”

She nodded.

And she was right where she said she’d be. I saw her shoes first, red and sharp and expensive; then I glanced at departed Elizabeth’s. Perfect match. That was good enough for me. I strolled back to the porch and plopped down while Garrett and the officer called it in.

While I was busy scolding myself for not examining the body and scouring the crime scene for clues like a real PI would, a blur in my peripheral vision captured my attention. It wasn’t like a normal blur, the kind that everyone sees. This was darker, more … solid.

I’d glanced to the side as fast as I could, but I’d missed it. Again. That’d been happening a lot lately. Dark blurs in my periphery. I figured either Superman died and was swooshing around the country at the speed of light—because dead people don’t move that fast; they appear out of nowhere and disappear the same way—or I was having lots of those little ministrokes that would someday lead to massive and devastating cerebral hemorrhaging.

I totally needed to have my cholesterol checked.

Of course, there was another possibility. One I hadn’t really wanted to consider. But it would explain a lot.

I’d never been afraid of the unknown, like other people. Things like the dark or monsters or the bogeyman. I suppose if I had been, I wouldn’t have made a proper grim reaper. But something or someone was stalking me. I’d tried for weeks to convince myself that I was imagining it. But I’ve seen only one thing in my life move that fast. And it was the only thing on Earth, or the hereafter, that terrified me.

I’d never quite worked out the reasoning behind my unnatural fear, because the being had never hurt me. Truth be known, it had saved my life on several occasions. When I was almost kidnapped as a child by a paroled sex offender, it saved me. When Owen Vaughn tried to run me down with his dad’s Suburban in high school, it saved me. When I was being stalked in college and eventually attacked, it saved me. At the time, I hadn’t taken the stalking thing that seriously until it showed up. Only then did I realize, almost too late, that my life had been in danger.

So, you’d think I’d be more grateful. But it wasn’t just that it had saved my life. It was the way it had saved my life. The ability to sever a man’s spinal cord in half without leaving any visible evidence as to what happened was a tad disconcerting.

And in high school, when other teens were trying desperately to figure out who they were, where they fit in the world, it told me what I was. It whispered the role I would play in life into my ear as I was applying lip gloss in the girls’ bathroom, words I never heard, words that lay thick in the air, waiting for me to breathe them in, to accept who I was, what I would become. As girls fluttered around me for glimpses in the mirror, I could see only him, standing over me, a huge cloaked figure bearing down on me like a suffocating vacuum.