The woman lowered her disfigured gun to the floor. The rest of Peaches’ people stood motionless.

“Are there any questions?” Mad Rogan asked.

A short man in a tattered Dallas Cowboys jersey raised his hand slowly. The woman in the tank top grabbed his hand and pushed it down.

“Okay then. You may go.”

By the time I took three breaths, the island was clear.

“Which way is your expert?” Mad Rogan asked me.

Chapter 9

“You killed Peaches.” I stepped over the gap in the bridge.

“Of course I killed him.”

I opened my mouth and closed it.

“Okay,” Mad Rogan said. “This is distracting you, and I need you to function, so let’s fix this. Which part of what happened is upsetting?”

I opened my mouth again and closed it again without saying anything. Peaches would’ve attacked us, possibly killed us, so what Mad Rogan did was justified. It was the sheer sudden brutality of it. It was the way he did it, without any hesitation. One moment Peaches was there, and then he vanished. No trace of him remained. He was crushed out of existence. He was . . . dead.

“Let me help,” he said. “You’ve been taught all your life that killing another person is wrong, and that belief persists even in the face of facts. Not only would Peaches have killed us given the chance, but this way I only had to kill one person rather than kill half a dozen of his followers. I saved several lives, but your conditioning tells you I’ve done the wrong thing. I didn’t. He started it. I finished it.”

“It’s not that. I was getting ready to shoot him in the head.” But when you shot someone, there was a slight chance they might live. There would be a body. What he did was so complete and sudden that I needed a couple of moments to come to terms with it.

“Then what is it?”

“It’s the . . .” I struggled for words. “Splat.”

Mad Rogan glanced at me, his eyes puzzled. “Splat.”

“Yes.”

“I had briefly considered impaling him with one of those steel poles from the roof, but I decided it would be too graphic for you. Would that have been preferable?”

My mind conjured up Peaches with a steel pole sticking out of his stomach. “No.”

“I really would like to know,” he said with genuine curiosity. “The next time I kill someone, I’d like to do it in a way that doesn’t freak you out.”

“How about you don’t kill anybody for a little bit?”

“I can’t make that promise.”

Small talk with the dragon. How are you? Eaten any adventurers lately? Sure, just had one this morning. Look, I still got his femur stuck in my teeth. Is that upsetting to you?

Ahead Xadar building loomed, top three stories above the water, its faded green sign grimy and stained with swamp algae. The tangle of wires on the roof looked like a black spiderweb. Somewhere inside, Bug sat in the center of this web, wrapped in his hysterical brand of crazy. I stopped.

“Don’t kill Bug,” I said. “I’m dead serious.”

Mad Rogan smiled.

“I mean it. Do not murder Bug. If you kill him, our deal is off.”

“Fine,” he said.

I resumed my walking.

“Maybe you should make me a list of people I can kill and ways in which they’re allowed to die,” he said.

“You are not funny.”

“I’m very funny. Just ask Peaches.”

We reached the building and climbed through a large second-story window. A damp, musty smell emanated from the commercial rug. Slugs crawled across the fallen cubicles. An old motivational poster hung on the wall. It showed a mountain climber hanging by his hands off a cliff. The caption said Break the Boundaries. The glass was cracked.

“Don’t touch anything,” I said. “He has the whole place booby-trapped.”

I followed a narrow path between the cubicles, stopped before a camera mounted in the corner, and held up the vial of orange pills.

An intercom somewhere close crackled with static and a scratchy male voice said, “Stay there. I’ll send Napoleon.” The static cut out.

“Have you ever killed someone?” Mad Rogan asked me.

“No. I saw a man die once.” I shouldn’t have said that.

“How did it happen?”

I glanced at him and stopped. He was focused on me, as if I was about to tell him the most intriguing thing in the world and he was prepared to absorb every word. Even his magic hovered around him, anticipating. For a few moments I had Mad Rogan’s undivided attention, and it wasn’t frightening. It was . . . flattering. As long as I told him things, he would keep looking at me just like that, and that alone was enough incentive to compel most women to tell him anything he wanted. And if I did tell him things, he would likely use them against me in some way.

He was still waiting. Oh what the hell.

“My dad wanted me to get a taste for the different areas of PI work, so when I was sixteen, I interned with a repo agent. He worked with his two sons. Our first few runs were great. We’d find the vehicle, sneak up, and tow it off, like spies on some secret operation in a movie. It was exciting. The guys told me how people try to scam the banks out of money, so we were doing a good thing.”

My lips had gone dry. It still bothered me after almost a decade.

“What happened?” he said, his blue eyes welcoming. A man had no right to be this fiercely sexual without even trying.

“We were trying to repossess a truck from a small suburban home, when a woman came out of the house. She was holding a toddler, and her eyes had this hollow look. She said, ‘Take it. I can’t afford to put gas into it anyway.’ The expression on her face was terrible. I should’ve quit right there. I should’ve called my dad and asked him to come and get me. But I was trying to do the right thing. My dad got me this job, and I was going to do it, even if it sucked.

“The guys just attached the tow, and then this man tore out of the house with a rifle and started shooting at us. No warning. We couldn’t even get into our truck. We just hunkered down behind it. The woman was screaming, but he kept firing at our truck. Doug called the cops. They got there fast. The man shot at the police cruiser, and the cops gunned him down. I saw the bullets hit him in the chest, and then he collapsed. More kids ran out of the house, and everyone started crying and screaming. I remember cops led his wife away and she kept trying to tell them that he was a good man and wouldn’t do something like this. I found out later he lost his job four months before that and his house had gone into foreclosure. My dad came and got me, and I never had to go back.” For which I’d thanked my lucky stars every morning for a month. “Your turn. First person you ever saw die.”