“I’m still not sure how you convinced the owners to shell out the money,” I said.

“I can be very persuasive when I want to be, and besides, they didn’t shell out anything. I paid for the remodel.”

“Oh. I didn’t realize.”

“I hear that the owner’s a little crazy anyway. She’s always getting into sticky situations. I was glad to help her out with this remodel.”

I had never met the owner of the apartment building itself. The only contact I had was with the landlord, Mr. Zamora, and a light pang of jealousy spiked within me with his intimate use of the word she. It galled me. I was not a jealous person. Had never been jealous of anyone for any reason, but in walks Reyes Farrow and suddenly I’m that chick from Fatal Attraction. Next thing you know, I’ll be boiling rabbits.

“Why haven’t you come to see me?” he asked as he stepped to an overstuffed sofa and sank into it, stretching his legs out in front of him. Like it was something he did every day, had done his entire life. I wondered what prison had been like for him. With no sofas and no marble fireplaces and no refrigerators he could raid whenever he wanted to. And I wondered what all of that would have been like, that kind of restriction, that kind of punishment, for someone who didn’t even commit the crime for which he had been sentenced. Would the lack of freedom be all the more difficult?

I shook out of my thoughts and followed him. “I don’t know. The last time I saw you, you’d been shot with a fifty-caliber bullet because of me. I wasn’t sure you’d want to see me.”

“So all the notes on your door didn’t clue you in?”

I sat on a chair that catty-cornered his seat. “Fine, but you’d still been shot.”

“And?”

“And…” I wasn’t sure how much to tell him about how I felt. About what had happened and how I was choosing not to deal with it in classic Charley fashion. I pressed my lips together, then said, “I killed a man, Reyes. A man is dead because of me.”

“A man who was trying to kill you.”

And that was the truth of it. A man I’d turned in as a bank robber had been hell-bent on making sure I didn’t testify against him. Unfortunately, he’d been in training to be a sniper in the marines when he received a dishonorable discharge. The guy was a loon with a hair-trigger temper, so it was probably only a matter of time, but he’d learned enough to try to take me out from a rooftop a hundred yards away. His plan would have been successful had Reyes not stepped in front of me, let it rip through him before turning to catch it when it continued toward me on its path of destruction. He had literally taken a bullet for me. A huge one that should have ripped him apart.

It was probably the blood spreading across Reyes’s torso that caused the spark of rage to burst within me. In an instant, I was in front of the guy. I reached inside his chest and stopped his heart before I took the time to consider the consequences. Then I looked back at myself, still standing beside Reyes, an expression of shock still evident on my features.

I had left my body. I had killed a man and I’d done it incorporeally, a fact I still had a difficult time wrapping my head around. Accepting as truth.

“I’m just not sure how much that should make a difference,” I said. “I still feel guilty. I took his life. He could have reformed, you know? He could have been the next Van Gogh or the next Shakespeare, but now we’ll never know because I didn’t give him the chance.”

“Do you really think that a man like that would have been the next Shakespeare?”

“Probably not, but again, we’ll never know. I’m not a judge and jury. I don’t have the right to take lives.” I studied him, then asked, “You’ve killed in self-defense in the past when you were in prison. How did that make you feel? What did it do to you?”

“It didn’t do anything to me. They were coming at me. I fought back. In the end, they were dead and I was not. Don’t ever underestimate the fundamental need to survive, Dutch. It drives us all. If we are going to play at being human, then we have a basic human right to defend ourselves, and you did what was necessary.”

Play at being human? Who was playing? I was human as far as I was concerned, but it was an odd statement. The fire crackled and I looked over because, no matter how real it looked, it was electric. “It even has sound effects?”

He laughed softly. “They have everything nowadays. I had no idea.”

The fact that he’d spent ten years in prison hit me again. And there I was, contemplating sending him back. Could I do it? Even if I were to discover he was the arsonist, could I send him back? Would they send him back? How would that work? Would he get a reduced sentence for time served?

“You’re very serious tonight. Any particular reason?”

“What were you doing at the bar?” I asked, changing the subject.

“I told you, I was passing by.”

“Oh, right. But you weren’t following me or anything?”

He ran a fingertip along the top of his glass. It was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen. “Is that what you think? That I follow you around to keep your ass out of trouble?”

“If so, you’re not very good at your job.”

A huge smile spread across his face. “True enough. So what’s eating you? Because, sadly, it’s not me.”

A sharp thrill spiked inside me with the thought of him doing that very thing, but I was there for a reason. Since I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask him if he was burning the city to the ground one dump at a time, I veered toward the subject for which I’d originally sought him out. “What’s hell like?”