Soon. He’s going to show up soon.

I leaned back, the little patch of instinctive skin between my shoulder blades suddenly cold and goosebumped. Silver charms braided into my hair with red thread moved uneasily, a tinkling audible through the assault of the music. I had my back to Riverson, and I was standing in the middle of a collage of the damned.

Life just don’t get no better than this, do it, babydoll?

“You shouldn’t be here,” he yelled over the music as he slammed the double shot of vodka down. “Perry’s still furious.”

I shrugged. One shrug is worth a thousand words. If Perry was still upset over the holy water incident or any other time I’d disrupted his plans, the rest of my life might be spent here leaning against the bar.

Well, might as well enjoy it. I grabbed the shot without looking, downed it. “Another one,” I yelled back. “And put it on my tab.”

Riverson kept them coming. I took down five—it’s a pity my metabolism just burns up the alcohol within seconds—before the air pressure changed and I moved, gun coming up, left hand curling around the leather braided hilt at my waist and the whip uncoiling.

People have got it all wrong about the bullwhip. In order to use one, you’ve got to lead with the hip; you have to think a few seconds ahead of where you want to be. Like in a fast game of chess. You get a lot of assholes who think they can sling a whip around ending up with their faces scarred or just plain injured, forgetting to account for that one simple fact. A whip’s end cracks because it’s moving past the speed of sound; little sonic booms mean the small metal diamonds attached to the laces at the end can flay skin from bone if applied properly—or improperly, for that matter.

Despite his ethnic-sounding name, Elizondo was a dirty-blond in blue T-shirt and jeans, dust-caked boots, his hair sticking up in a bird’s nest over the face of a celluloid angel. His eyes had the flat hopeless look of the dusted, and I was willing to bet there was still dried blood under his fingernails. What he was doing here was anyone’s guess. Was Perry involved in the smuggling? It wouldn’t surprise me, but good luck proving it.