Colin Ferguson woke up with a hangover, alone in an unfamiliar double bed. Not the best way to start the morning. “Fuck,” he muttered, and sat up. Moving made his headache worse. Even the quiet four-letter word seemed too damn loud, always a bad sign. The inside of his mouth tasted as if something had died in there a week ago.

Thick maroon curtains kept out most of the daylight. Most, but not enough. He felt like an owl squinting at the sun. Yeah, he’d done a number on himself, all right. Bigtime.

“Fuck,” he said again, not quite so softly this time. Here he was, in a rented room in… For a second or two, he no-shit couldn’t remember where the hell he was. The hangover just hurt. Not remembering honest to God scared him.

If it hadn’t come back to him, he could have got the answer from the telephone book. The nightstand by the bed was a two-shelf unit attached to the wall. No drawer-using one would have cost an extra seventy-one cents a room, or whatever. Multiply that by a raft of rooms and you knew why Motel 6 never lost money. The top shelf held a phone and his watch, which was that close to falling on the uncarpeted floor. On the bottom shelf lay the phone book and a Gideon Bible bound in bilious blue.

Motel 6. Jackson, Wyoming. The day after Memorial Day. He did remember. “Fuck,” he said one more time. Back when he’d set up this vacation, Jackson, Wyoming, had seemed about as far from the L.A. suburb of San Atanasio as he could get. As far from the fiasco he’d made of his life.

What was supposed to be a laugh came out more like a raven’s croak. That was one of those jokes that would have been funny if only it were funny.

You couldn’t get away that easily. Most of the time, you couldn’t get away at all. Being a cop taught you all kinds of lessons. That one stood pretty high on the list.