I pursed my lips. "That doesn't sound so odd."

"She was waterskiing at the time."

I blinked. "How the hell did that happen?"

"Bridge over the reservoir was the way I heard it. Car jumped the rail, landed right on her."

"Ugh," I said. "Any idea who is behind it?"

"None. Think it's an entropy curse?" Thomas asked.

"If so, it's a sloppy one. But strong as hell. Those are some pretty melodramatic deaths." I checked on the puppies. They had fallen together into one dusty lump and were sleeping. The notch-eared pup lay on top of the pile. He opened his eyes and gave me a sleepy little growl of warning. Then he went back to sleep.

Thomas glanced back at the box. "Cute little furballs. What's their story?"

"Guardian dogs for some monastery in the Himalayas. Someone snatched them and came here. A couple of monks hired me to get them back."

"What, they don't have dog pounds in Tibet?"

I shrugged. "They believe these dogs have a foo heritage."

"Is that like epilepsy or something?"

I snorted and put my hand palm-down out the window, waggling it back and forth to make an airfoil in the wind of the Beetle's passage. "The monks think their great-grandcestor was a divine spirit-animal. Celestial guardian spirit. Foo dog. They believe it makes the bloodline special."

"Is it?"

"How the hell should I know, man? I'm just the repo guy."

"Some wizard you are."

"It's a big universe," I said. "No one can know it all."

Thomas fell quiet for a while, and the road whispered by. "Uh, do you mind if I ask what happened to your car?"

I looked around at the Beetle's interior. It wasn't Volkswagen-standard anymore. The seat covers were gone. So was the padding underneath. So was the interior carpet, and big chunks of the dashboard that had been made out of wood. There was a little vinyl left, and some of the plastic, and anything made out of metal, but everything else had been stripped completely away.