Focusing my will, I shut it down, a TV show nobody’s watching. I have to choose to read something, or I’d be bombarded with images all day long; it takes pure focus born of necessity and habit to keep my gift in check. The more traumatic of a charge an item holds, the worse it is. I had a feeling that whatever his mother’s Buddha held would be bad.

As if even my soda pop felt nervous about my situation, the glass bottle immediately began to sweat. I set the drinks down and found a bottle opener.

“I was tracking you.” His voice carried a bare-bones quality, like it was all he could do to keep from showing me how deep he was cut.

“How’d you find me?” I thought I’d been so careful, honest to God.

His smile flickered in time to the tumble of his silver coin along the knuckles of his right hand. Fully ambidextrous, he could do it with his left as well, but I wasn’t interested in his parlor tricks. At one time or another I’d seen them all, and I missed only the wicked thing he did with his tongue.

“Luck,” he said, as if it could’ve been anything else. “I showed your picture, and a car rental agent in Shreveport remembered you. She looked up where you dropped the car off for me.”

Well, naturally she did. She’d probably have volunteered a kidney and her firstborn if he’d only thought to ask. I hadn’t used my real name or any of the aliases Chance knew, but that clearly hadn’t slowed him down much.

“So you knew I returned the car in Laredo.”

He nodded, eyes fixed on the pewter icon still lying untouched on my counter. “Didn’t take too much to figure you must’ve made the border crossing. Then I just had to figure out where you went from Monterrey.”

And that would’ve been child’s play, based on how well he knew me. I fought down the dead man’s hand creeping up my back, trying to consider the question with a cool head. If he found me, could someone else? Someone who meant more harm than Chance?