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Rosa’s surname or the name of her daughter and Mike didn’t enlighten him, worried that if the creep did remember he would hotfoot it
over to another network, get plastered again for free and spurt out everything to the competition.
    Willy’s story was gold. Maria Rosa had paid him in kind for her trailer’s rent. It was handy not having to stray from his Cactus Flower Trailer Park to “get done”, he
said, even if it had to be during the day. “At least the kid was at school. The ma didn’a want her to know nuthin,” he said, “but she had to know somethin’. She was
fucken smart, that kid. Won some prize, I ’member… from the, ah, Rotarians. Made some speech to ’em. Maria Rosa got the spoils after the girl scooted. I ’member it cos
there weren’t no monkey business goin’ after that an’ she give me the winnings for the rent. After that, Maria Rosa just shut down shop. With her legs closed, she couldn’a
pay rent no more, so’s what could I do? A man’s gotta eat, right? So’s I kicked her out.”
    “Why did her daughter leave home?” asked Mike before taking a sip of the drink the bartender had just slid in front of him.
    “Was bad, man,” Willy said, doing likewise. “One of Maria Rosa’s boyfriends… she liked callin’ all us regulars her ‘boyfriends’… he did
her, you know what I mean?”
    “Ah, not really.”
    “He fucken did the kid.”
    That Isabel had been the victim of a serious assault was well-known, but this…
    “He’d been round a couple weeks, Mr Mandrake. I even sorta liked him. But not by the end. There was fucken blood everywhere, man. I had to hose out the fucken trailer after the cops
left. He fucken slit her throat ’n all.”
    “Her throat!” Mike pictured Isabel with her fabled scar. So she didn’t get it in a mugging. That was the story the public had swallowed, but Isabel had always refused to
confirm or deny it, and the media had let up on it as private. Until now.
    “The kid was lucky. But fucken ran away from the hospital after’n she got fixed up. Never even brought her sorry butt over to say adios to her lovin’ mami,” Willy said
snarling, his lips pulled back over his teeth, revealing Maria Rosa wasn’t the only one to have lost a few. “Broke Maria Rosa’s heart, Mike. Broke her fucken heart.”
    “Where’d she go?” asked Mandrake, meaning the mother. His stomach clenched for the answer.
    “Don’ fucken know, don’ fucken care. What she did to her bewdiful ma, man… first class fucken A-grade bitch, pardon the French. I loved her ma, Mike. Really loved
her.”
    “I mean the mother. Where did she go?”
    “How the fuck would I know? Had to turn her out, like I said. It was hard on me to do that, man. I loved her.”
    “You must have some idea.”
    Willie looked hard at the four fifty-dollar notes Mike had slipped out of his wallet and placed under Willie’s Wild Turkey. “Went back to Bolivia,” he said, taking another swig
of his drink and pocketing the cash. “Prob’ly had a few boyfriends back there… Lucky fellers, if y’ask me,” he said, breaking into a sneer and again poking the
cracked grey skin of his elbow into Mike’s blue cashmere sweater, this time catching a thread. But Mike didn’t care.

 
9
    T HE REPEATED LATE nights were getting to Ed Loane. He jerked open his closet drawer and picked out one of the small foil-wrapped Clip’n’Drip cylinders, this one an antibiotic. He peeled back the foil and after marvelling at the sharp, cone-shaped pellet spiking out of the cylinder, he ripped open an
antiseptic swab. With the four good fingers of his left hand, he yanked the front of his shirt out of his pants and swabbed a few inches from his navel. Bunching up the little skin he
could—even at his age Ed didn’t carry much flab—he placed the cone point over the sterile area, jabbed it in and pulled the spike back out clean, implanting the biodegradable
dose-release pellet.
    Debbie Branson