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up.
    “ Okay, okay,” he said,
holding up his hands in a placating gesture. “Hey, it’s just my
broken heart talking, okay? I’m upset, is all. I love that girl
more than life itself.”
    “ Well, then,” the second
woman said. The first continued to punch buttons on the phone. “Why
don’t you go home and write her a nice letter? I’m sure the post
office will forward it to her.”
    “ Okay, yeah, that’s what
I’ll do,” he said, retreating to the door and out. He loped across
the chilly chrome-and-marble lobby and out of the building, into
the dense June fog. He was in his car, tearing out of the parking
lot, before anyone in a uniform could reach the
building.
    The flames of his anger still nipped at him,
crackled and glared. No, he wasn’t going to write Pamela Hayes a
letter.
    She hadn’t shown up at her office in a full
week. Obviously she’d taken a powder. Mick was going to have to
track her down.
    He had to, before the D.A. put together a new
case against him. He had to find that big-eyed, big-mouthed bitch
and shut her up before she caused him any more problems. It was her
own fault, really. She shouldn’t have been where she was when she
was, snooping, watching, witnessing things that weren’t supposed to
have witnesses. If only she hadn’t been there, he’d be a free man
today.
    But as long as he wasn’t free, neither was
she. She’d seen him, she’d spoken against him, and now she was
going to pay.
    All Mick had to do was find her.
    ***
    DEEPER AND DEEPER, Pamela thought as she
studied the blurred diagram Joe had sketched on a textured napkin
at the Shipwreck last night. The ink had bled in spots, and his
handwriting left a great deal to be desired. She could find
scarcely any resemblance between his drawing and the map she’d
obtained from the Chamber of Commerce six days ago, when she’d
cruised the last few weary miles of Route One onto the island and
comprehended that she had truly, literally gone as far as she could
go.
    One part of her considered Jonas Brenner her
salvation: marry him and she’d be under his wing. Surely the matron
saints of feminism would forgive her for shucking her own last name
and submerging her identity within a man’s. Once her arrangement
with Joe had run her course and she divorced him, she could go back
to being Pamela Hayes.
    But another part of her couldn’t shake the
frightening notion that rather than saving herself, she was sinking
deeper and deeper into trouble. Her mind conjured the image of a
person in quicksand who, instead of stretching out and floating on
the ooze, tried to fight her way out and wound up being sucked down
to her death. The woman staring at her from the mirror above the
scratched dresser looked an awful lot like someone trapped in
quicksand.
    Sighing, she turned away from her wan
reflection and gazed at the neat, stark efficiency apartment that
had been her home for the past few days. She suspected the
apartment building had once been a motel; her front door opened
onto a second-floor balcony that ran the length of the building to
a flight of stairs on either end. The exterior was ticky-tacky
tropical—faded pink stucco, wrought-iron railings, rippling roof
tiles that were just a bit too orange to be believable. The
interior was just plain tacky—carpeting rough enough to file one’s
nails on, ceilings textured to resemble cottage cheese, a
kitchenette as small as a coat closet and furniture constructed of
cardboard-thick wood held together with paste.
    She wondered what Joe’s house looked like,
and his furniture. As an architect, she used to think such things
mattered.
    Now all that mattered was saving her
neck.
    She opened the front door, stepped out onto
the balcony, and glanced toward Kitty’s windows. The curtains were
drawn. It was nearly eleven o’clock; Joe had told Pamela to arrive
at his house in time for lunch. If Kitty was still sleeping, Pamela
didn’t want to disturb her.
    She reentered her own