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picked up the remnant of the straw wrapper, which Cat had set in her own lap. “Like you keep dreaming that you shot Lee. That’s not the same as this, is it? Hard evidence. Always remember that, dreamslipper.”
    Cat let the words sink in. Her grandmother was right. But then Cat realized something. “Hey, you’ve slipped into my Lee nightmares! What about the rules?”
    “As you illustrated, Cat, rules are meant to be broken.” And with that, Granny Grace hoisted herself to her feet. “C’mon. We’ve got more artists to interview.”

Chapter Three

    It was the worst conversation Mick Travers had ever had in his life.
    Telling Donnie’s parents that their precious son was gone, their precious boy, no matter that he was a forty-three-year-old man who hadn’t yet made it as an artist—to them he would always be their precious boy sitting on the living room floor drawing like a boy genius—that was the worst conversation he’d ever had. It wasn’t even so much a conversation as a verbal bloodletting. Poor Mary Ellen Hines and Donald Hines, Sr., sitting in their suburban kitchen in suburban Ohio, getting this information over the phone.  
    Mick had let Donald Sr. cry in that silent, wracking way a man not given to shedding a tear finally does when something happens that is so painful, even he can’t hold it back. “No,” was the first thing the man said. Just “no.”  
    Mick waited while Donald told Mary Ellen.
    “We should come down,” Donald finally said through choked sobs. “We should…see him.”
    Mick thought of Donnie’s unrecognizable body. No parent should have to see that. He also knew they couldn’t afford several trips to Miami or funeral costs. Mick had heard from Donnie that his parents struggled financially after the airline company Donald had worked for all his life defaulted on his pension. The two survived solely on their small savings and Social Security. Donnie hoped to make it big as an artist so he could help them. They’d never been able to visit their son in Miami, not that they were the traveling type anyway. Unlike their free-spirited son, the two had barely ever left Ohio in their own lifetimes. Donnie had driven up to see them whenever he could, usually making the trip in a record two days in his aged Datsun.  
    “You don’t have to do that,” Mick told the man. “Really. It’s better…if you remember him the way he was.”
    Seized with a galvanizing sense of guilt, Mick said, “Please, let me handle the wake. We’ll have it here. You can come down then. It won’t be long. Just a week or two.”
    The two agreed, and Mick left them to their black hole of grief.
    There was nothing for it, nothing at all, not even five bottles of Bushmill’s. When he came out of his stupor, he was still angry enough to carp at his well-meaning grandniece. He left the house just so he didn’t end up saying something he’d regret.  
    Donnie hadn’t deserved to go out like that.
    It should have been me , Mick thought, about fifty times an hour.
    He drove to a Cuban bakery in a strip mall where he knew he could get some decent coffee. He would have preferred a walk or a bike ride, and maybe one of those would have cleared his head, but nobody really did that in Miami. Both activities were in fact dangerous; the head of the city’s transportation department had recently been mowed down by an SUV while biking to work. That was Miami for you.  
    He sat in a booth and ordered a cortadito, though he preferred the taste of the colada. But coladas were meant to be shared. He, Donnie, Rose, and some of the other residents of the Brickell Lofts often took communal coffee breaks that way. One of them would go out and get a colada in a big Styrofoam cup and pour the syrupy coffee into tiny plastic thimbles, one shot each. It was the perfect afternoon pick-me-up. They’d stand around in Mick’s studio shooting the shit, Rose complaining about her boyfriend (in Mick’s opinion he seemed to