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couldn’t save. One more name for the list of the dead, chiseled on an granite slab and dragging me down.
    “Thank you,” I said. The voice started talking about burial costs and Planck’s family in Virginia and did I know—and I just hung up.
    Corman read the look on my face. He put down his phone.
    “What’s what, kiddo?”
    “Eugene,” I said. “The guy who helped me and Caitlin track down the Etruscan Box. He’s dead.”
    “Natural causes?” he said, but I could tell from his tone that he knew better.
    “Classic one-two punch. While we were chasing our tails and getting shot at in Arizona, Lauren was out in California dishing out some payback. I think she hoped she’d kill us all off at the same time.”
    “We’re still here,” Corman said.
    I slammed my fist against the counter. A jolt of pain lanced up my arm and left my wrist throbbing.
    “He spent twenty years in a mental hospital,” I said, seething, “because Lauren locked a curse around his neck and
put
him there. Twenty goddamn years in purgatory. All I had to do, the
one thing
I had to do, was kill Lauren and he would have died a free man. I couldn’t save Stacy Pankow or Amber Vance or any of the other people her cult murdered. She ordered Meadow Brand to torture Spengler and kill him right in front of me. We got to Sophia’s house just in time to find
her
dead body. Corman, I—”
    My eyes squeezed shut. A weak and rotten dam against the tears I didn’t want to let flow. I’d been pushing everything down, bottling it up so I could keep fighting, but Eugene’s death was that one straw too many. I couldn’t keep carrying that weight on my shoulders.
    “You’re afraid we’re going to lose,” Corman said.
    I opened my eyes, took a deep breath to steady myself, and nodded.
    “The only game you can lose,” Corman said, “is a fair game. That’s fine for baseball and poker night, but when all your chips are on the table? That’s when you do what Bentley and I taught you. Cheat. Rig the game. Do whatever you gotta do to come out a winner.”
    “What if Lauren cheats better than us?” I said.
    Corman snorted and shook his head.
    “Son,” he said, “
nobody
cheats better than us. Now stop worrying about could-bes and what-ifs, because could-bes and what-ifs aren’t worth a damn. You’re burning daylight. Get out there, do what you do best, and find a new angle. Lauren Carmichael’s just one more in a long line of people who thought they were immortal until they suddenly weren’t. Time we proved that to her.”

Five
    A n hour later, I was sitting in a booth at the Five Guys on Eastern Avenue, noshing on a big, soggy bacon burger and dipping into a greasy brown paper bag stuffed with Cajun fries. I’d rather have gone for Korean with Caitlin, but the fast food quelled the gnawing in my gut. The hunger pangs, anyway. It didn’t do much for the sense of dread that only got stronger when Harmony Black walked in the door.
    I’d figured out an angle, all right, but I couldn’t do it alone.
    Harmony was a short, full-figured blonde with wire-rimmed glasses and a penchant for men’s neckties. Today’s was forest green. She also had a penchant for putting guys like me behind bars. She gave the clientele a quick frisking with her eyes, making sure I didn’t invite her into an ambush, then slid into the seat across from me.
    “Tell me something I want to hear,” she said. Her words were clipped, edged with a faint New England accent.
    “Such as?”
    “Like you’re ready to take the deal and turn state’s evidence,” she said. “You called me, Faust. Don’t tell me I came all the way across town for the burgers.”
    I shoved the brown paper bag to the middle of the table.
    “Try the Cajun fries,” I told her.
    “Look at that,” she said. “Another thing you won’t get to eat in prison.”
    “I need a favor.”
    She reached up, pulled her glasses down to the tip of her pert nose, and stared at me over the