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“Thanks for the loan.”
    “Sure.” Jack’s voice had turned silky, hard. “You borrowed the car, and you left the keys. You know, Honey, I almost believed that nonsense you were telling me. ‘I’m a changed woman. I’ve reformed.’ Liar.”
    “Now, now.” Honey shifted easily, getting off the highway. “I have reformed.”
    She’d quit boosting cars even before she stole Jack’s police cruiser. That had been a fluke. After sneaking her very first bottle of champagne with her cousin Barney, she’d gone for a walk to clear her head. The patrol car had been sitting there, less than a block from the wedding reception, with a shotgun locked to the cage and a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude on the passenger seat.
    She’d known it was Jack’s car. He was the only cop in Los Angeles who liked to read Gabriel García Márquez.
    Knowing it was Jack’s was what had made it so exciting.
    She’d been letting herself through the door when her Uncle Mike called and asked her to pick up an extra case of beer from the house. She’d known better than to steal a police car. If she hadn’t been tipsy already, she never would have done it.
    Never would have ended up in jail for a year and a half.
    Jack had done the right thing by sending her up. She’d figured that out after she lost her grandfather.
    “You’re nothing but a low-down, dirty, rotten—”
    “Is that any way for a gentleman to talk?”
    He snorted angrily. “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard it before, sweetheart.”
    “Of course I’ve heard it,” Honey said. “Just not from anyone with political aspirations.”
    “You took my badge and my gun.”
    “Uh-huh.” Honey glanced at the passenger seat, where she’d tossed the items in question. “Sure are shiny.”
    The crash of the receiver hitting a hard surface was followed by a buzz, then silence.
    Honey smiled, dropped the phone onto the seat, and shifted into third.
    The inside of the Super Bee smelled like coffee. Underneath that scent, there was another one, masculine and indefinable. When she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine Jack sitting in the passenger seat beside her.
    With the windows rolled down and the music blasting, they could drive all the way up the Pacific Coast Highway to San Francisco. They could stop on the way and eat seafood pulled fresh from the ocean.
    She laughed at herself. What a fantasy.
    But she could do it alone. She’d never been to San Francisco. After that, she could go anywhere in the world. Chicago, Boston, New York City. Or abroad, maybe. She’d taken French in school, but the Spanish she’d picked up on the streets of Los Angeles was even better. She could go to Mexico.
    It would have to wait until she figured out who was trying to kill her. Some people might have seen their house burning down as a reason to leave town. Not Honey. She’d only ever run away from a fight once in her life. At the time, it had seemed like her only option.
    It had been a mistake.
    She circled her block twice, but she didn’t see anyone lying in wait for her to come home. She parked two houses away, pulling the Super Bee into an empty driveway. At ten o’clock in the morning, most of her neighbors were at work. They wouldn’t mind if she used the space.
    Honey grabbed Jack’s gun and his badge as she got out of her car. She hustled down the street toward her house, trying to keep her eyes open, alert to anything out of the ordinary. But she wasn’t a cop. She was a mechanic working out of a rented garage bay near her house. An artist with an internal combustion engine who moonlighted as a bartender for her Uncle Mike to make ends meet. Neither of those jobs had trained her to notice evil men lurking in the bushes.
    Luckily, no one jumped out at her.
    When she arrived at the house, she remembered that her keys were in Jack’s bathroom, along with the pajamas she’d been wearing the night before. Exactly where she’d dropped them when she changed into