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in her head.
    â€œCory, I was just having dinner.”
    â€œ Where were you having dinner, Evi?”
    And then he’d pick up the phone and call Mike, her ASAC back in L.A. And Evelyn would be in so much shit that she’d never slog her way out again.
    Evelyn hadn’t known that a human being could keep screaming for as long as the girl across the room had. The screaming girl and her husband appeared unharmed. So did everyone else. The hostess, a formidable-looking black woman with a gold ring in her nose and a sort of turban on her head, was gently trying to calm the screaming girl down. Shhh, shhh, shhh.
    Evelyn probably would have just given the girl a slap. A gentle one.
    When the shooting started, Evelyn had reached for her purse. And then remembered she didn’t have her firearm. Cory had made her promise to lock it in the hotel room safe. Evelyn didn’t need a gun on vacation, he’d pointed out, now, did she?
    So that had left her—as she hunched behind the table and counted the shots from the shooter’s Glock— armed with nothing but a steak knife.
    She’d assumed, at first, that the shooter’s target was the shithead— her shithead, damn it, just her luck. She wondered how in the world the Armenians could have known that she was there to flip him. They couldn’t have known.
    After a couple of quick peek-and-ducks, a stray bullet zinging past, she realized that the target was actually the old guy.
    He was yelling at the shooter, taunting him. Evelyn was 1,000 percent certain nothing good could come of that. She was surprised the shooter hadn’t hit the old guy yet, but not shocked. It happened sometimes. A shooter’s adrenaline went crazy, the target kept moving, the gun kicked and jumped. Evelyn had seen TV footage once, caught by a local news crew, of a client trying to shoot his lawyer outside a courthouse. Point-blank range, but the lawyer kept moving, juking, ducking behind a tree. He’d survived, not a scratch on him.
    Evelyn doubted he’d been taunting the shooter, though.
    When she’d counted fifteen shots, the magazine empty, she started to make her move. To her surprise, Bouchon was already making one of his own. He tackled the shooter and knocked him to the floor. The gun came free, but Evelyn had to stay where she was. She could probably get to the gun before the shooter did, but that really wasn’t something you wanted to be almost sure about.
    The shooter got to the gun before Bouchon did. They wrestled and then the shooter punched himself in the face. Evelyn wasn’t exactly sure how Bouchon arranged that, but the shooter dropped the gun and took off.
    Now the sound of sirens began to drift in through the broken window. Shit, Evelyn thought again.
    Bouchon had checked on the screaming girl, and now came over to check on Evelyn. He looked like he might want to say something clever, but finally he just ran a hand through his hair and sighed.
    â€œYou’re bleeding,” he said.
    Evelyn reached up and touched the lobe of her ear. A sharp fragment of painted coconut shell had stabbed into the wall right next to her head. Bouchon worked the piece of coconut shell loose from the wood. It still had a little blood from her ear on it.
    â€œYour poor mermaid,” Evelyn said. The mermaid had been smashed to pieces by a stray bullet.
    â€œOther than all that,” he said, “it’s been a pretty good day.”
    She smiled. She was finding it harder and harder to think of him as a shithead. He was, no question. In Evelyn’s book, anyone who made a living from unlawful activity, past, present, or future, was a shithead. But she’d always been able to read people well. She’d known, for example, that her ex-husband was an asshole the minute she met him. Shake Bouchon just didn’t seem that bad of a guy, for a bad guy.
    She was still going to put the screws to him. It just wouldn’t be quite so