The rain in Los Angeles didn't wash anything clean. It just made the grime slicker, turning the streets of downtown into mirrors that reflected neon signs and broken promises in equal measure. Veronica Cross watched the rain from the window of the bar on Sunset Boulevard, her reflection superimposed over the yellow streaks of taxi lights on the wet pavement. She looked like a woman who knew something she shouldn't. Maybe she did.

The man sitting across from her at the corner table knew something too. Detective Jack O'Brien was a big man with a tired face and the kind of honesty that made other cops dislike him. He had been hiring Vera for jobs for three years—jobs the LAPD couldn't officially handle, jobs that required a woman who could walk into any room in Los Angeles and make people underestimate her.

"They say he's dead," O'Brien said. He didn't look at her. He was studying the ice in his glass. "Six months ago. Car went off a bridge upstate. Single vehicle. No skid marks. Driver identified by his wallet, which was in the other jacket—the one he wasn't wearing when the car went in the water."

"Mickey wasn't wearing his jacket?"

"He was driving. Jacket was on the passenger seat. We found it."

Vera swirled the amber liquid in her glass. Mickey Moretti was her husband. Or had been, for four years, before she'd learned that the man she'd married was a mid-level enforcer for the Moretti crime family, responsible for laundering money through a network of legitimate businesses—restaurants, parking garages, a union local that existed on paper and in the pockets of city councilmen.

She had known. God help her, she had known. And she had stayed anyway, telling herself that love was its own justification, that the man who brought her flowers on Fridays and hit her on Tuesdays was two different people who shared a face.

Then Mickey had died, and the two people had finally become one: dead.

"And you want me to believe this is a tragedy," Vera said.

"I want you to believe that I'm paying you five thousand dollars to drive west on Route 66 and find out if Mickey Moretti is actually dead. If he is, I'll close the file. If he isn't—" He finally looked at her. "If he isn't, then someone in this department has been lying to me for six months, and I need to know who before he kills someone else."

Vera took a drink. The whiskey burned, but not as much as the thought of driving west alone, on the same highway that had carried her honeymoon, her arguments, and finally, the morning after the last punch, her suitcases out of the house on Wilshire Boulevard.

"Why me?" she asked. "You got cops for this."

"I got cops who Mickey would recognise. You—" He looked her up and down. "You're a pretty woman. People talk around pretty women. They think we're decoration. It's their mistake."

Vera smiled, thin and humourless. "Where do I sign?"

The Cadillac was black and quiet and had been fitted with everything a woman who expected to be followed might want: a silenced pistol under the passenger seat, a spare gas can in the trunk, and a false compartment behind the glove box that Vera discovered by accident and then pretended she'd known about all along.

She left Los Angeles at dawn, driving west on Route 66 with the radio off and the windows down. The California morning smelled of dust and eucalyptus and something she couldn't name—maybe freedom, maybe desperation. They felt similar on this road.

San Bernardino was the first stop. She visited a brothel on the edge of town, the kind with peeling paint and a woman named Pearl who had been pretty once and was now something harder and more useful. Pearl recognised Vera immediately—Mickey had brought clients here, and Vera had once walked in on them by mistake, an incident that had ended with Pearl teaching Vera how to throw a punch.

"Mickey's dead," Vera said.

Pearl spat into a tin cup. "Who said?"

"The police."

"Police say a lot of things. Mickey's been here. Two months ago. Asked about Las Vegas. About the new casinos."

"Did you see him?"

Pearl studied Vera's face. "Why? You think he's alive?"

Vera didn't answer. She left a fifty-dollar bill on the counter and drove on.

Salton Sea was next—a place that seemed to have been cursed by God and forgotten by man. The lake was shrinking, leaving behind white crusts of salt that crackled under the car's tires. At a gas station on the edge of town, Vera spoke to a man who had been living in a shack by the shore for three years. He was half-mad, possibly from the radiation from a nearby nuclear testing site, possibly just from loneliness.

"I saw that car," he said, nodding at the Cadillac. "Black. Same one. Came through six months ago. Driver looked like your Mickey. But it could've been anybody. Out here, everybody's a ghost."

By the time she reached the Mojave Desert, Vera was running out of road and out of patience. The desert was vast and empty and beautiful in the way that indifference is beautiful. She stopped at a gas station run by an old man who spoke to no one and accepted payment without looking at it.

"Mickey Moretti," Vera said, writing the name on a piece of paper and sliding it across the counter.

The old man looked at it for a long time. Then he looked at her. "He came here. After the bridge. Paid in cash. Asked for directions to Las Vegas."

"When?"

The old man pointed to the gas receipt, still pinned to the board behind the counter. The date was three weeks after Mickey's death.

Vera took the receipt. Her hand didn't shake. She had trained herself not to shake.

Las Vegas was a city built on the principle that anything could be reinvented if you had enough money and enough nerve. The desert exploded into neon—caesars, egyptian themes, western motifs stacked on top of each other like a child's dream of what civilization looked like. Vera parked the Cadillac outside a motel on the Strip and sat in the dark, listening to the slot machines clatter through the walls.

She was about to enter the Dunes Casino when a hand touched her shoulder.

She turned, drew the pistol from her waistband, and had the barrel pressed to the stranger's chest before he could speak.

The stranger raised his hands calmly. "Easy, Mrs. Moretti. I'm not here to hurt you."

It was a man in his thirties, dark-haired, with Mickey's jawline and Mickey's walk, but different eyes—softer, less certain.

"Who are you?"

"My name is Marco. Marco Moretti." He paused. "Mickey's brother. The twin."

Vera's finger rested on the trigger. "Twins don't look exactly alike."

"Most don't. We do. That's the curse." He kept his hands up. "Can we talk somewhere that isn't a casino parking lot?"

Vera lowered the gun slightly. "If you're Mickey—"

"I'm not. I'm the brother he spent his entire life being compared to. The one who stayed in New York and became an accountant while Mickey became a thug. I only found out he was in California because Mom died and I had to sort through his things. That's when I found the letters. The ones he never sent."

"Letters to me?"

"Letters to nobody. He was writing to himself. Trying to figure out who he was." Marco's expression darkened. "He was scared, Vera. Not of the police. Of what he'd become. He told me in the last letter—he said he was going to disappear. Not die. Disappear. So the people who owed him money would stop looking. So the people he owed money to would think he was gone. So you would be safe."

"Safe from who?"

"That's the question, isn't it?" Marco's eyes flicked toward the casino entrance. "Because someone else thinks Mickey's alive too. And they're not as patient as I am."

Vera felt the desert night close around her like a fist. "Who?"

Marco leaned closer. "The same people Mickey was laundering money for. The same people who might have a problem with you talking to me. You need to leave. Now. Drive east. Don't stop. Don't look in the rearview mirror."

Vera looked at the man who shared her dead husband's face and realised she didn't trust him. But she trusted the fear in his eyes, and that was enough.

She got into the Cadillac and drove. She drove through the neon desert, past casinos and motels and the skeletal remains of older, worse Vegas, heading east on Route 66 with the pistol between her feet and a mind full of questions that had no answers.

She was not a woman who made good decisions under pressure. She was a woman who made dangerous ones.

And the most dangerous decision she was about to make was still three hundred miles away, waiting for her in the dark.