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fucking waitress for Christ’s sake!—I’ll sign her up and she’ll be grateful, know what I mean?”
    Fisher looked around, searching for a little male solidarity. Montez shook his head. It was going to be a pleasure ridding the world of this shithead.
    “Go on,” he said quietly. “You signed her up, correct?”
    “Yeah, but man did that bitch drive a hard bargain.” A grating whining note crept into his voice. “Most musicians, they don’t know dick about the music business. They learn as they go along. Some of them never learn. But Irene—Eve—shit, it was like she was born to it. She negotiated the toughest contract I’ve ever seen, right down the line. Boy, does that bitch know her numbers.”
    Yes, indeed, Montez thought sourly. The bitch knows her numbers. And mine.
    “And that was the easy part. Because when I started talking gigs and recordings, man, she just went wild. Laid down the law. No concerts, only recordings. Recording studio had to be emptied out, musicians and sound engineer in another room with a separate entrance. And no interviews, no photos, no website, no nothing. That was her iron-clad bottom line, and I tell you, I nearly walked away, because who needs this shit. But then, hell…” The idiot smiled reminiscently, forgetting where he was. “That first album went gold, the second platinum. It was a smart marketing ploy.”
    This was getting tedious. Montez wanted to wrap it up.
    “So where does this Irene, or Eve, live?”
    Fisher shook his head. “No fucking idea.”
    Trey’s blow drew blood this time. When the idiot stopped screaming, Montez tried again.
    “Where does she live?”
    “I don’t fucking know !” he shouted. “She wouldn’t tell me! The address on the contract is a P.O. box in Seattle. No one knows where she lives.”
    Fisher was too much of a coward to lie. Shit.
    “What’s her cell phone number?”
    Fisher’s eyes lit with hope. He rattled off a number with a Seattle prefix, and Montez realized that was about all he was going to get out of this fuckhead.
    “Okay, we’re done here.” Montez stood, and Fisher’s eyes followed him eagerly. Idiot thought the whole thing was over. Montez glanced at Trey. “Take care of this,” he said quietly, and exited the room.
    He could barely hear the shot out in the corridor. Trey used a suppressor, just like he’d been told.
    San Diego
      Ellen Palmer checked the address on the small brass plaque outside an elegant, super-modern building in downtown San Diego against the scrawled words torn off a napkin and verified that they were the same.
    She didn’t need to do that. She had a near-photographic memory, and if a number was involved, she never forgot it, ever.
    Morrison Building, 1147 Birch Street.
    Yes, that was it.
    Ellen recognized what she was doing. She was stalling, which was unlike her. She was alive because she’d been able to take decisions fast and act on them immediately. She’d have been six feet under if she hadn’t acted fast. Stalling was unlike her.
    But she was so damned tired . Tired of running, tired of lying, tired of keeping her head down, in the most literal sense of the term. Security cameras were everywhere these days and her enemy had a powerful face recognition program. For the past year, she’d rarely presented her naked face in public in daylight.
    Even now, when she was betting her life on the fact that she was moving toward safety, she had on huge sunglasses and her now-long hair was drawn forward around her face. She needed to buy a big straw hat.
    There were two security cameras on the lintel of the twelve-foot street door of the Morrison Building, but Ellen kept her head down as she entered, walked across the huge glass and marble lobby and rode up in the elevator to the ninth floor. Remaining anonymous in the elevator was hard. The four walls were polished bronze that reflected as well as mirrors to the small security camera in the corner.
    The door to RBK Security was