"Not to worry," I said. She didn't ask.
LuEllen stayed over. Clancy, the computer lady who had been designing the America's Cup boat, had found somebody else to design it with, and my feet, had, in fact, been cold all winter. So LuEllen was welcome.
But as I lay beside her that night, awake, listening to her easy breathing, I felt the finger of darkness pressing on me again. It had come any number of times in the past two months, usually just before sleep: the ghost of St. John Corbeil.
I was the only one who'd ever know, but the passport that crossed into Mexico was the same one that Green, Lane, LuEllen, and I had passed around a diner table after the raid on Corbeil's apartment. The man who'd carried it was a friend of Bobby's, reliable, and who, for a price, was willing to check the passport through Mexican passport control, without asking why. He'd burned it in a bathroom of the California Royal Motel in Matamoros; and that is the last, I hope, that we'd hear of St. John Corbeil.
Corbeil himself was buried under a foot of sandy Texas soil, in a hastily scratched-out grave, a few miles northwest of Waco, Texas.
At night, lying in bed, I sometimes felt his loneliness out there.
Maybe, I thought, as I turned over and touched the woman's back, LuEllen could make him go away.
Maybe.
