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ful of surprises. Carlotta set the phone next
    to her ear and curled onto her side, listening to Jack
    breathe. She made an effort to outlast him, but she lost
    that struggle with a smile on her face.

    8
    Wesley shifted on the uncomfortable chair in the coffee
    shop, waiting for Meg. He hadn’t wanted to crawl out of
    bed so early, but she’d asked him to meet her outside the
    office to go over the test data at this godawful hour. So
    here he was, sneaking a smoke under the table, trying to
    wake up. He was on his second foamy drink with sprinkles
    that was some pricey derivative of coffee.
    Conscious of his promise to Carlotta, he’d swallowed only
    half a tablet of Oxy this morning, cutting his normal dose.
    And he’d hoped the extra caffeine would help to ward off
    withdrawal. Instead, his head rumbled and his bladder was
    about to explode, but he wasn’t about to carry a damn
    bouquet of flowers into the john.
    He looked at the flowers and hoped Meg didn’t notice the
    brown edges. It was the best bunch the convenience store
    on the corner had to offer. He picked off a few dying
    petals, but it left the flowers looking a little bald. He tossed
    down the rubber-banded bouquet and wiped his hand
    over his mouth. Like it mattered.
    From his backpack, the theme of The Mickey Mouse Club
    sounded. He winced—if Mouse was calling this early in the
    morning, it couldn’t be good. They’d had a lousy
    col ections day yesterday—he probably wanted to work
    today. Wes cursed under his breath and flipped open the
    pay-as-you-go phone. “Yeah?”
    “Hey, little man, did I wake you up?”
    “Nah. What’s going on?”
    “Bad news. You know that Logan kid you let slip through
    your fingers yesterday?”
    “The Georgia Tech student who owes The Carver ten
    large? I didn’t expect the guy to jump out the window.”
    “Yeah, wel , I just found out the frat boy got kicked out of
    school. Which means he’s probably planning to hightail it
    back to Cincinnati and skip out on his debt, if he hasn’t
    already.”
    Wes sighed. “I wasn’t planning to work today.”
    “Change your plans,” Mouse said. “The stakes went up
    when The Carver bought your debt from Father Thom.”
    Another loan shark he owed…or used to. Now all his
    markers were with The Carver, the man he was working
    undercover for in exchange for leniency from the D.A. on a
    previous charge. To get his foot in the organization, he’d
    offered to partner with Mouse to collect on “non-
    traditional” accounts—students whose environments he
    could infiltrate.
    “If this schmuck is stil in town, find him,” Mouse said.
    “And if I can’t?”
    “The Carver’s gonna hold you personally responsible.”
    The line went dead and Wesley snapped the phone closed.
    His arm tingled where The Carver had sliced the letters C-
    A-R into his flesh for a previous infraction, with the
    promise to finish the job if Wesley stepped out of line
    again.
    Wes lifted the cigarette for a drag.
    “You can’t smoke in here,” the guy at the next table said.
    Wesley started to give him the finger, then something in
    the newspaper the guy was reading caught his eye. APD
    Receives Anonymous Note Identifying Headless Man. “Can
    I see that?”
    “Are you going to put out the cigarette?”
    Wesley grabbed the paper out of the guy’s hand and took
    another drag.
    “Hey!”
    “Relax, dude. Your blood pressure wil kil you before my
    cigarette does.”
    The guy got up and scurried away. Wes scanned the short
    article that described the scrap of paper he’d mailed to the
    APD with three variations of a name scribbled on it. He
    hoped that one of the names belonged to the headless
    corpse in the morgue. He was pretty sure Mouse had done
    the guy in, since the dead man’s finger had been in the
    trunk of Mouse’s Town Car. And because Mouse had
    forced Wes to remove the teeth from the severed head
    with a pair of pliers.
    The APD hopes the person who mailed in the tip wil