She looked at him with borderline contempt.

‘I swear,’ he added, like a fifth-grader.

Why did this always happen to him around her, this feeling that he was unworthy? She was a pole-dancing whore, for Chrissakes, not Mother Teresa.

The answers came back at him with slick ease: because she’d left a refund on a Motel 6 pillow; because she’d whipped him at pool and still made him laugh; because nobody really watched her dance but him; because her mother wore white gloves; and because he’d held her dead sister’s hand in the rain. All those reasons and more jumbled through his head while she managed to seat the key correctly and open the car door.

‘Lucia,’ he started, ready to convince her with the unbelievable truth. She stopped half in and half out of the car and looked at him, impatient, angry, hurt. He changed his mind.

‘I need your help,’ he said.

It was the truth too, but it was also the one thing he knew she wouldn’t refuse him, and he burned with the shame of sinking low enough to take advantage of someone’s impeccably good manners.

*

She drove past the Motel 6 without a glance. Tom knew because he watched her.

She wasn’t going to cut him any slack.

‘Everything I’m going to tell you is true,’ he said, and she slid an appraising look his way, then concentrated on the road again.

‘Okay,’ she said, ‘then I’ll believe it all.’

This time he left nothing out. Almost nothing.

She took Harbor Boulevard to Warner, then swung a left and a quick right, and pulled up outside a low stucco apartment block. They sat there until he finished up with stealing evidence from a grieving widow and $112,000 from what he had to assume was the Mafia, or the Russian Mafia, or the Irish Mafia. Some ethnic, scary mob, in any case.

‘I’ve only left one thing out,’ he told her finally, ‘and that’s to protect somebody else.’

She nodded slowly. ‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘I told you. I need your help.’

‘But why me?’

‘I—’ He stopped. ‘I just …’ He didn’t know what to tell her. Didn’t know what to tell himself.

She nodded again. ‘Let’s go inside.’

Her apartment was tiny but neat and tastefully furnished. She dropped her purse on the couch and disappeared into the kitchen. ‘You want coffee?’

‘Please.’ He stood in the doorway between the two rooms and watched her. ‘How’s your mother?’

Lucia used a carved wooden scoop to measure the coffee grounds into a black-and-chrome espresso machine. ‘If you don’t mind,’ she said quietly, ‘I’d rather not talk about my family with you.’

He felt slapped. Hard. It was a new twist in his humility training.

‘What happened to your face?’ she said, turning her back to him.

‘When I went after the men who shot Munro …’ it seemed so foolish and unimportant now ‘… I fell.’

‘Do you want cream and sugar?’

‘Sugar. Thanks.’

They sat down, she on the couch, he in a small leather armchair.

‘I don’t know what I can do for you, Tom.’

‘I don’t know either.’

‘You must have had some idea when you came to the Sawmill.’

He glanced around the apartment. It was barely big enough for one.

‘Do you need a place to stay?’

He wanted to say, ‘No,’ but he had to say, ‘Yes.’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘For now.’

‘I can pay.’

‘I don’t want that money.’

He felt embarrassed. ‘It’s all I have.’

She was staring at the wall. ‘Then stay for free.’ She drained her cup and got up.

‘You got some blankets or something? For the couch?’

‘You can sleep with me. Sleep.’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Sleep.’

Man, that humility thing was really getting a workout tonight.

*

By four in the morning, he was all ready to check into a motel. Sleeping with Lucia was impossible. He’d never known that if you did nothing with it a hard-on could last all night. It was a case of ignorance having once been bliss.

Bliss newly defined was Lucia in the little white panties and crop-top she called pyjamas. She was apparently so moved by his sexy presence that she fell asleep before he’d even got out of the bathroom. He slid under the covers beside her, lay on his back, and watched the ceiling fan revolve for the next two hours while his groin ached. Im-fucking-possible.

Only the fact that her sister had just died stopped Tom from putting a careful hand on her breast and seeing how things went from there. At four thirty he conceded defeat and shut himself in the cramped bathroom. He came as quietly as a prisoner, then crept back to bed.

‘’Kay?’ she mumbled, making him jump.

‘Yeah,’ he said.