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“Neither of us knows them.”

“And the lady still refuses medical attention?”

I nodded.

“Well, all right then, folks. Hope you don’t have no more trouble.”

“Thank you for coming so quickly,” I said, and turned my head a little to meet Officer Boling’s eyes. He looked at me in a troubled way, and I could hear in his head that he was worried about my safety with a violent man like Quinn, a man who could throw two boys several feet in the air. He didn’t realize, and I hoped he never would, that the attack had been personal. It had been no random mugging.

We went to the station in a police car. I wasn’t sure what their thinking was, but Boling’s partner told us that we’d be returned to Quinn’s vehicle, so we went along with the program. Maybe they didn’t want us to have a chance to talk to each other alone. I don’t know why; I think the only thing that could have aroused their suspicion was Quinn’s size and expertise in fighting off attackers.

In the brief seconds we had alone before an officer climbed into the driver’s seat, I told Quinn, “If you think something at me, I’ll be able to hear you—if you need me to know something urgently.”

“Handy,” he commented. The violence seemed to have relaxed something inside him. He rubbed his thumb across the palm of my hand. He was thinking he’d like to have thirty minutes in a bed with me, right now, or even fifteen; hell, even ten, even in the backseat of a car, would be fantastic. I tried not to laugh, but I couldn’t help it, and when he realized that I’d read all that clearly, he shook his head with a rueful smile.

We have somewhere to go after this, he thought deliberately. I hoped he didn’t mean he was going to rent a room or take me to his place for sex, because no matter how attractive I found him, I wasn’t going to do that tonight. But his brain had mostly cleared of lust, and I perceived his purpose was something different. I nodded.

So don’t get too tired, he said. I nodded again. How I was supposed to prevent exhaustion, I wasn’t sure, but I’d try to hoard a little energy.

The police station was much like I expected it to be. Though there’s a lot to be said for Shreveport, it has more than its fair share of crime. We didn’t excite much attention at all, until officers who’d been on the scene put their heads together with police in the building, and then there were a few stolen glances at Quinn, some surreptitious evaluations. He was formidable-looking enough for them to credit ordinary strength as the source of his defeat of the two muggers. But there was just enough strangeness about the incident, enough peculiar touches in the eyewitness reports . . . and then my eye caught a familiar weathered face. Uh-oh.

“Detective Coughlin,” I said, remembering now why the name had sounded familiar.

“Miss Stackhouse,” he responded, with about as much enthusiasm as I had shown. “What you been up to?”

“We got mugged,” I explained.

“Last time I saw you, you were engaged to Alcide Herveaux, and you’d just found one of the most sickening corpses I’ve ever seen,” he said easily. His belly seemed to have gotten even bigger in the few months since I’d met him at a murder scene here in Shreveport. Like many men with a disproportionate belly, he wore his khaki pants buttoned underneath the overhang, so to speak. Since his shirt had broad blue and white stripes, the effect was that of a tent overhanging packed dirt.

I just nodded. There was really nothing to say.

“Mr. Herveaux doing okay after the loss of his father?” Jackson Herveaux’s body had been found half-in, half-out of a feed tank filled with water on an old farm belonging to the family. Though the newspaper had tap-danced around some of the injuries, it was clear wild animals had chewed at some of the bones. The theory was that the older Herveaux had fallen into the tank and broken his leg when he hit the bottom. He had managed to get to the edge and haul himself halfway out, but at that point he had passed out. Since no one knew he’d visited the farm, no one came to his rescue, the theory went, and he’d died all by himself.