47
It had been a week since I’d left Cissy’s apartment and returned to Tallahassee. The Feds had successfully kept our exploits out of the news, so it was a week of bread-and-butter records checks, of eating ramen and tracking down overdue payments from the State and other deadbeat clients so I could pay my own bills. I guess “working” for Renee had been my unpaid vacation.
It had also been a week of Renee dodging me. I had not seen her once. She didn’t answer the phone, even when her car was in the driveway. Ben had only been by my house a couple of times—scarce by Ben standards—but he was enjoying his last weeks of freedom before the start of a new school year. He’d visited soon after I’d returned home to show me his pale, shriveled arm, now free of its cast. Then he’d dropped by a few
