Making no effort to mask her irritation, the woman on the other end informed her that the office was closed for the day, and she’d only answered because she’d been talking to her husband when their call had been dropped, and she thought it was him calling her back. “Try again tomorrow,” she said impatiently.

“Wait! Please don’t hang up,” Jessi exclaimed, panicking. “Tomorrow might be too late. I need it picked up first thing in the morning. I’ve got to return this thing fast.”

Silence.

“It was really expensive to ship,” Jessi shot into the silence, hoping money would keep the woman on the line and motivate her to be helpful. “Probably one of the more expensive deliveries you guys have done. It came from overseas and required special handling.”

“You going to pay to reship, or you trying to stick it to the shipper?” the woman asked suspiciously.

“I’ll pay,” Jessi said without hesitation. Though she loathed the thought of spending money on something she would end up with nothing to show for, at least she’d be alive to pay it off. She had a downright scary amount of credit on her Visa; it never ceased to amaze her how much rope banks were willing to give college students to hang themselves with.

“Got an invoice number?”

“Of course not. I just told you, I don’t have the bill of lading. Your guys forgot to give me a copy.”

“We never forget to give copies of the BOL,” the woman bristled. “You must have misplaced it.”

Jessi sighed. “Okay, fine, I misplaced it. Regardless, I don’t have it.”

“Ma’am, we do hundreds of deliveries a week. Without an invoice number, I have no way of knowing what delivery you’re talking about.”

“Well, you can look it up by last name, can’t you?”

“The computers are down for the night. They go off-line at eight. You’ll have to call back tomorrow.”

“It was an unusual delivery,” Jessi pushed. “You might remember it. It was a late-night drop. A recent one. I can describe the guys who brought it.” Swiftly, she detailed the pair.

There was another long silence.

Then, “Ma’am, those men were murdered over the weekend. Garroted, just like that professor man that’s been all over the news. Police won’t leave us alone.” A bitter note entered her voice. “They been acting like my husband’s company had something to do with it, like we got shady dealings going on or something.” A pause, then, “What did you say your name was again?”

Feeling like she’d just been kicked in the stomach, Jessi hung up.

She didn’t go straight to him.

She refused to do that.

The thought of such a swift show of defeat was too chafing.

The past few days had been a study in humility for her. Not a single thing had gone according to anything remotely resembling The Jessi St. James Plan For A Good Life, and she had the bad feeling nothing was going to for quite a while.

So she stubbornly toughed it out in the university café until half past midnight, sipping still more coffee that her frazzled nerves didn’t need, savoring what she suspected might be her last moments of near-normalcy for a long time, before caving in to the inevitable.

She had no desire to die. Crimeny, she’d hardly even gotten to live yet.

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. Her friend Ginger had given her a coffee mug with that quote on it a few months ago. If you spun it around, the other side said: When did having a life become an event you had to schedule? She’d stuffed it way in the back of her cupboard and not looked at it again, the sad truth of it shaving too close to the bone.

No, she certainly wasn’t ready to die. She wanted at least another sixty or seventy years. She hadn’t even gotten to the good parts of her life yet. Problem was, she didn’t suffer any illusions about her ability to, as he’d so succinctly put it, “see death coming.” She was a college student, an archaeology major, at that. People were not her forte. Not living ones, anyway. She was no slouch with the dead ones, like the Iceman or the Bog People, but that wouldn’t get her very far with an assassin. Sad fact was, Death could probably stalk up to her wearing a hooded black robe and toting a scythe, and she’d get all distracted wondering about the age, origin, and composition of the scythe.

Ergo, like it or not—and dear God, she didn’t—she needed him. Whatever he was. The professor was dead. The deliverymen were dead. She’d been next. Three out of four down. She felt like one of those ditzy heroines in a murder mystery, or one of those fluffy romance novels, the loose end that needed tidying up, the one the psychopath kept coming after. The helpless, girly girl. And she’d never considered herself helpless in her entire life. Girly, maybe, but not helpless.