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Fresno five months before. He was lucky to be alive, though he had probably spent many weeks feeling otherwise. Judging by the care with which he sat down, that time was not over yet. The man who shot him — and me too, in the shoulder — was dead. Nina had killed him in the forest a couple of miles from where we now stood, on the day we met Patrice. Nina had seen her boss only twice since, on our two brief visits to LA, when she had been required for debriefing and evidential hearings towards the trial of the killer we had caught that day.
    'Why didn't you call ahead?' she said. 'By which I mean yesterday, not when you're halfway around our lake? Killing you is trouble we really don't need — however
unbelievably
appealing the idea seems right this second.'
    Monroe put his mug on the table. 'Would you have been here when I arrived?'
    'Of course we would.'
    He didn't believe her. Olbrich meanwhile was gazing out at the trees, happy not to be involved in this part of the conversation. But I could read a good deal of tension in his face.
    'And you would have taken the call in the first place?'
    'Charles… oh for God's sake.' She rubbed her face with her hands, and picked her own coffee up off the rail.
    'Monroe,' I said. 'What do you actually want?'
    'From you, nothing. You are not an employee of the FBI, which is the organization I work for. Nina too, as I hope she recalls. You're not a cop either, and never were. I gather you once worked for another agency in what may loosely be termed "intelligence", but from what I hear that was a long time ago and you are not exactly missed. So far as I am concerned you can walk off into the forest and never come back.'
    'Ward saved your life,' Nina said.
    'Really? The last thing I saw was him pulling you out of the back of a restaurant and leaving me pinned in a booth. The shooter followed you. I survived by default.'
    'A selective account,' I said, though privately I agreed with him. I'd been more concerned with prolonging Nina's life, and my own, than I had been with his — especially after he'd taken what I'd assumed were mortal wounds. I had found I could live with this decision.
    'People,' Olbrich said, 'this isn't getting us anywhere.'
    'Nina and I weren't
intending
to go anywhere,' I snapped. 'She had an agreement with this asshole which precluded him revealing our location — including to you. He's broken that already and I'm guessing that's just the beginning. You haven't come here to bring Nina's mail, Monroe, so what the hell do you want?'
    'Nina,' Monroe said. 'It's time for you to come back.'
    Bang. Just like that, I knew Nina's question of the other night had been answered. It was always bound to be this way. I shook my head, and walked a few paces.
    'I don't know if I'm coming back,' Nina said. 'I like it here.'
    'Is that a resignation? Really? If so, get a pen and paper. I'll need it in writing.'
    Nina looked at me. I shrugged, meaning this was her gig, her call and decision and life.
    'Come on, Nina,' Monroe said, voice caught between irritation and an attempt to sound reasonable. 'You know the score. I got you leave because the circumstances were exceptional.'
    'Plus about two million years' worth of owed time.'
    'You ran out weeks ago. As you know.'
    'Okay,' she said, dully. 'So maybe I will retire. Maybe I'm done with this stuff. It's not like we're making a discernible difference.'
    'That's not true. There are ten years' worth of killers in jail because of you.'
    'Putting someone away after they've killed two, four, six people — what kind of win is that? It's wiping up a dropped glass of milk. Fine, the floor's clean for a while. But you still don't have any milk. The victims' families still get up every day feeling like death. It all still happened and we're after the fact.'
    'Unless you find some way of going back in time,' Olbrich said. 'That is the nature of law enforcement.'
    Nina coloured. She had meant the observation personally, as a reflection of what