Benny woke up to the scrape of shovel on dirt. He couldn't see a thing. When he stirred, he felt rough hemp against his face. When he tried to take the hemp bag off he realized that his hands had been tied up as well.

"Don't bother."

That voice. Was it-

The bag was pulled from his head, and he saw. The courier. The gaunt, angry set of jaw, the startling blue eyes. The twin pucker of nine millimeter bullet scars on her forehead. She looked like an avatar of some old vengeful god clad in leather armor.

"Hey! Pussycat! Are we turning the kink up, or what?" he joked feebly. Unlike Swank, he'd always had a thing for dangerous cats.

She said nothing, standing in grim silence. The moon at her back gave her face an ominous cast. Benny felt a sudden trill of fear. He looked around nervously. The lights of Vegas shone in the distance, but all around them there were cacti and the occasional honey mesquite. They were right in the middle of nowhere. No witnesses.

Silence was unbearable to Benny. Benny Bigmouth, that's what the kids always called him. "Bu- but... you saved my life!" The last he had seen of this insane courier was in Caesar's camp, charging at Caesar and his Praetorians after untying his bonds.

"No," she said simply. "I wanted to kill you on my terms."

I don't want to die, Benny realized suddenly. At the Fort he had resigned himself to his fate, but then the courier had come, and released him. He had been free again, with a life on the straight and narrow ahead of him. He understood now that that had been a lie. He had never been free. It had just been a stay of execution.

"Baby, we had some good times, didn't we?" Despite the biting cold of the Mojave at night he was sweating in his suit. "You and me, we're platinum! Untie me, and we- we'll dance together again."

The courier unholstered her gun, and Benny sucked in a breath of recognition. Maria glinted in the moonlight. She thumbed the safety off with a click. "You're crying in the rain, pallie."

She slid the magazine out and reached into her belt pouch. "Time to cash out." A fresh magazine. Red rim. Hollow point.

Damn damn damn

The hollow points slid back into Maria. "Sorry you got twisted up in this scene." He realized, belatedly, that the courier was repeating his exact words when their situations had been reversed, except that she made the words sound mocking.

"It was just business, baby."

The courier ignored him. "From where you're kneeling it must seem like an eighteen-karat run of bad luck," she said, almost mechanically.

Staring down Maria's barrel now. Time for the big sleep.

The ghost of a sneer on those full lips. "Truth is, the game was rigged from the start."

Blossoming pain in his brainpan. The courier was saying something else, but Benny Gecko was beyond caring. The world fell away and all was dark.