It wasn't the booze. It wasn't the blue-steel smell of a well-oiled .38. It wasn't the pheremones in the summer air, thick as Spanish sweat in the summernight simmer of a city too familiar with sinning. It wasn't even the teeth-grinding screech of bad brakes from a thousand dissonant taxicabs that made Sevilla die that night. It was her goddamned double crossing luminsecent Gardol smile, really, that did her in, finally -- that two-timing fluorescent cheapskate imitation of sunlight oozing out of the dark corners of her pusillanimous soul. That's why she died. But I'm getting ahead of myself.