A Harrington & Richards .22 cal. revolver holds nine cartridges. If you load only one, the odds are 8:1 you’ll catch a lucky bullet. That’s a twelve-point-five percent chance the hammer will fall on the loaded cylinder.

Infinity contained in that tiny black hole.

I was still capable of putting nine in the black at fifty yards with the 12-inch heavy-barrel pistol. Shouldn’t be so hard to put one into the back of my head, but the long barrel was clumsy to position at just the right angle. You don’t want to screw up and leave yourself worse off than you already are.

I was contemplating such deep thoughts when the phone rang, interrupting my reverie. I say “the phone rang”, but it actually chirped, or warbled, or some Chinese software engineer’s idea of what ‘ring’ should sound like when produced by a tiny bit of silicon and solder.

I ignored it. The interruption had allowed pain, my ever-faithful companion, to sneak back into my consciousness. Resentment, like undigested french fries, lifted bile into my mouth.

After the third warble the voice mail picked up. The caller heard Barbara’s voice from beyond the grave:

“Thank you for calling Allworth Investigations. We are unable to take your call at this time. Please leave your name, number and the best time to reach you. One of our investigators will return your call within four hours.”

Yeah. And if you believe that, you believe Oswald was the lone assassin.

I was two-thirds of the way through a fifth of cheap bourbon. I returned to my mental calculations, considering the improvement in odds if I used my five-shot snub-nose .357 Magnum revolver instead of the .22.  One in five bumps the likelihood of success. Of course, you don’t shoot yourself in the head more than once. And, logically, I could fill the cylinder and guarantee results. That seemed unsportsmanlike. I thought I should give Fate a fair chance with the outcome. I was getting crazy. Okay, crazier.

Forensic pathologists say the small caliber bullet will likely penetrate the skull only once. Instead of exiting, the tiny piece of lead bounces off the inside, usually more than once, thereby transforming the cranial contents into something resembling the consistency of day-old oatmeal.                

The .357, on the other hand, is likely to remove enough brain tissue to guarantee a fatal wound, so I suppose, in the end, it’s merely a question of how considerate of the cleaners you want to be. I tried the fit of the snub-nose against the base of my skull, pointing the black hole against my cerebellum. Blow out your cerebellum and you’re dead before you register the sound of the shot.

Maybe.

Bang!

To escort you into eternity.

To die/To sleep./ Perchance to dream./Aye, there’s the rub.

Shakespeare got that right.

I suppose I could have found some HMO slave-doctor to give me the latest and greatest SSRI, but that felt like cheating. I had good reasons for being depressed. Fooling my brain into thinking I wasn’t so bad off was wrong. Sure, you can go through life an emotional castrati, but what’s the point?

The afternoon sun streamed light through the trailer window’s Venetian blinds and onto my eyelids. I lay there for a long moment wondering why I was still alive. The door to the trailer rattled. My heart lurched inside my chest, which was the only way I knew it was still beating. My feet kicked weakly, a futile attempt to disentangle from the sleeping bag.

The door rattled again. A woman’s voice called through the aluminum siding.

“Mr. McCool? The man at the gate said you were home. I called the other day?”

It was the voice belonging to a person who meant what they said. Polite but insistent. A person who, having previously called and not received a response, and having gone to the trouble of transporting themselves to my location anyway, expected to receive some acknowledgment of the effort expended. I coughed up a wad of brown phlegm into the overflowing ashtray so I could answer.

“Yeah. Gimme a minute, will ya?”

It had been months since I’d had an inquiry, let alone a real client. I’d forgotten the niceties.

The voice waited until I struggled out of the bunk, stuffed the sleeping bag into a cabinet, pushed the bed into its ‘couch’ configuration and cranked open the trailer’s roof vent, assuming the stagnant air was not fit to breathe by anyone who wasn’t already terminal. I opened the door slowly. It opens out, so if you bang it open quickly, you could cold-cock an unwary visitor.

First sight: cool, pale blue eyes, unimpressed by the image they regarded. Hair: light brown, shoulder-length, brushed, but lacking the attentions of a hairdresser for quite some time. No worse for it, in my humble opinion. Oval face: delicate features, symmetrically arranged. Not drop-dead-gorgeous, but attractive, in a non-threatening way. The sort of face that seemed to belong to a good person. There’s not a lot of those around.

“I’m Susan Sharpe. I left you a message?”

I spoke carefully, since I talked mostly to myself and never knew if I was going to find the right words first time out.

“Uh. Sorry. To keep you waiting.”

I was warming up. I figured I’d get better if I kept talking.

“Sorry. Must have missed your message.”

I realized I’d have to let her come in. And that I’d apologized twice in five seconds.

“Uh. Place’s kind of a mess. Housekeeper’s year off.”

She smiled carefully. She looked like she was preparing to view a murder scene. I pushed the door far enough for her to catch hold, then retreated into the trailer. Walked to the sink to start coffee. Opened the window as an afterthought, figuring the more ventilation the better. I gestured toward the only chair.

“Have a seat. Coffee?”

She examined the chair for a long moment, then sighed and sat on the edge.

“Coffee? No thank you. Please don’t bother.”

“Well, I’m making some anyway.”

“I usually drink tea.”

She looked guilty about it, as though she’d been criticized for having the preference.

“Oh.”

There was a tea bag or two lying around somewhere, but I figured anyone who actually liked tea wouldn’t want to drink that stuff.        

I measured out water, fired up the microwave, rinsed dried crud out of a mug. Waited exactly three minutes and fifteen seconds, reacted to the ding like a dog, filled the coffee press, set it cautiously on the TV tray in front of the couch. I sat, leaned into the dented spot, arranged my face into listening mode.

“How can I help you?”

She paused, as if considering the question for the first time.

“Well, as I said in my message...”.

“I’m afraid...”.

“Oh, right. You didn’t get that.”

I gave her one of those ‘technology-what-can-you-do?’ looks. She took a deep breath.

“My husband...well, ex-husband...”.

“I don’t do domestic cases.”

Been burned too many times by newly-single women—dangerous as a drunk with a semiautomatic and about as randomly destructive.

“It’s not about that.”

She waved a hand, dismissing the subject.

“I’m okay with the divorce.”

She gave a little twitch at the corners of her mouth.   “Tell you the truth, I hadn’t known what I was missing until he left.”

“What’s the matter? Old man’s dick too small?”

I was feeling mean.

She blushed, but gave me a look.

“As a matter of fact, he was hung like a horse. You think it feels good to have a ten-inch pole shoved inside you? Thank God he didn’t last very long. If he’d used that thing on me for more than ten minutes I’d have needed surgery.”

She took a beat.

“Size is such a guy thing.”

“Touché.”

I gave her the McCool-patented bad-boy smile.

Of course, heavy endowment is indeed a guy thing. Most women who’ve expressed an opinion to me have said much the same thing.

Or maybe they were just being considerate. You just never know with women.

“Anyway, I didn’t come here to discuss the size of my ex-husband’s penis. It’s more important than that.” She took a breath, then added, “I don’t need a private detective to find a good fuck.”

She got me. She had looked like Mrs. White-bread Suburban Housewife and she had got me good. I was beginning to like her.

“I’m sorry again. I was just trying to be cute. Look, I’ve had a rough night. Let’s start over.”

Her eyes flicked over the trailer.

“I’d say you’ve had more than one rough night.”

“It’s been a tough year.”

“I’m sorry. Life goes that way sometimes, doesn’t it?”

“Got that right, sister.”

I fumbled for a cigarette with one hand while I slurped coffee with the other.

“Mind?” I held up the smoke.

“Well...”.

“Tough. I’ve quit trying to quit. A half-hour of secondhand smoke won’t kill you.”

I nodded at the vent in the middle of the ceiling.                    “Go ahead and open it all the way if you want.”

She stood up and spun the handle on the vent. I admired her while she did it. Nothing particularly special, just nicely put together and well maintained.        She sat back down. I lit my cigarette, slurped some more coffee. She opened her leather shoulder bag and removed a CD.

“Maybe we can save some time if you take a look at this.”

She glanced around.

“You do have a computer?”

“Sure.”

I rummaged in a cabinet and removed my laptop. “Just give me a minute to get set up.”

I plugged it in and booted up. 

“Have to keep it out of sight. Too many fu...uh, too many thieves around.”

She ignored the almost-vulgarity.

I slid the disk into the drive. The machine whirred and clicked for a moment, displayed a file. I clicked on it. Page after page of spreadsheet cells and small-font text appeared on the screen. Looked like something important, but much more reading than a man with a two-year hangover could be expected to wade through quickly. I saw a lot of what seemed to be geological references in the text.

“Can you sum it up?”

“I moved recently. That’s how I happened to come across it. In the desk. I suppose he forgot it when he moved out. Along with this.”

She sounded apologetic. Held out a baggie with about a half-ounce of pot. I took it from her.

“No need to explain. It was in your stuff. It was your ex’s, but how would you know unless you took a look?”

I opened the baggy.

“Smells like good shit.”

“I didn’t even know he smoked marijuana.”

She paused, looked embarrassed by the depth of her husband’s betrayal. She shook it off.

“But then something happened last week.”

I raised an eyebrow. Possibly both.

“Someone broke into my place and...well, they messed around with my things.”

“Messed around?”

“Took my...uh...well, my underthings, and just tore everything apart. The police said it was probably some burglar who gets his kicks that way.”

“But you didn’t think so?”

I took another sniff of the baggie.

“Mind if I help myself?”

She shook her head. I found some papers and rolled a smoke. Lit it and offered. Another head shake. Hadn’t thought she smoked dope, but figured to be polite. I took another hit. Good shit.

“I got a phone call the next night. A man said ‘Where’s the disk?’.”

“And you said?”

“Well, at the time, I didn’t know what he was talking about. I mean, I had the disk, but it was a phone call in the middle of the night. I couldn’t think. He just said that, and when I asked who he was he said something like ‘You’ll find out’ and then hung up.”

She shook her head, as if she could throw off the fright like water.

“I was nervous. A girl friend of mine suggested I call a detective and mentioned your name.”

She looked as if she was going to go to that friend’s house and slap her.

“She said you’d been very helpful with her situation. I guess you were still doing domestic cases then.”

“Name?”

She told me. I couldn’t bring a face to mind, but it could have been any one of a number of suburban ex-housewives I’d liberated once upon a time.

“The caller, it wasn’t your ex?”

“I’d have recognized his voice.”

“I suppose so.”

“He’s a vice president of ___.”

She named a very large petroleum corporation. Are there any small petroleum companies?

“We lived in Saudi for several years, as well as London, the Bahamas and Mississippi. When we moved to Marin he fell in with a sort-of ‘swinging crowd’. I guess I wasn’t cool enough for him anymore.”

“How was Saudi?”

“Terrible. Boring. Americans and Brits living in little gulags, drinking duty-free booze, playing cards and fucking each others’ spouses.”

I nodded and smiled encouragingly.

“The other places were about the same. London is dirty, lot’s of crime. Bahamians’ll steal anything that isn’t nailed down, the men follow American women around constantly...”.

She stoppped.

“I guess I sound provincial.”

I didn’t think she sounded provincial. I thought she sounded honest.

“God bless America.”

She smiled, this time with some feeling.

“So...you want me to find out who made that phone call?”

“Does it matter?”

“Probably not. You want protection?”

“I don’t know. Tell you the truth, now that I’ve seen you, I don’t know if I need a private investigator or not.”

That hurt.

“Look. I know I’m not my best right now, but if you ask around, there are folks who’ll tell you Doug McCool isn’t completely washed up.”

“You’ve just been having a bad year?”

It was an invitation to tell her.

“You don’t want to hear.”

“Sure I do. Ask around. You’ll find out Susan Sharpe isn’t such a bad person to talk to.”

Suddenly the idea of opening my heart to an attractive woman who might actually care about what I said seemed appealing.

“Somebody died.”

A stabbing sensation in the eyes. I knew if I blinked tears would start. I tried to suck them back into the ducts, but that doesn’t work.

“I’m so sorry.”

She moved over to sit next to me on the couch. Offered a slim-fingered hand. Deep red nails, smoothly filed. Cool flesh, but when I took it, those delicate fingers gave mine a tiny squeeze. That was enough pressure to milk the whole story from me.

***

After puzzling over the disk for a few hours and finding it more or less meaningless, I phoned a crackerjack CPA who’d been a client from time to time.  I dropped the disk off at Larry’s the next morning.

      

Two days later Larry phoned and told me to see him at his flat.

Bright sunlight poured through the bay window of Larry’s Marina District flat—facing the yacht harbor, of course. Someone else might have thought this a good thing, but my eyes felt like icepicks had been driven into my optic nerves. My head teetered on the edge of a migraine. I didn’t need one.

Larry sat behind his desk. The desk was positioned to face the multimillion dollar view. Larry’s theory about money is that one should enjoy it while one can.

“Where did you get this?”

That precise accountant voice contained a nervous demi-semiquaver of fear, a familiar note to detectives.

“If I told you I’d have to kill you.”

Originality is overrated. Why struggle for originality, when everyone expects to hear the same damn thing?

His fingers spent some time adjusting papers on his desk. The CD glittered on one corner, flinging sunbeams like music notes around the room.

“You didn’t understand it?”

I nodded. Sometimes Larry needed a good long chew until he reached the bone.

“If this is correct...”.

He stopped, chose another direction.

“This document is a synthesis of geological research from _____ corporate laboratories. The spreadsheet is a series of calculations—projections for petroleum resources that can be developed over the next hundred years.”

A breath, then plunging on. I’m nodding after each sentence to keep him moving.

“So, according to the numbers...well, these projections indicate the total world supply of petroleum has stabilized.”

“Huh?”

A good detective keeps asking questions until he understands what he’s being told.

Larry grimaced. It’s a little face he makes when he thinks someone is being dense.

“Okay. To put it bluntly, according to this, there is no oil shortage, now or for the foreseeable future.”

He leaned back into his expensive office chair, folded his hands over his little belly.

“There’s enough oil for a hundred more years, at least. Maybe forever.”

I meditated on this for a moment.

“The whole ‘we’re-running-out-of-oil-the-sky-is-falling’ bit is bullshit?”

Larry frowned at my coarse language.         

“Yes, Doug. That’s what this report says.”

He leaned forward.

“If I understand the geology correctly...I’m no geologist but it seemed to make sense...the whole idea of oil coming from a bunch of squished-up plants and dinosaurs is ridiculous. There’s no way there was ever enough biological stuff to make all that oil, or for it to be so deep in the ground.”

“Okay. I’ll buy that. So where’s it come from?”

“Well, there’s a few geologists who think it’s formed at deep levels, near the earth’s core, then gets squeezed up through channels in the tectonic plates, accumulates in voids. So the reason the Middle East is sitting on all that oil is because it’s in a geological spot where the oil collects. The _____ corporation has been studying this theory. Quietly, of course.”

He wiggled his fingers on the surface of his desk. Reached out and touched the edge of the disk, like a talisman.

“If they rotated drilling, instituted a few other modified extraction practices, the oil fields would replenish...like an aquifer. I couldn’t understand the geological science part. Too technical for me.”

“Holy shit,” I whispered. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“Yes. For once I agree. Shit.”

I reached for the disk. My hand stopped involuntarily. Perhaps some instinct for self-preservation manifested for a moment. I pushed through this spasm and picked it up. Larry offered me a plastic case. I put it into the case, slipped the case into the inside pocket of my jacket, near my heart. My mind felt tensed for something, but I didn’t know what.

“So aside from whatever corporate employees know about this...there’s you and me.”

“And your client.”

“She doesn’t know. As ignorant as I was...”, I checked my watch, “...twenty minutes ago.”

“You know what they say? ‘Ignorance is no excuse’. Just knowing the disc exists...”.

He stood up.

“Don’t tell anybody you’ve shown it to me. I don’t want to know anything else. I don’t want to know who your clients is, or how she got it. I haven’t seen you in months.”

I thought he was going to make little shooing motions in a minute.

“I don’t even know who you are,” I said over my shoulder as I walked out of the office.

I hit the street with a bad case of nerves. I was having trouble going through normal motions, like getting my keys out of my pocket and walking. My brain was apparently fully involved in higher functions. I scanned the street for something anomalous. Futile. Marina Parkway is a busy thoroughfare, cars up and down constantly; big parking lot across the street. A tail could be anywhere. Paranoia comes easily when you’re already a bit crazy. Besides, it’s not paranoia if someone’s really out to get you.

Suddenly it occurred to me that some other hand might hold a heavy-barrel .22 pistol and take care of my issues for me.

***

I sipped whiskey with a Arizona Ice Tea chaser because I don’t much like whiskey. If I drank something I liked, I’d be dead drunk all the time, so this is my discipline: I only drink stuff I don’t like.

What to do, what to do?

There are companies that specialize in high-level corporate security consulting. You can find them on the Internet. They use subtle language in their mission statements, but if you read between the lines you can figure out that if you have a dirty job, and a lot of money, they have people. Our people, they call them. Retired military, special-ops types. Read a couple of web sites and see where they say they have clients. A Who’s Who of trouble spots.

What does a guy do for a living whose entire professional life has been devoted to killing other people without being killed or caught himself? He works for a high-level corporate security company. Hell, there’s hundreds of ‘assignments’, all over the world: Beirut, Mombassa, Baghdad, Port-au-Prince...they go places and they take care of problems that need taking care of and then they go somewhere else. You sometimes read about their work in the newspaper: a labor organizer killed in Bogota, a radical cleric car-bombed in Tripoli, a wayward executive commits suicide in Hamburg, a scandal-ridden comptroller wrecks his Ferrari in Dallas. Suicides, car accidents, hit-and-runs, heart attacks, or sometimes just a quick bullet in the back of the head. You don’t believe me? Ah, innocence is so precious. 

I would like to believe big companies like _____ don’t go around hiring hit men and ‘rubbing people out’ like the Mafia. Truth is, not even the Mafia, whoever they are, casually kill. It takes some pretty egregious behavior to get yourself whacked by the Mob.  But when trillions of dollars are on the line, values get...distorted.

Lead us not into temptation. Deliver us from evil.

I have managed to stay alive this long by not taking on people against whom I cannot win. I ride past windmills with nary a twinge. All I needed to figure out was how to make sure the nice lady didn’t find her late night caller in her bedroom instead of on the phone. Calm everybody down, return the damned disc.

No brilliant plan came to mind, which is not an unusual event these days. My brain seems to have worn a groove for itself. When I try to change the groove, it just slips back, over and over. I know I should stop, but it’s like when you’ve got a sore tooth, and your tongue keeps touching it; and it hurts when you push on it, but you find yourself doing it again. You think to yourself: ‘I’ve got to stop’, but a few minutes later, bang, your tongue does it again.

I’d become so self-reflexive I didn’t seem to be a person anymore, just an animated creature running in tight little circles. I’m not sure I even wanted to change. Most of the time I just wanted to die and end the pain.

***

I popped a couple of Vicodin and drove to her condo in Bel Marin Keys. Not lavish—by Marin County standards, anyway. Marin is one of the wealthiest counties in the US—per capita as they say. You just have to be the right capita.

I was happy to see a security gate, but sorry there was no camera. If someone rang the gate buzzer, they talked to you on a phone. And if someone says “UPS” or “Dominos”, somebody’s gonna buzz them in. At least she wasn’t isolated in some suburban wasteland where she could scream her head off and the neighbors would just shrug and figure the TV was too loud.

She buzzed me in. I was gratified to see she checked the spyhole before she opened the door, and she did turn the deadbolt after I entered. Fat lot of good it would do. Anybody equipped with a sufficiently heavy door ram could pop the door in about a second, frame and all. Wouldn’t even make that much noise.

She gestured me to a chair.

“Can I get you something?”

“Coffee, if you have it.”

“You drink a lot of coffee.”

It wasn’t a question.

“If I could just run the caffeine in with an IV,” I said. Gave my best self-deprecating smile.

“All I have is instant.” A self-deprecating smile of her own.

“I’m not picky.”

We sat across from each other on the balcony patio.

“The CD,” I said, reminding her of why she’d hired me.

“Yes,” she answered, using pretty much the same tone of encouragement I’d used on Larry.

“It says the world’s not running out of oil.”

She’d been an oil executive’s wife. It didn’t take her more than a couple of seconds to see way down the road.

“Shit,” she said. Coming from her, it almost sounded like a nice word.

“Yeah, that’s pretty much what I said.”

“They just want the disk back, right?”

“Yeah, I hope that will keep them happy.”

“Roger won’t think I’d understand, anyway. He’d be right. I never would have figured it out. In fact, before that call, I had planned on just mailing it to him.”

“Well, most of the time, I find people screw things up more by over-reacting than if they’d just waited. Most problems go away.”

“You know, I believe you’re right about that.”

“Well, I’ve been guilty of it myself. Make the same mistake often enough...”.

“I know about mistakes.”

Yeah, I’ll bet.

“So, here’s the thing: how about you just mail it to the ex? Write a little note—‘Found this in the desk, must be yours, where’s the alimony check, sincerely...’—leave it go at that?”

“You think they’ll forget about it after that?”

“Old Roger wouldn’t want you to get hurt, would he? I mean, the guys a...”, I almost said ‘prick’ but decided to pick a different perjorative, “...jerk, but he’s not going to want his ex hurt...I mean, the mother of his children?” I paused. “How many, by the way?”

“Two.” She seemed to have gone distant on me. “I wanted four. We talked about four. First two, then maybe later two more.”

She looked sad.

“We didn’t last long enough for the other two.”

Her tone went far away. She was going over some old ground, touching that friggin’ tooth.

“I think even then he was thinking...you know...two more kids...more child support...he wouldn’t be able to afford to divorce me if we had four kids.”

Her eyes just drifted away, staring at a past that had shifted on her, as life does sometimes. You think you know what’s going on: your spouse is this person, you live at such-and-such a place, you’re going to go to Tuscany one day, you’re this person, here; then something comes along. You wake up one day and none of that’s real. Never was real. It was a belief system you’d built up around yourself. All the pieces fit together, so you thought that was the way it was. Only the hardworking husband turns out to have been banging every broad that offered it; the nice house disappears when the equity’s chopped in half by the settlement; you’ll never go to Tuscany; you’re not Mrs. Big Oil, you’re the former Mrs. Big Oil. The kids go to college, think their mother is somebody who bakes cookies and does everything for them. What about love? What about passion? What about your friggin’ life? You’re middle-aged, middle-income, middle-of-the-road and there’s ten thousand women just like you within the surrounding ten square miles.

I was there, that’s all. I was there, and I’d been down the same road of delusion, knew every turn, every intersection, every place where I could look back and say ‘If I’d only done that instead of...”. Big word—if.

So we talked the rest of the afternoon, and when the sun finally set we sat in the dark until she asked me if I was hungry. For the first time in many months, I was.

 She was hungry too, and I was desperate, which made for a good combination.

***

The next day we went back to the trailer so I could pick up a change of clothes and gear. We dropped an envelope with the CD into the mail along the way.

I stuffed another pair of jeans, some socks and a clean shirt into my duffel. I slid my polymer-frame Witness .45 with the compensated barrel and Hogue grips into a Yaqui slide holster, strapped the rig to my flank. The snub-nose revolver went into an ankle holster. She watched silently for a long moment.

“You have a lot of guns.”

“Never take a knife to gun fight.”

She nodded.

“I don’t know anything about guns.”

“Well, perhaps you should learn.”

She looked dubious.

“I’ve taught a few women to shoot. They start out better than most men. Men have bad habits to break. Too many movies, too much testosterone. Women just shut up and do what their told. Makes them better, at least, at first.”

I paused. I’d talked more in the past two days than in the previous year. Dealing with the world was exhausting.

“Combat isn’t like target shooting. Targets don’t shoot back. Just jerk the damn thing and fire. If you’re in a situation where deadly force is appropriate, it’s nearly always at short distances, and over in a few seconds.”

Those pretty blue eyes went wide.

I took her to a pistol range, gave her the .357.  “This thing’s accurate enough at the distances we’re talking about. More than twenty or thirty feet, the bullet might go anywhere. But if you’re face-to-face with someone bad, just point it at their middle and pull the trigger. Here, use two hands, like this.”

I formed her delicate fingers around the grips. “Squeeze with a death grip.”

I wrapped my hands around hers and squeezed.“You’re going to be scared shitless. Everything will seem to happen in slow motion. Just bring it up to eye level...”, I raised her arms, “...and aim for the chest...”.

She pushed the gun out with her arms straight. “No. If you push it out too far from you, some smart guy might grab it. He’s strong enough to take it from you.”

I bent her arms a bit.

“There, like that. You’re not aiming, just line up the barrel level with your chest. Squeeze the trigger. The sound will make you jump. Don’t worry about it. Just line it up and squeeze again.”

By the third time she’d emptied the cylinder she was hitting between the 6 and 10 rings every time. Hell, one or two slugs from a .357 would stop all but the most crazed killer. Unless he’s wearing a vest. Even with a vest, a hit will sting pretty good. I filled the cylinder with Federal Silvertips and gave her a box to carry. A sabot-tipped .357 slug will make impressively large holes and put the toughest guy on a coroner's slab.

I ran three mag-loads through my Witness Competitor, just to show her I could do more than talk, and remind myself how easy it is to shoot a gun. Thirty rounds fired—twenty-seven head shots, two neck, one miss.

I put a old S&W .40cal snubbie revolver in my ankle holster. I always carry a revolver for back-up. I’ve never had a revolver fail me, but I’ve had plenty of autoloaders jam.

I had Susan clean out a pocket of her shoulder bag. Once she’d dumped the old lipsticks, wadded-up tissues and assorted junk, she could draw and fire pretty damn smoothly. She might have a chance. The surprise factor would be a plus.

Of course, she might shoot me instead. Bullets tend to fly around pretty randomly in a fire fight. I’ve been shot. It hurts.

My .45 rode over my right kidney. The way the arthritis in my right shoulder is going, I’m going to have to switch to an appendix-carry in a couple more years. My right ankle weighed heavy with the .40 S&W. I wore my old but serviceable Kevlar vest under an untucked, oversize Hawaiian shirt. Of course, a vest won’t protect you from a head shot, which is why I’ve practiced head shots ever since I’d first picked up a gun with deadly intent.

Sleeping in a new, air-conditioned condo, in a queen bed, with an eager partner, certainly beat contemplating suicide and getting too drunk to do it. I did not expect we would have to shoot it out, but there’s no more foolish feeling than needing a gun and not having it.

***

We were watching the 6 o’clock news. A short item, toward the end, after the weather but before the cute little wrap-story. Roger Big Dick, vice-president of research for _____ Oil, killed when his Porsche left the road and hit a power pole. Apparently drunk-driving.

Her face went white when she grasped the content of the story. Her eyes went to mine.

“Roger quit drinking three years ago.”

Must have received the disk today.

Punished for his absent-mindedness. Maybe it was the pot he’d been smoking with his hip, Marin-county-swinger friends. Makes you forget things, things like wives and children, things like a half-ounce of sinsemilla and shiny CDROMs tucked in the desk at home.

I sent her into the bedroom to pack her things. We’d find a cheap motel in Santa Rosa, pay cash. Drive somewhere far away in the morning. It was nearly seven, the winter sun gone, dark as midnight outside. The security lights of the condo complex glowed through swirls of fog sweeping over the highlands from the Pacific, mixing with more fog from the Bay.

I gave her my vest, a concession to chivalry, but let her carry the bags, leaving my hands free for more important things.

We walked to the front door.

Just as I was about to turn the knob someone knocked. I jumped back and bumped into Susan. She stumbled into the wall. Her shoulder brushed a picture. It fell with a crash.

So much for the element of surprise. Now they knew she was there.

My hand was drawing the .45 at about the same time as the doorframe gave a dying scream. The door banged open, bounced off the wall and bounced back, getting in everybody’s way for a split second. I saw one of them swing a fence-post driver into the hinges and the door fell flat, just missing the tip of my nose.

I flinched backward while bringing my right hand up to fire. I could see everything happening a split-second before it happened. My mind was functioning on automated survival mode and needed no interference from me.

Two men, three feet in front of me. That’s the impression my eyes snatched in the split-second available for observation.

The pistol in my hand started making loud noises. Somewhere a woman was screaming.

More loud noises echoing in the tiny condo entrance.

Something punched me in the chest. I staggered backward and sideways into the wall. In my peripheral vision I sensed something falling just next to me.

The loud noises had stopped. An infinite silence settled over the entry, but my ears were ringing so loudly I could hear nothing but the high-pitched whine of tinnitus.

I had trouble catching my breath and leaned against the wall, then found myself sitting on the slate tile floor. My right hand still clutched the Witness, but I lacked the strength to lift it. My eyes rolled around crazily, little plastic eyes in a stuffed toy.

Suddenly the thought struck me—there was a lot of blood on the floor, walls, door. Two bodies lying in the doorway, big messy head wounds poured blood onto the tile.

Going to be impossible to get the stains out of the grout.

The thought came and went in a flash. I considered a laugh but now my chest hurt, a stabbing pain in the right side made it hard to breathe.

My eyes rolled around to find her. They wobbled about until I managed to make them focus.

She was lying on her back, the snubbie in her hand. Another messy head wound.

My stomach twisted and heaved, as if it were trying to escape from the scene without me. The heaves brought the pain in my side into a focus of such intense pain I suddenly felt a oneness with it. I had become the pain.

My silly eyes rolled down, noticed my belly and pants were covered with blood. I could not move, not even lift a finger. I was very cold, but there wasn’t any pain now. My brain seemed to be trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t catch hold of the thought. My vision tunneled and I felt the world receding away from me, like looking through the wrong end of a small telescope.

Voices muttered angry words in my ear: the souls I’d sent to Hell; the souls I’d known who must have ascended to Heaven; the lovers who’d come to hate me; ex-wives who only thought of me when the check was late; all the lies and disappointments.

What a waste. What a waste. My mind spun like a disc, playing those words over and over.

I heard sirens. They sounded very far away. I wondered if I was dying. I realized in a sudden, strange moment of clarity, that I’d just started living again.

That figures...

The End