“My car’s in front,” said Gregor.

“That’s no good,” said Sims. He pointed beyond the back of the motel. “My car’s through there.”

Gregor waved the shotgun. “Take me.”

“Fifty-fifty.”

“Don’t be crazy. Take me or I kill you.”

“Then we’ll both die, and without the money.”

“I give you quarter, maybe.”

“Fifty-fifty.”

The sirens grew louder. A set of tires squealed in the parking lot on the other side of the motel.

“You are a dishonorable and murderous thief,” said Gregor. “I admire that.”

“Is it a deal?”

“Deal,” said Gregor.

“This way,” said Sims, beginning to run, with Gregor behind him. When Sims reached Terry at the fence, he stopped suddenly and turned to me. “Is this the perp who killed the doctor?”

“What do you care?”

“Of course I care,” said Sims. “I’m a cop.”

He raised his gun and fired.

“Case closed,” said Sims, as Terry staggered backward and fell with a quick splash of blood.

And then Sims was off, past the pool and through a patch of weedy trees, with Gregor Trocek, lumbering like a bearded sasquatch, still behind him.

Sirens and footsteps. Tires squealing. Shouts and hollers. Orders to get down, get down. And above it all the plaintive desperate keen of a woman in love.

48

There was a moment after the cops arrived and made sense of the scene and gave chase to Trocek and Sims, a moment before the ambulance careened around the side of the building to pick up what was left of Terrence Tipton, there was a singular moment in which things came clear to me. Julia, my Julia, was kneeling over the prostrate body of her lover in a posture of perfect devotion as a uniformed officer performed whatever CPR he could think of to keep the bleeding piece of meat alive. And then Julia looked up, her face full of panic. She searched around frantically until her search found me and our eyes met.

Help me, please, her expression begged. And all I could think was, Who the hell was she? How had this strange woman, whom I barely now recognized, twisted me into knots?

Yet in reality I had done all the twisting, hadn’t I? What she had done to Terrence, by concocting a fantasy room for him to live in, I had done to her, by concocting a fantasy past for the two of us, where our love had been honest and pure, when in reality it had been neither. She was just a woman doing her best to hold on to the one true thing in her life; my feverish emotions had turned her into a femme fatale. But isn’t that always the way of it when old love comes a-knocking?

I’ve been trying to figure out what it is about old lovers that causes so much perturbation of the soul, and I’ve come up with a theory. We have, all of us, an image of what love looks like, an image that evolves and ages as we move through life. But for some, tragically, the evolution slows or even stops dead. And if that image stalls when a relationship dies, as it had for me, then you remain haunted by the lover who disappointed you and then disappeared. Whoever you are with, whoever you kiss or ravish, can be only a pale imitation of the image that lies like a ghost in your soul. But here’s the thing. When the old lover shows up again in your life, she is just as pale an imitation as everyone else. She is no longer twenty-four, and neither are you.

“You took your time,” I said to Hanratty as we stood side by side and stared at the twisted little pietà inside the pool fence.

“You told me you wanted to bring her out,” he said. “I thought I’d give you a chance. I waited as long as I could, and then the gunfight in front of the motel broke out.”

“Did you know it was Sims who was shooting from inside?”

“When the shooter outside was felled with one shot, I figured it out. Sims and Trocek didn’t get away so long ago, but Sims knows all the tricks. He’s probably on his third car by now. I’d be surprised if we see him again.”

“Maybe he and Gregor will end up killing each other over the money.”

“We can only hope. You have any idea where they’re headed?”

“Georgia.”

“Why Georgia?”

“For the pecans,” I said. “I didn’t do much good here, but I appreciate your letting me come over to try.”

“She’s still alive, isn’t she?”

“But I don’t think she’s happy about it.”

“That’s not the point. And at least you tried. I almost admire that. I still want to punch you in the face, but I’d feel bad about it now.”

“It’s a start.” I looked around. “Where’s Derek?”

“He stayed in the diner, said a pack of cops showing up with guns drawn made him a little nervous. And he said he had something going on with the waitress.”

“Yeah, that’s Derek.”

“What are you going to do about her?” he said, gesturing to Julia, still looking around desperately for the ambulance.

“I’m going to wait until this whole thing settles down,” I said, “and then I’m going to wrap her in my arms and kiss her good-bye.”

But I never got the chance.

When the ambulance careened around the side of the building and lurched to a stop at the edge of the pool, she stayed with Terry. Even as they loaded him onto the gurney and lifted him into the vehicle, she stayed with Terry, climbing into the back of the ambulance with the paramedic before the vehicle rushed off.

They pronounced Terrence Tipton dead at the Warren Memorial Hospital in Front Royal, Virginia, shortly after the ambulance arrived. It was inevitable, I suppose, that Julia and Terry’s romance would end in blood and anguish. In Shakespeare’s play the very instant Romeo unsheathes his sword, even if with the best intentions, he seals his fate, and Juliet’s, too. Violence begets violence, and love pays the price.

I imagine that Julia was in the room as the doctors worked frantically over her lover’s body. I imagine she had to be pulled away as they pressed the paddles to his chest. I imagine that after death was pronounced and the time duly noted, they left her alone with the corpse and she hugged it and kissed it and swore her everlasting devotion a final time.

Love at its truest, ever as faithful as it is delusional.

And then, after all the hugging and kissing and swearing and pain, after it all, she simply slipped away. The police came looking for her, but she had disappeared. There were charges of obstruction of justice and abetting a murderer to deal with, there were financial matters concerning her dead husband’s estate to deal with, there was me to deal with, but all that was evidently too much for her to deal with, because she slipped away and disappeared. She vanished into the thin of the air, as if without her one true love to keep her grounded she rose into the ether and dissolved.

But I eventually received a clue that she might not have dissolved into nothingness after all. It arrived in the mail, a package from a place called Corsicana, Texas, about fifty miles northeast of Waco. A pecan pie. It was thick and rich, so sweet it curled your toes, and the nuts on top were fat as toads. About as perfect as a pecan pie could be, but not homemade, not Gwen’s, with its little imperfections and heirloom taste. She had promised me a pie, and she had made good on her promise, even if what she sent was mail order.

“We got us a ways to go,” read the note, “but we’ll get where we’re going.”

Was I delusional to believe Julia was there, in that lovely word at the head of the sentence? Was I a fool to hope that Julia was with Gwen somewhere, healing? And all I knew about the somewhere was that it wasn’t in Georgia, because Gwen hadn’t made the pie herself from handpicked pecans, and it wasn’t in Texas, because Gwen was too smart to order from on close. I could see the three of them, Norman driving the big white Buick while Gwen fussed on Julia in the backseat, a sweet little family making do on the road, with just one another to rely on, and one point seven million in cash.