Ian and Jenn looked at each other, then at him.

“I mean, neither of you were hurt.”

“No.”

“Uh-uh.”

“Good. That’s good.”

“What about Alex?” Jenn was in the opposite chair, her knees three inches apart. He had an adolescent urge to look up her skirt.

“Of course he’s OK.” Ian was pacing. “Why wouldn’t he be?”

“You hit him pretty hard,” Mitch said.

“I didn’t mean to.” He paused, made a strangled laugh. “It was my first pistol whipping.”

“What?” Jenn straightened. “You hit him with the gun?”

“It was in my hand.”

“What about your other hand?”

“I-look, I just did what we talked about. Mitch was there. Right?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I was there.”

Another silence, then Jenn said, “What do we do?”

A fair question. He decided to think about it, and was surprised to realize that he could. That in fact, he felt sharp. “OK. Let’s go through this. That guy.” He had a flash of the man’s face, buried it. “He must have been the drug dealer Johnny was meeting with. Damn. I really figured we’d have time before he arrived. He must have known Johnny-what?” Realizing Jenn was staring at him.

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to get my head around this.”

“Get your head around it? Get your head around what, that you, that we…”

“Yes,” he said.

“Can we look on the bright side?” Ian’s eyebrows high. “The cash?”

Funny. Mitch had forgotten about the money. He straightened, pulled the bag to his lap. Opened the zipper. What he saw inside, less real than raising the gun and pulling the-stop, bury it-was bundles. He reached in, took out a handful, packs of hundreds and twenties.

“Wow.” Ian sounded reverent. “How much?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m saying, count, man.”

“No.”

“OK, let me.”

“No.” He stuffed the money back in the bag. “We’re not talking about the money now. We have to think first.”

“About what?”

He looked up, met Ian’s gaze, held it. “About how to get away with this.”

“Get away with it?” Jenn made a squeaky sort of sound. “How?”

“One step at a time.” Mitch’s thoughts came clear and clean and logical. Like a machine, a big industrial machine that stamped out part after perfect part. “First. In the restaurant. We were wearing masks and gloves. Ian, you didn’t take your gloves off, did you? Get sweaty, wipe your hands?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“Of course.”

“I might have touched something,” Jenn said quietly.

“Touched what?”

“I don’t know. Something.”

“In the alley?”

She nodded.

“That’s OK. It’s an alley. Hundreds of people go through it.” His body felt like it was getting low-grade electrical shocks. He stood, cracked his knuckles. Pulled the pistol from his waistband and dropped it on the table. It hit loud and heavy. “This was the only gun we fired, right? So that’s lucky.”

“Why?”

“It’s a revolver. Revolvers don’t leave casings.” He saw Jenn’s expression, said, “The part that comes off a bullet.” He took two steps forward, spun, took two back, feeling muscles in his legs. Stopped, looked at Ian. “What were you thinking, man? Pulling out your gun like some freaking gangster?”

“I was-”

“You didn’t even have the safety off.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not the one who shot him.”

“No. You’re just the one who left us no choice.” He glared at his friend, feeling the anger run through him, remembering the guy doing coke in the goddamn car. Ian tried to meet his gaze, then looked away, at the window, his feet. Shuffled them. Looked up again, something in his eyes.

Something like fear.

Strange. Mitch couldn’t remember anyone being scared of him before. “OK. That doesn’t matter now. These guns, the guy you got them from, who was it?”

“Just a guy I know. He runs a private casino. Some other stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“I don’t really know. Prostitutes, I think.”

“Can the guns be traced to him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because he would have worried about us getting caught. He’d have given me ones that couldn’t be traced.”

“OK,” Mitch said again. It felt good to say, to mark off little increments of thought, like ticking off items on a list. “You’re right. And we didn’t leave any fingerprints, and the bullets can’t tie to us. So, then.”

Jenn stared at him. Hanging, he realized, on his next words.

“So then we’re OK.”

“OK? You killed-”

“We. We killed.” He closed his eyes, rubbed at them with his forefinger and thumb. “But he was a bad guy, a drug dealer. And he saw you.” He moved to her, dropped to a squat beside the chair, took her hands in his, not thinking about any of it, just doing. “Jenn, he saw your face.”

She said nothing. Something was happening behind her eyes, though he couldn’t have said what. He kept speaking, talking fast, wanting to make everything better. “But now we’re safe. Things didn’t go exactly how we planned, but we got the money and got out, and didn’t leave anything that would lead to us.”

“But we-”

“Yes,” he cut her off, his patience snapping. “Yeah, we did. Which is just one of the reasons I didn’t want to do this in the first place, remember? You wanted your big adventure? Well, now you’ve got it.”

“That’s not fair.”

“What’s fair got to do with it? It happened, damn it. Do you get me? It happened. It’s real. Do you understand?”

Jenn’s eyes were wide. She nodded yes in a way that meant no.

He sighed, squeezed her hands. “Look, it’s nobody’s fault. But what matters is that there is nothing to point to us. Nothing at all.”

“Sure there is,” Ian said. “The money. The cars. The guns.”

It was a fair point, and it froze him cold. Ian was right. He’d been so focused on thinking about what had already happened that he hadn’t put any thought into what happened next. Still, he was the one holding it together, while the two of them seemed about to come apart, Jenn retreating into herself, Ian’s swaggering a thin veneer over panic. If someone had to be strong, to make the hard decisions, it looked like it was going to be him.

He was surprised at how good that idea felt.

“You’re right. We’ll need to take care of all of that. But first things first. We need to talk to Alex, see what happened on his end. With the shooting, the police will be involved. We hadn’t counted on that. We need to know what they think.”

“I’ll call him,” Jenn said, rising.

“Wait. He’s probably on the way to the hospital.”

“The hospital? How hard did you hit him?” She glared at Ian, who sighed and dropped onto the couch.

“Harder than I should have, OK? I was nervous.”

She shook her head. Straightened her back and ran her hands through her hair. “Which hospital would they take him to?”

Mitch realized she was asking him, him directly. “I don’t know,” he said. “And we can’t start calling around, or dial his cell phone a hundred times. We can’t do anything that would raise suspicion.” His mind still churning steady and strong, focusing on the task at hand. Maybe if you do that hard enough, you won’t have to remember what you-stop.

He took a deep breath. “The idea from the beginning was that there was no reason why anyone would look at us. Far as we know, that hasn’t changed. We need to talk to Alex and find out what happened on his end. He won’t be in the hospital long. Overnight, probably.”

“So what do we do?”

“Leave one message on his cell, something perfectly normal. Tell him that we’re getting together tomorrow morning. Here.”

“And until then?”

“Wait.”