“She’s right, Chester. I’m sorry. That’s just what it is.”

The great whiteness of Chester ’s face has changed to pink, and his small blue eyes blink quickly as if in defense. He sets a hand upon a stack of documents. “I have given you everything you wanted. I’ve provided for your dreams. Surely there can be a place in them for me.”

“I’m sorry, Chester,” I say.

“I’m not,” says Sharon.

“For your father, Ron? My brother? For old times?”

“We’re starting up a company, Chet, not putting a contract out on you.”

“Man to man, blood on blood?”

“No.”

A long pause while Chester stares into space. “I’m very, very disappointed.”

Chester stacks the documents neatly and sets them in the still-open briefcase. He squares them, closes the lid, snaps down the latches, and spins the small steel combination numbers. He stands and sets the briefcase upright before him, both hands on the leather handle. He looks at Sharon, then at me. He bows his head formally. Then he turns and sweeps the briefcase from the table, and when his back is to me, he pivots around once like a discus thrower and slams the corner of it into my head. I get my hand between my skull and the briefcase but not much of it. Then I’m on my back on the floor, looking up at the chandelier. However, the chandelier is not bright and white but the color of my eyelids. I try to open them as in a nightmare, but they will not open. I hear grunts and whimpers and the gagging of strangulation. I hear the tearing of fabric. I hear gasps. Then these sounds lose volume, and I fear that I am losing consciousness. I stand. I fall. I stand again and my eyes open. The penthouse whirls around me. I stagger toward the sounds in the bedroom. I stand in the doorway looking in. Chester has his enormous back to me and he has planted his bulk upon Sharon on the bed, her legs splayed and her heels raining helplessly down against his huge haunches. He’s got her hands pinned over her head to the mattress with one of his own, and with the other he’s trying to get off his belt. They’re both growling.

Without thinking, I throw myself onto him. It takes him a moment to acknowledge me. I smell baby powder. Then he rises up smoothly like a breaching whale and wrenches himself off the bed. I land on the floor. He towers over me. He looks down and his expression is the same as it always is. He pulls me up by my shirt collar, tosses me into the air just a little, and catches my head between the meaty vises of his hands. He holds me up to face him, eye to eye, and I’m struggling and kicking and hanging onto his forearms with both hands to try to keep my skull from buckling. He squeezes. “There are no new ideas. Only old imperatives,” he whispers. I feel my skull plates grinding. My vision constricts, then fractures. All I can see for certain is the bed below me, the blessedly empty bed.

Then I hear three sharp cracks. Through Chester ’s palms I register three small tremors. His hands shiver and his eyes widen and he growls again, then grimaces, his small even teeth not a foot away from my face. He drops me to the floor. I roll toward the door and there is Sharon, standing just inside the doorway, her dress ripped and dangling and a Pace Arms Hawk.22 up in both hands, aimed at Chester. He lumbers toward us. I stay down on my knees to give her a clear sight line. If he gets close, I’ll spring onto him to keep him from her. She shoots him three more times and Chester stops. I can see two small bloody circles on his shirtfront and a bright red gash high up on his skull where the bullet has bounced off. He grunts and twists one arm behind his back as if trying to scratch an itch, and I realize this is where the first three shots hit. Sharon has eight shells left if the magazine was full, nine if there was also one cartridge in the chamber. Chester steps forward and Sharon shoots him three more times, pretty much dead center at this close range. He rocks and staggers backward. He sways, then steadies himself. “Nobody does that to me,” Sharon says dreamily. She fires and misses and misses again. The bullets smack the wall. Then she cracks a shot between his small blue eyes. His head shakes and settles and he looks at us. He sits on the foot of the bed and places his hands on his thighs, as if he were about to say something. There’s blood running down his mouth and off his chin. He extrudes a small pointed tongue and tastes it. His torso is drenched in the red blood of his lungs and the black blood of his heart. He collapses then, like a building imploded, his lower body slumping to the floor first and his head whipping down last with a sharp centrifugal splat. The back of his cream linen coat is a bloody thing, too. Sharon hands the gun down to me and walks unevenly away, one shoulder and half her back showing above the flap of her torn green dress, one foot bare and the other still shod.

I find her in the kitchen, wiping out two martini glasses. Her eyes are wide and her hands tremble and she doesn’t look at me. I come up behind her to put my hands on her shoulders.

“Do not approach me.”

“Okay. I won’t. Sharon, he didn’t-”

“No, he did not.”

“I’m thankful for that, Sharon. I’m going downstairs to talk to Marcos while you make those drinks. We’ll need to make some adjustments.”

“The ice cream is melting.”

“I’ll get it.”

“What if he’s not dead.”

“He is dead.”

“But what if he’s not.”

I read the old inscription on the Hawk, then set it on the counter.

For Sharon, safe forever in the arms of Pace.

“I didn’t know you kept this.”

“It’s been in my purse since the day you gave it to me.”

“If he’s not dead, shoot him again.”

She looks up toward me, but I don’t think she sees me. She smiles vacantly. “Terrific, Ron. Don’t be long.”

I look in on Chester to make sure no miracle cures have occurred. He’s still as a boulder, and the hardwood floor around him is a dark slick. I feel regret that he’s dead and an odd sense of loss, but very small amounts of each. I never understood how he could have been the brother of my reasonably sized, generous, sensitive, good-natured father. I still don’t. The wood floor is a modern laminate and will clean up well.

As I walk toward the front door, I see Sharon in the kitchen, scooping ice into the martini shaker. Her hair washes over her face, and tears run down her cheeks, but her hands are steadier now. She has tucked the torn shoulder of her green dress up under her bra strap. I am so proud of her, and that she chooses to spend her time with me. She looks back at me with an expression that says: Don’t say one word.

I don’t dare.

I ride the elevator down into manufacturing. I’m trying to figure out how to tell Marcos what I now need from him, but my phone rings and I see that it’s Bradley.

“Bra-”

“Don’t talk,” he says. “Only listen.”

I listen and do not talk. Bradley tells me that ATFE knows what I’m making, that the Pace building is probably under surveillance right now. I can’t understand how they would know. Chester? At Bradley’s orders I write down an address and a time, and I make a list of the things he wants me to buy and in what quantities. Some of these things make sense to me and others do not. I see that what I’m going to need from Marcos is small potatoes compared to what Bradley needs from me.

“You got it, Bradley. Done.”

I punch off and stab the phone back into the belt holder. I take a deep breath and straighten my back.

Rounding the corner into the intensified smells of solvents and lubricants and blued steel and loud Mexican music, I raise my hand and hail Marcos. It’s just dawning on me how to pull this all together.