Singleton leaned back against the wall, and for the first time in five minutes, noticed the pain in his chest. Not so bad right now. Not quite so bad, but his chest felt wet. He stuck a hand inside his shirt, felt the wound, felt a dampness and pulled his fingers back out. Blood. Goddamnit, he'd broken the wound open.

He had to find somebody to work on it, and soon. God knew what the lead bullet was doing inside of him. Probably poisoning him. Thinking about it sent him to the sink, where he washed his hands again, and wiped them carefully on paper towels. He put the towels in his pocket-DNA. His mother came back in the kitchen.

"What ya doing?"

"I'm bleeding again," he said.

"Won't kill ya," she said. "I seen a lot worse." She turned up her head and sniffed. "Something in the oven?" She stepped over to the stove, and looked through the glass front. "Looks like a casserole."

"Pork chops," Singleton said, nodding at the sideboard. Three thick center-cut porkchops sat on a sideboard, and one of the burners was glowing on the stove. "Turn the stove off," he said.

Margery left the burner on but put a kettle on it, obscuring the orange glow. Not bad, Singleton thought: the bubbling pot killed the silence. "Better get back in the hall," Singleton told her. "Gene doesn't miss dinner."

Calb arrived as the words came out of Singleton's mouth. Margery slunk back into the hall as the headlights swept over the side of the house and the driveway. The lights in the garage went on, and Singleton said, aloud, "Be alone." He pressed himself to the kitchen wall beside the door from the entry.

The garage door went up, then went down, and a moment later, Calb was at the back door, stomping his feet on a snow mat. "Gloria?"

He closed the outer door and stepped into the kitchen, leaning forward, groping for the light. "Gloria?"

Singleton hit him on the crown of his head and he went down to his knees. Singleton, grimacing, hit him again, and Calb stayed on his knees and one hand came up, his face turned up, and he said "cars," or something like that, and Singleton hit him across the eyes and this time, Calb went down.

Margery stepped up, took the pipe, crouched, and began hitting him as she had Gloria, the hammer swinging once, twice, three times, four, five…

Breathing hard, she finally stood upright, light in her rattlesnake eyes. How many times had she hit Calb? He had no idea, but Calb was dead, all right-his head was like a bag of bone chips.

"That got him," the old lady said with satisfaction.

"Did you kill people at work? The old men you didn't like?"

The rattlesnake eyes slid away. "What're you talking about? Let's get to work. Dumb shit."

Singleton looked at Calb and suddenly began bawling again. His mother muttered something and went into the living room, and Singleton wiped his eyes on his sleeves and got a bag out and bagged Gene Calb's head. Then he got a paper towel and the 409, cleaned a smear of blood off the floor, put the paper towel in the bag, and called his mother, and together they dragged Calb into the hall and left him next to his wife.

Back in the kitchen. "Goddamn, something smells good," Margery said, turning toward the stove where the casserole was still cooking, smacking her lips.

MARGERY MADE HIM clean the floor again; he was doing that, and she was back in the living room, "keeping an eye out," she said, when the doorbell rang. He was on his hands and knees and heard the door open, and his mother say, "Come in," and then, "Where's Loren and Gene?" and he recognized the voice and his eyes got wide and he lurched to his feet and called, "Katina?"

And at that very second, he heard the door close and remembered giving Margery the.380, and he stepped to the doorway with the towel in his hand and saw Katina looking at him, a question on her face, and Margery standing behind her, her arm pointed at Katina's head, and he shouted, "No… "

Bang!

Katina went down. Her eyes rolled and she went down on her face and she never twitched, and Singleton screamed something at his mother and started toward her, and she leveled the.380 at him and screamed back, "Get the fuck away from me, get away… "

EVERYTHING LOCKED UP. Then Margery said, quietly, "It's gonna take two of us to finish this. She had to go, because there was no way for you to break it off that wouldn't be suspicious. Now, you want to help, or you want me to finish you off, too?"

The gun never wavered.

"GODDAMN, THAT SMELLS good," Margery said. It had taken a while, but Singleton wasn't going to hurt her. Not now-or not yet. He'd started thinking.

She went to the stove, opened the oven, took a couple of hotpad mitts off hooks beside the stove, and pulled the casserole out. She turned the top burner back on, found a pan in the bottom of the stove, and dropped in the porkchops. She found plates and bowls and silverware, dumped some macaroni and cheese from the casserole dish into the bowls, fried up the porkchops and slid them onto the dish.

"Damn, that's good." Margery said. They sat in the semidark kitchen, and talked about what to do next.

Chest hurt.

They finished eating, cleaned up the dishes and put them away, threw the cooking trash in the garbage, and began ransacking the house. Two suitcases, clothes, shoes, jewelry, Gloria Calb's purse, cosmetics, some photographs-they took two photographs out of their frames, and left the frames. Threw it all into the suitcases and carried the suitcases out to Calb's Suburban. As they went through the house, collecting things that the Calbs would take with them to Hell, they searched it, looking for money.

If Calb had left money in the house, Margery said, and the cops found it, that could queer everything. They found nothing except two safe deposit keys for a bank in Fargo. Margery took them, put them in her purse.

THEN THE BODIES.

Gene and Gloria Calb went out to the Suburban. He humped them out as fast as he could, but Calb was heavy, and he wound up dragging him. Still, the effort nearly killed him, and Margery was no help at all. Singleton's chest felt as though it were tearing apart, and he hadn't yet gotten to the hard part of the evening.

Katina, in dying, had leaked onto the carpet. They left the blood spot and carried her upstairs, got a chair from the bedroom, pushed open the access hatch to the insulation space under the roof, and pushed her body up through the hole. She was wearing a sweater, and Singleton carefully dragged the sweater across a rough spot in the framing around the hatch, so that a few strands of wool were pulled out.

Back downstairs.

Forgetting something, he thought. Hurting. He needed another pill, is what he needed. Christ, this might be too much…

What was he forgetting? He walked through the whole scene, and remembered the shell from the.380.

Found it in the kitchen, carried it outside, rolled it through Gene Calb's fingers, and made sure he got one good right thumbprint on the cartridge, as it would be if Gene were pressing a shell into a magazine.

Carried the cartridge back inside and tossed it on the floor.

His mother had one last idea. Gene had a home office…

They went through a Rolodex, and inside found a Kansas City phone number for Davis. He dialed the number and a woman answered, "Hello?"

"My name's Carl. We are asking Kansas City people for donations to the Missouri State Law Enforcement Association, which supports your local state, county, and municipal law enforcement officers-"

"We gave some," a woman's voice said.

"Our records don't show that," Singleton said. "We feel our law enforcement officers… "

He strung the conversation out another ten seconds, until an increasingly irate woman said, "Go away," and the phone slammed down. There'd be a record that just before the Calbs disappeared, they'd called Shawn Davis in Kansas City.