The rehearsal went well. More instructions. Jerry, stand here. Dad, walk there. Jerry, hold Eva like this. You will do nothing if not follow orders. As for the speech—you don’t get to give one. Of course not, because Pressure Cooker Jerry needs to be contained, and even though that makes you sad, you can understand it. It is, sadly, just the way things are now.

Oh, by the way, speaking of the way things are now, guess what happens on Monday? That’s right, alarms are being put on the windows. It’s official—soon you’re going to be a prisoner in your own home.

Good news—the alarms mean Sandra isn’t planning on putting you into a care facility right away.

Bad news—your world is getting smaller. You don’t really need the alarms now because you don’t even want to go outside. You just want to curl up on the couch and drink. You used to think the difference between being a good author and a great author was . . . ah, hell, you’ve said that already.

They pull out from the side of the road. Jerry plays with the radio until he finds a news channel. Hans makes the next left to take them towards the center of town. Jerry plays with the label on the water bottle. His legs are still jittering.

“It’s tough, you know? Thinking of myself that way,” Jerry says. “Thinking of myself as a killer. It doesn’t feel right. No matter how I try to see it, no matter what angle I come at it from, I can’t get the label to fit.”

“What happens in your books, Jerry, when people are hoping for the best?”

“They get the worst.”

“I’m sorry, buddy, but that’s what this is.”

Jerry nods. His friend couldn’t have summed it up any better. Still . . . “It’s not right. I know what you’re saying makes sense, that there’s a certain kind of logic to it, but it just feels too convenient that I can remember some things but not others. Why can’t I remember any of this morning?”

“The doctors say that you blocked out what happened with Sandra, that it’s too difficult for you to accept. Stands to reason you’d be doing the same thing now.”

“I’m not that guy, Hans. I’ve never been that guy. I shouldn’t have wiped down the knife. If I’d left it alone, then the real killer’s prints would have been found on it.”

“It sounds like you were trying to get away with it,” Hans says.

The words annoy him. “It’s not that. I just knew how things looked. That’s why I took the knife to the mall with me.”

“What?”

“I wasn’t going to dump it there. I just went there to get food and a SIM card. I was going to dump it later.”

“You should have called the police.”

“No,” Jerry says. “I called you because you can help. Because you’ve always been there for me. Because you’re the only person who will believe me. When I came out to meet you I realized I’d left the bag with the knife and towel behind in the bathroom.”

“Jesus, Jerry, are you kidding me? Or just yourself? You called me because you think I can help you get away with murder. Just like you did last time. Only this time I’m not helping you.”

Jerry shakes his head. “That’s not true. Somebody wants me to think I’m the Bag Man.”

“What?”

“The Bag Man. From the books.”

Hans shakes his head. “I know who the Bag Man is, Jerry, and you’re not him.”

“I didn’t say I was. I said somebody wants me to think I am.”

“Was the woman this morning killed the way the Bag Man kills?”

Jerry thinks about the woman on the lounge floor, the bruises and the blood. He thinks about her eyes open and staring at him. He tries to remember the Bag Man. He can’t remember the who or the why, but he can remember the how. The Bag Man stabbed his victims and when they were dead he tied a plastic garbage bag over their head. He was impersonalizing them. “She was stabbed in the chest. I even had a black garbage bag on me.”

“Jesus, Jerry . . .”

His heart is hammering. “But I didn’t do it. I would know if I had.”

“Because you trust yourself.”

“You have to help me.”

“Help you how, Jerry? By stealing a detective’s badge and walking around the crime scene asking questions? Chasing down leads and bending the rules? Pulling a mobile DNA testing kit out of my ass?”

“No. Well, yes. I don’t know. Not exactly. But we can figure it out.”

They drive in silence again. The lunchtime traffic is fading as people return to work. He sees a boy of two or three accidently drop his ice cream on the pavement then start crying, his mother trying fruitlessly to console him. Behind them a bus comes through early on a red light and almost hits a cyclist. Jerry keeps rewinding the clock, going further back into the morning, but continually comes to a stop the moment he came to on that woman’s couch. As far as he can tell, time before that moment didn’t exist. His heart beats harder the closer they get to the police station. When they are two blocks away he’s sweating again.

“Can we pull over?”

“We’re almost there,” Hans says.

“Please. Just for a few minutes. Please, hear me out. As my friend, listen to me.”

Hans looks over at him, then indicates and pulls in against the side of the road. “Talk,” he says. “But you’ve only got a minute.”

“I didn’t do this,” Jerry says. “My DNA is on record. If they’d found my DNA at Belinda’s house, they’d have made the connection. But none was there.”

“You’re a crime writer, Jerry. You know how to commit a crime and get away with it.”

He remembers Mayor suggesting something very similar on the ride into the police station. “That’s not what happened,” he says.

“Then you have nothing to worry about. The police will figure it out.”

“No, they won’t. It’ll be worse than that,” Jerry says, and he can connect the dots ahead of him, he just can’t connect the ones behind. He’s not the man he used to be, but he certainly hasn’t gone from crime writing to crime committing. “If I go in there and tell them about today, and we tell them about the florist, then it’s going to be like writing a blank check.”

“What are you talking about?”

“They’re going to take every unsolved homicide over the last few years and they’re going to pin them on me. They’ll probably go back further too. They’re going to say I got sick five years ago. Or ten. Every open homicide is going to close with my name in the whodunit box.”

Hans shakes his head. He looks lost in thought. “That’s stupid.”

“Is it? You really think so?”

“They’re not going to take . . .” Hans says, then stops talking.

“What?”

Hans doesn’t look at him. Just keeps looking ahead. A truck passes close enough to the car to make it sway on the axles.

“What?” Jerry repeats.

“Nothing.”

“There’s something. Tell me.”

“It’s nothing,” Hans says.

“Tell me.”

Hans breathes out heavily. He sounds like a man who’s cutting wires and hoping a bomb isn’t about to explode. “Let me think for a few seconds,” he says.

“Tell me!”

“Goddamn it, Jerry, I said let me think.”

He thinks. And Jerry lets him think. And they stay parked on the side of the road two blocks from the police station, and Jerry stares out the window while his palms sweat and while Hans thinks some more. Hans tilts his head back and covers his face with his hands. He keeps them there, so the words are muffled when he talks. “There was another killing last week,” he says, then drags his fingers down to his chin, stretching out the skin on his face and tugging down the bottom of his eyes. “It’s still unsolved. A woman by the name of Laura Hunt.”

“I think I’ve seen it in the papers.”