“Well dangling him outside the window was a stupid idea.”

“Yeah? You want to carry on doing this alone?” Hans asks. “You think you’re better off without me?”

“No, of course not,” Jerry says. “I just didn’t know we were going to be killing anybody. We just murdered him, Hans.”

“Damn it, Jerry, I know that, okay? But before you head to church to confess, just remember what he did. He killed those women and framed you for it.”

“But we don’t know that,” Jerry says, “not for a fact, and even if that is true who the hell is going to believe us, huh?”

“Come on, let’s go,” Hans says.

“And what? Just leave him out here?”

“We need to make use of the time we have,” Hans says. “Soon his wife is going to start wondering where he is, then she’s going to start phoning around, and in a few hours she’ll probably be calling the police. They’re going to make the connection pretty quickly since both of you have gone missing,” Hans says.

“We can’t just leave him like this,” Jerry says. “It’s not right.”

“There’s no point in dumping him anywhere,” Hans says. “We’re going to have to admit to what happened, but once the police figure out the kind of man he really was, then that’ll go in our favor. Plus it was an accident.”

“I don’t mean dumping him anywhere,” Jerry says. “But we can’t just leave him out here on the patio. It’s not right.”

“None of this is right,” Hans says, then he disappears inside.

Jerry leans up against the house because the ground is swaying. He crouches down and tries to be sick again, but there’s nothing, just bile. When Hans comes back he’s carrying a shower curtain. They roll Eric into the shower curtain, his body making clicking sounds as broken bones roll over each other. Jerry picks Eric’s broken glasses off the ground and puts them in Eric’s hand. When they’ve turned him into a cocoon they try to lift him. The wrapped feet keep slipping out of Jerry’s grip and hitting the ground. Somehow the dead man feels heavier than he did five minutes ago. Jerry fills his hands with layers of plastic rather than trying to scoop them under the body. This time they get Eric inside and they lay him gently on the floor, and he doesn’t go oomph because he can’t make those noises anymore. No matter what is real and what isn’t, Jerry just killed a man.

Hans uses his phone to light their way back through the house. They don’t say anything as they walk out the front. Hans closes the door behind him and the lock latches back into place. They walk casually to the car and climb casually in and then casually drive out of the street—nothing to see here, nothing going on, no sir, no ma’am, just two law-abiding citizens out for a drive after casually dropping somebody to their death.

The tension builds in the car as they drive. Jerry can’t tell whether Hans is going to take him right to the police or hang him out a different window all by himself. In fact he has no idea where Hans is going. It’s creeping up to eight o’clock and there isn’t much to see in the way of life on the streets. They drive for fifteen minutes and Jerry watches the houses and the cars parked out front and the occasional person wandering along, and he craves all of it. He wants to wrap himself up in that life, the normality of thinking about dinner and TV and the onslaught of bills. He wants to be Jerry Grey back before Captain A steered him into the dark.

“We’re here,” Hans says.

“Where?”

“Eric’s house,” Hans says, turning the car into the driveway. He presses the button on the remote to open the garage door. “We’re committed, buddy, and we’ve come too far to turn back now.”

“You’re kidding.”

“How long have we known each other?” Hans asks.

“Honestly, I have no idea. I don’t even know how old I am,” Jerry says, but as soon as the words are out an answer comes to him. He’s forty-nine. One year short of the big midlife crisis.

“You’re fifty,” Hans says, and the news is almost as upsetting as any other he’s had today. “In that time, have you ever known me to kid?”

“Honestly, I can’t remember that either.”

Hans laughs at that. “God I wish that was a joke. Come on, let’s start looking around.”

“Didn’t you say he was married?”

“I did, but look—do you see any lights on? And there’s no other car in the garage. Come on.”

“Doesn’t mean she isn’t home.”

“The house is empty,” Hans says.

“How can you be so sure?”

“I can just tell. It’s like a secret power.”

“But isn’t that what you thought earlier when you first came here only to find Eric inside?”

“It’s a secret power that is occasionally wrong. Like I said, Jerry, we’re committed.”

They drive into the garage. Hans pushes the button to close the door behind them.

“So what’s the plan?” Jerry asks.

“The plan is we don’t mess things up,” Hans says.

“And if the wife is home?” Jerry asks.

“Then that will be a problem,” Hans says, “but thankfully we have these,” he says, and pops open the glove box and pulls out the leather pouch with the syringes inside.

“Good thing you brought them along.”

Hans shakes his head. “These aren’t mine. I found them in here earlier. They’re Eric’s. They’re what he sedated you with. No reason for him to have them in his car, right?”

“He had his car yesterday,” Jerry says, “when he came to the house.”

“And he should have returned them to the nursing home, but he didn’t, because they are for his own personal use.”

“What if we use one on his wife and she’s allergic to it, or we overdose her?”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“So what do you want to do, Jerry? Nothing? Go to jail and let the world think you killed those women when it was Eric? The chances are she’s not even home, and the longer we sit in the car debating it, the closer she’s getting. We could have been in and out by now. Come on, we have to go in and prove he did these things.”

“And what if he didn’t?”

“Then we just killed an innocent man. There’s no point in holding back. We’re so far down the rabbit hole that it doesn’t really matter how much deeper it gets.”

They move into the house, the internal door bringing them into a hallway. Hans flicks on a light. Jerry notices his friend is still wearing gloves. “See? I told you it was empty.”

“Shouldn’t we leave the lights off?”

“Why? Eric was supposed to be home, right? It’d be weird if the lights weren’t on.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You go search the study,” Hans says. “I’ll start elsewhere.”

The study is the first room on the left. There’s a bookcase on the wall and Jerry’s books are there, plus those of others, a bunch of authors Jerry has met and had drinks with at festivals, a bunch of true crime novels, some how-to and tips on writing. There’s a desk facing them. It’s solid wood with scars and scratches and dents. It looks old, all that character beaten into it over the last hundred years. Behind the desk is an office chair on wheels, and on top of the desk a computer, a printer, a couple of novels, a bottle of water, a phone, and a printed out manuscript. On top of the manuscript is a snow globe a little bigger than a baseball, a castle on the inside of it, the flecks of glitter lying prone on the bottom. The room is carpeted, which makes it unlikely there are any hiding spaces beneath the floorboards, but he still kicks at it anyway, listening for something that might give, but there’s nothing.

He sits in Eric’s chair. He starts with the drawers. There are some magazines, some office supplies, some bank statements. No jewelry, no strange porn or photographs of neighbors through windows. He picks up the manuscript. It’s bulky. It’s been many books since he last printed out a manuscript. He used to do all his editing and reading on the computer. He figured he was helping save the environment.