“I swear,” I said in a voice that surprised me with its strength. “I swear, Mel, if you try to take this from me, I’ll blow your head off.”

“You’re crazy.” I understood why Mel said that. I didn’t feel entirely sane at the moment. Just very calm and determined.

“Probably. But it doesn’t matter. Because I’m going to sit here with your gun pointed at your head, and we’re going to talk about how you killed Gabe, you son of a bitch.”

27.

I had imagined all the things that Mel might say in this situation, and how I would respond. So his first reaction didn’t surprise me.

“You can’t fire it,” he said. “The safety lock’s on.”

“These guns don’t have safety locks, Mel. That’s why you cops like them. You don’t have to grope for the safety lock while the bad guy puts a bullet in you. When you pull the trigger, you release the safeties and the gun fires. No fumbling around. I pull this trigger and the bullet comes out. Simple as that. Right, Mel?”

“Gabe teach you that?” I hated the way he said it.

“No. Gabe hated guns. A little time on the Internet. That’s all it took.”

“Is that where you got this crazy story about me shooting Gabe?” He sat back as though trying to move out of range. He looked calm, except for a small twitch at the corner of one eye.

“It’s not a crazy story,” I said. “And it didn’t come from the Internet. It came from you and Hayashida and Walter Freeman and Mike Pilato—”

He forced himself to laugh. “Mike Pilato? You’re believing the biggest gangster in the city?”

“—and Glynnis Dalgetty—”

“Who?”

“—and Andrew Golden and two snooty women who got their Louis Vuitton purses mixed up. You killed him, Mel. You shot Gabe while he was waiting for me, naked on the blanket inside the bushes, and before that you shot Dougal Dalgetty, and later you killed Wayne Weaver Honeysett, trying to cover up everything with your story about drugs missing from the police locker and Gabe suspecting Walter, which was when I really started wondering about you. Gabe wouldn’t take home a two-dollar notepad, and you tell me he might have been taking drugs from a police locker? Walter knew it too, in the depths of his stupid soul. He knew Gabe was no thief, so he started believing I was. You killed Gabe, Mel. I know how you did it, and I have a good idea why you did it, and if I don’t put a bullet first in your balls and then in your brains before the cops get here, we’re going to go over all the details. Right here. Right now.”

“You’ve got officers coming?” Mel twisted to look around. “That’s good. Because when they see you with my weapon, they will either shoot you or arrest you, and probably both. And whatever story you come up with will be the product of a delusional woman who can’t believe her husband killed himself because his wife didn’t want to fuck him.”

He looked directly at me, and I saw the flash of anger that Gabe had told me about, so long ago, the one I had seen in small doses. Mel has the ability to think and act simultaneously. Gabe had said that. And: The only thing he’s gotta control is his temper.

He was speaking to me again.

“Right, Josie? Isn’t that right? A drunken man finds out his wife’s been screwing his partner, and when she doesn’t show up as promised, he loses it and turns the gun on himself. That’s what happened, right?”

I wanted to scream and shoot, not necessarily in that order. I spoke instead, in a calm voice that continued to surprise me, while Mel listened, too interested or perhaps too frightened to interrupt me. “No,” I said. “You shot Dougal Dalgetty because he started to squeeze you. He was turning the tables on you after you’d been squeezing him and Mike Pilato, threatening to arrest Dougal for drug dealing unless he and Pilato paid you off. How much did they pay you, Mel? Enough to buy that place by a lake and do what, Mel? Just lie around and spend the money you took from Pilato and Dalgetty and maybe some others? Or maybe take me or some other woman to that inn in New England? The Griswold Inn, right? Eugene Griswold, innkeeper. Two hundred years after Eugene died, he gives you a name for a drug dealer that never existed. You make him up as a big dealer, telling Gabe this Eugene Griswold is new in town and throwing his weight around, going up against Mike Pilato and killing one of Pilato’s dealers, Dougal Dalgetty. And when Gabe starts checking on his own, talking to people like Mike Pilato, trying to find Griswold, he realizes there is no Griswold or Grizz, and since you were the only person saying there was, you must be lying, which meant you were hiding something.”

Mel opened his mouth to speak, but I knew what he was going to say and interrupted him before he could say it.

“How much did Dalgetty and Pilato pay you before they decided they’d paid you enough, and if you didn’t knock it off they’d drop the word about you to Walter Freeman? Especially when you didn’t lift a finger to get the charges against Dalgetty dropped? How scared were you about that, Mel? Did you think Dalgetty would turn on you in court, saying he’d been paying you off? Or maybe they paid you in more than cash. Were they slipping you bags of dope, Mel? Cocaine? Heroin? What was it?”

Mel wouldn’t look at me as he spoke. “It was Gabe,” he said. “Check it out, Josie. It was Gabe’s gun that killed Dalgetty. Gabe. Not me.”

“It was you, Mel. And it was you who was under the lift bridge when Wayne Honeysett told me he had seen everything.”

He turned to face me. “That’s crazy.”

“Your cell phone records say so. The date, the time, the location …”

The sun had set, and the light inside the car and all around us was weighing down with the greyness of dusk, but I could still make out Mel’s expression and pallor. His expression was concern. His pallor was as grey as the dying light. “You don’t have my cell phone records,” he said in a voice that sounded like high noon in Death Valley.

“No,” I agreed. “Hayashida has them. Got them this morning. I called from Vancouver, asked him to check them out. He did, and confirmed what I suspected. The night Wayne Honeysett died, you were within a hundred yards of right here. You saw him, Mel. You saw him because you were trailing him, right? You were trailing him because you started checking the interviews with all the local perverts, like the good cop you pretended to be, because you realized he might have been in the garden shed the night you shot Gabe. You figured Honeysett was the peeper who hid in the garden shed, the poor sap who fell all over himself when he became infatuated with women like Glynnis Dalgetty, and me, I guess, and a bunch of other women he gave gifts to. He was too shy, too totally screwed up to give me the ring he made for his wife, so he gave it to Gabe and asked him to give it to me, and Gabe did, probably because he felt sorry for Honeysett and wanted me to wear it. What happened, Mel? Did Honeysett start talking about what he knew, what he saw, the night Gabe died? Is that why you had to kill him?”

Mel, still thinking about his cell phone records while staring through the windshield, muttered that I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.

The silence made me uncomfortable, so I kept talking, waiting for what I knew I had to do, and it all spilled out of me in a torrent.

“Honeysett didn’t go to the police because he was afraid they would charge him with being a pervert again, and he probably would have gotten a jail term. What happened, Mel? Did you see him run from the shed after you shot Gabe? Or maybe as you were coming into our house, through the garden? Did you decide you had to kill him before he figured out what you had done, before somebody like Walter Freeman took the miserable little guy seriously? You must have been under the bridge when I scattered Gabe’s ashes. Is that where you were, Mel? Hiding under the bridge, waiting to talk to Honeysett? Did he know you’d be there? Were you going to shoot him like you shot Dalgetty and …” I had to swallow the lump in my throat. “Like you shot Gabe?”