“And I don’t want you to, but we have no choice.”

“Must I?”

“Yes, dear.”

“I love you.”

“I know you do, Bobby. Do it for us. Do it for our love.”

Bobby leaned forward and closed his eyes, saw a thin, nubile figure twisting in his mind’s eye in Super 8 black-and-white, felt his lips brush hers and then press harder. The joy, the sweet joy, rose through him like a wave, flushing out everything before it, leaving just his raw emotions and her desire.

“I love you,” he murmured into her mouth.

“Show it.”

He kissed her again, felt her lips and something else, sweet and slippery. He sucked on it as if it were a lifeline, sucked on it until it pulled away.

“Now,” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“For our love.”

“Yes,” he said, pulling back and nodding, knowing exactly what he must do, how it would end, why it was necessary. Seeing the whole of his life unspool in that perfect kiss.

Slowly he stood, nodding all the while. Slowly he caressed her withered cheek with the back of his hand. Slowly he turned and aimed the shotgun straight at the Byrne boy standing there with his mouth agape. Slowly he squeezed the trigger.

CHAPTER 57

LATER DETECTIVE RAMIREZ would squat beside the bloodied body and feel the emotions rise to choke her throat. She’d seen scores of dead, it was the currency of her new post, but this one bit into her in a way that none had before. The sight of the blood, his blood, the sickly sweet smell of the iron and rot released by a body split open by the gunfire, the sick, dead eyes that were full of intense life just a moment before. She was dry-eyed, and her chest wasn’t racked by sobs, but in the storm that raged beneath her brow, she was weeping nonetheless.

A hand fell onto her shoulder, solid and warm. She didn’t need to look up to know to whom it belonged.

“You okay?” said Henderson.

“No.”

“Good,” he said. “When you ever get okay with any of this, then it’s time to hang up your hat.”

“Is that why you’re retiring, old man?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I been thinking about sticking around a little longer.”

“I thought you wanted to get yourself a puppy.”

“Maybe I already found myself one.”

Ramirez shrugged his hand off her shoulder, took a final look at the corpse, her corpse, and then rubbed her face with her hands, hard, as if rubbing out her very features, before standing and turning away. Henderson was looking at her, not the dead body, but his eyes were staring at a casualty.

“They find him yet?” she said.

“Not yet,” said Henderson.

“They won’t.”

“No,” he said, “I don’t expect they will.”

The car outside the house was empty when they checked it right after the shooting, but someone had been there all right. There was a set of headphones, a receiver, and a tape deck, just as Spangler had said. But the tape was gone, and so was the person who had been listening in with the headphones. A host of uniforms were now going door-to-door, and four black-and-whites were cruising the neighborhood, trying to grab whoever had been in that car.

“You think it was him?” she said. “You think it was Liam Byrne?”

“Seems a bit far-fetched. But after what you learned about the guy who signed the death certificate, I’d certainly want to go up to Rahway and ask him what he knows. And we’ll see if this Liam Byrne had any fingerprints on file to match what they already peeled off the car.”

She turned and gave the corpse a quick glance. “You want to know something that makes me believe it, Henderson? Spangler had a bizarre integrity about him. I don’t think he would have lied about it.”

“He was certifiable. Who the hell knows what he was thinking?”

“And we’ll never know now.”

“He had taken at least two lives already, and he would have taken two more if things worked out tonight the way he wanted. Maybe even three. You did the right thing.”

“Okay.”

“And even with all that he was, you tried to save him. I heard you trying.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve tried and failed before,” she said, “but never like this.”

She had been trying, pleading with Bobby Spangler to put down his gun. She had made no threatening moves, beyond, of course, keeping her gun aimed at his heart, and had promised whatever she could think of promising to avoid having happen what actually happened. But whatever she was saying was obviously counteracted by the witch, who was whispering incessantly in his ear and who gave him that nauseating kiss of death.

“What did you say to him?” she screamed at the old lady when it was over. “What did you say?”

“I told him to stop all this nonsense,” said Mrs. Truscott with her hands suddenly becalmed and her lips tight. “I told him to put down the gun and surrender to the nice police officers. I told him that was the only way.”

She was lying, Ramirez knew she was lying, but all she had to go on was what actually happened. Spangler slowly rising, Spangler gently caressing the old woman’s cheek, Spangler slowly turning as the gun swiveled from the senator to Kyle Byrne, Spangler slowly squeezing the trigger.

Ramirez shot him three times in the chest. Henderson fired at the same time, hitting his shoulder and spinning him around, but it was Ramirez’s shots that killed him. Spangler, already dead, fell back as his shotgun spurted upward along with the blood from his chest. When the shotgun fired, finally, the blast took out not Kyle Byrne or Senator Truscott but the imposing portrait above the fireplace.

It played out as quickly as that, so quickly that Kyle and the senator didn’t have time to throw themselves onto the floor until all the danger had passed. And when it was over, Lucia Ramirez, God forgive her, had her first kill.

“Why did you try so hard to help him?” said Henderson. “Most cops, seeing a killer with a weapon pointed at a politician, would have shot first chance they had. And there were chances, moments when his attention wandered, when the gun was pointed nowhere specific. Why didn’t you take him out when you could?”

“I don’t know, Henderson. What are you, my therapist? What do I get, forty-five minutes to pour out my soul before you tell me my time’s up?”

“I’m just asking.”

“I felt sorry for him, all right? I saw his apartment, I saw his desperation. He was living a twisted little life, and I know the witch who was doing the twisting. I had my choice, I’d have shot her.”