Someday, if I meet the owner of Taco Bell, I will advise him to renovate these fucking bathrooms. I will explain that my wife and I—wife!—like to go to his establishment every so often. I will tell him we would go more often if the bathrooms weren’t so disgusting.

I push through the door, excited to tell Love about my plans to renovate the bathrooms at and stop short. Her gordita is sitting there as fat as it was when I left, but she’s not at the booth. And the guy at the counter is gone, too. The kitchen is silent and outside the PCH is empty. Nothing. Not a single BMW. Goose bumps cover my body and I run into the women’s bathroom, but every stall is vacant.

My phone rings, echoing in the vast silence of this deserted Taco Bell. It is Love, and I silence the call because I know, now, what this is. Love retrieved the mug of urine but the mug of urine was not my only mistake. I’m sure of it. The only other possible explanation for the vacuum of silence is an atomic meltdown, in which case the sky would be orange.

I turn on the faucet. The soap in here is newer, pinker. I wonder if my child will be a boy or a girl. I wash my hands with hot water and I rinse with cold water. This is my last trip to the spa for a while and I push the dryer and the hot air blows. I close my eyes and let my hands take on the heat.

My phone is ringing again. Love. They’re making her call me to see what’s taking so long. They do shit like that in Dennis Lehane books. But you can’t hold it against them; their job is to get me.

And they must want me very badly because the perimeter has been cleared. That’s why there’s no one at the register and no cars on the PCH. If I had been a gentleman, I would have let Love go to the bathroom first and I would have been the one to watch the cops sweep in, stealthy and silent.

I pull the door and exit the women’s restroom. I memorize the tiles on the floor of this Taco Bell and I take one last bite of Love’s gordita and this is it. I pull the first door and enter the vestibule. I open the second door and enter the parking lot. The sun pierces my eyes. There is a cop on the roof above me.

“Put your hands up,” he says.

I do.

He reads me my Miranda rights and cops pop up everywhere, from behind the parked cars, from around the side of the building, from the bushes. I don’t care about them. I don’t care that I am under arrest for the murder of Guinevere Beck and the murder of Peach Salinger.

What I care about is Love and she appears now with tears streaming down her face. She is trying to run for me but they are holding her back. If she has a miscarriage because of the ridiculous, over-the-top antics of the United States Federal Justice System, I will kill each and every one of these people.

All that evolved Charlotte & Charles shit about trust and optimism is good and all, but not when your pregnant wife is sobbing in the Taco Bell parking lot and she’s got gordita all over her shirt and you can’t do anything because you have to go to jail. But I don’t have to worry. I’m one of the rich people now, the untouchables. These fuckers can’t nail me. I’m gonna have the best lawyers money can buy. And let them try proving that I killed either of those girls without a single shred of evidence, without the mugofurine Love got for me.

I lock eyes with Love. I tell her I love her. She nods. Me too. The cop asks me if I’m done and before I answer, he opens the door and shoves me into the backseat. This is real. This is not a minor traffic infraction where they give you a warning and ask you about New York. This is not a jaywalking ticket by some power hungry cop. This is two counts of murder one suspect in custody, over.

Fuck you, radio. It’s not over. Not even close.

56

THE police are so fixated on the past and I want to tell them that it’s all gone. I’m a changed man. I saw Amy on the beach, Amy, the reason I moved here, the person who stole from me and broke my heart, and I didn’t kill her. I’m not that guy anymore and this seems relevant, but then legally, it isn’t. My brain gorges with my defense, the one that I can’t reveal because the case against me is not about Amy, damn it, though I wish it were.

Here’s the gist of it. Detective Peter Brinks and the New York Police Department are not like the feminist bloggers. They took the complaints of Dr. Nick Angevine seriously. One of his complaints was regarding Patient X, one Danny Fox. They were unable to locate Danny Fox. It was like he didn’t exist.

Meanwhile, in Little Compton, Rhode Island, Officer Nico was spending a lot of time around the Salinger house. In police work, there is a lot of down time, a lot of sitting around, a lot of coffee, a lot of waiting, and while he was sitting around doing nothing, Officer Nico decided it would be fun to flip through a sailing magazine. And in that sailing magazine, he saw a picture of a guy on a boat. The guy was identified as Spencer Hewitt. “I looked at that picture,” he says. “And I thought, what are the odds that there are two guys named Spencer Hewitt?” Even though the Salingers insisted on closing the book on Peach, Officer Nico went to the garage that worked on my Buick. He wondered: Did they have a record of that transaction, perhaps a license plate? And they did have a license plate number on a receipt. Officer Nico found that the car was registered to a Mr. Mooney. He read about the bookstore in some BuzzFeed article about old bookstores in New York. He saw the name Joe Goldberg and then he found me on motherfucking Facebook.

Fucking Facebook.

He recognized me and he brought the picture to the Salingers and they knew me, of course, as the delivery boy, as the guy in the bar. So then the red flags were raised. Officer Nico is no dummy, and he knew Peach’s friend Beck had also met an untimely end. I almost wish I could have been there on the day that Officer Nico visited Dr. Nicky in prison and showed him my photograph—fucking Facebook—and said, “Is this Danny Fox?”

So that’s how this maelstrom came together, like any storm system in nature, a confluence of circumstances. It’s as absurd as me running into Amy on a beach in Malibu after hunting her in Hollywood for months. How things come together in this universe, how they don’t, is unfair. I was so judicious with Amy. I let her go. I didn’t punish her. I think the justice system should see where I am now, how far I’ve come, all the good I have to lose. They should stop prodding into my past. It’s so vengeful, so middle school, the way they want to boil my entire life down into these two dead girls.

And I had no warning of the coming storm but because of Love, I was able to batten down the hatches. I have a lawyer named Edmund and he sits alongside me through every interrogation. He is my counsel. He nods when it’s okay to answer and he shakes his head when he wants me to be quiet. Edmund says to focus on the facts and reminds me that the cops have yet to produce any evidence that proves that I did anything. All they know for sure is that I like to use pseudonyms. In our first conversation, I reminded Detective Leonard Carr that lots of people use pseudonyms. “Look at authors,” I said. “Look at famous people who check into hotels.”

It’s been three days and life is never how you expect it to be. The food here isn’t bad. It isn’t good, per se, but I’m not starving. In the newspapers they call me Killer Joe and it’s disappointing, the failure of modern media, the lack of originality. Love visits me. Her father too. At night I worry. I wonder if there are other mugs of piss, if I forgot about them. I think about Charlotte & Charles. I daydream about Love. I think about the baby, running from Love to me and then back again. I dream of the baby learning to walk and I wake up ready to face my long days of cheap coffee and interrogations.