MY HEART POUNDED, and a clenched coil of fear hardened in my chest. I had witnessed the death of two people. I would be next. I was going to die. Everything was cold and icy and slow, unreal and so achingly, physically, undeniably real as to be a new state of consciousness.

I never decided to turn and face the killer, but it happened. I pivoted my neck and saw an unusually tall man standing behind me, holding a gun pointed in my general direction, if not exactly at me. The lunar eclipse of his head blocked the overhead naked bulb, and for an instant he was a dark, wild-haired silhouette. The gun, which I could see clearly, had a longish black cylinder at the tip, which I recognized from TV shows as a silencer.

“Crap!” the man said. He moved and came into view, looking not raging or murderous, but puzzled. “Who are you?”

I opened my mouth but said nothing. It wasn’t that in my terror I’d forgotten my name or how to make the sounds come out; it was more that I knew my name would mean nothing to him. He wanted some sort of description that would place me in context, something that would help him decide if he should let me live or not, and I wasn’t up to the task.

With the gun still pointed toward me, the man gazed at my confused face with an expression of patience both coolly reptilian and strangely warm. He had blond hair, white really, that spiked out Warholishly, and he was unusually thin, like Karen and Bastard, but he didn’t look sickly and drawn the way they had. In fact, he seemed sort of fit and stylish in his black Chuck Taylors, black jeans, white dress shirt buttoned all the way up, and black gloves. A collegiate-looking backpack dangled insouciantly over his right shoulder. Even in the smoky light of the trailer, his emerald eyes stood out against the whiteness of his skin.

“Stay calm,” he said. He had the demeanor of a man totally in control, but in the tiniest fraction of a second, his composure appeared to crack and then reassemble itself, going from statue to rubble to statue again.

He took a step to his left and then to his right, a truncated sort of pacing. “You might have noticed that I haven’t killed you, and I can pretty much tell you that I’m not planning on killing you. I’m not a murderer. I’m an assassin. Worst that will happen, if you do something stupid and piss me off, I’ll shoot you in the knee. It will hurt like hell, might leave you crippled, so I don’t want to do it. Just be cool, and do what I say, and I promise you’re going to be just fine.” He looked around and then let out a breath of air so that his lips vibrated. “Crap. I was so hopped up on adrenaline, I didn’t even see you until I took them down.”

I continued to stare, in something like shock, I suppose. The terror swelled in my head like a dull roar against my ears, and my heart pounded, but the thud of it felt distant and detached, the tinny echo of someone banging on something far away. My neck ached from craning, but I didn’t want to look away. Too much shifting might make him nervous.

“What are you doing here?” the assassin asked. “You don’t look like a friend of theirs.”

I knew I’d better answer a direct question, but something in the pulley-and-wheel mechanism of my vocal cords wouldn’t move. I swallowed hard, painfully, forcing something down, and tried again. “Selling encyclopedias.”

The green eyes went wide. “To those assholes? Jesus. You should have done it a few years ago. Maybe a little knowledge would have saved them. But you know what? I doubt it.”

Don’t ask him, I warned myself. Just shut up, play it cool, see what he wants. He hasn’t killed you yet, so maybe he won’t. He says he won’t. Don’t ask him anything. “Why did you kill them?” I asked anyway.

“You don’t need to know that. You just need to know that they deserved it.” He grabbed the chair next to mine and sat down, moving in deliberate and authoritative movements, as if he were about to deliver an older brother’s kindly lecture on saying no to drugs. I could now see that the assassin was younger than I had first realized, maybe twenty-four or twenty-five. He looked cheerful, as though he had a good sense of humor, almost certainly dry humor- the kind of guy you might want at your party or to live on the same floor of your dorm. Even as I thought it I knew it sounded idiotic, but there it was.

“I’d like you to pack up your stuff,” the assassin said. “Don’t leave any evidence of being here.”

I couldn’t make myself move. It seemed like the stench from the trailer park had begun to seep inside, to beat down the smell of tobacco and gunpowder and sweat, but then I realized it was the smell of the bodies- shit and piss and blood. And there were those dead faces with their empty eyes. My gaze kept drifting over to their ruined heads, frozen in terminal surprise.

“This is important,” the killer said, not unkindly. “I need you to clean up your stuff.”

I rose in hypnotic compliance, expecting to discover his promise not to hurt me to be a lie. The instant I turned my back, I’d hear the squeak of the silencer and the burning rupture of metal in my back. I knew he was going to kill me. Yet at the same time, I didn’t quite believe it. Maybe it was intuition or wishful thinking, but when he said he didn’t want to kill me, part of me believed he meant it- and not desperate, pathetic belief, either. It didn’t seem to me like the desperate hope of the blindfolded condemned, feeling the roughness of the noose as it slipped over his neck while certain the reprieve would come. For whatever reason, the idea that I could get out of this alive struck me as entirely plausible.

I looked at my stuff. All of the book materials were on the table, and miraculously, none had been splattered with blood. My hands, big surprise, trembled like an outboard motor, but I began to pick up the brochures and samples and pricing sheets, holding each gingerly as though I were a cop collecting evidence, and I dropped them into my stepfather’s moldy bag. I took the check Karen had written and shoved it in my pocket. Meanwhile, the assassin began to organize Karen and Bastard’s stuff. He placed the checkbook next to a pile of bills by the phone, returned the pens to a cup on the counter separating the kitchen from the living room. Careful not to step in any blood, he brought my cup over to the sink and washed it methodically with a sponge, somehow keeping his gloves reasonably dry.

He was so cool about it, so damn cool, moving around the room with unflappable focus, the sort of person who acted as though everything had gone according to plan, even when it hadn’t. My being in the trailer hadn’t thrown him off for more than an instant. He’d changed the plan, was all. I flipped out when I overslept by five minutes, but this guy was centered.

He stepped back over the bodies, over the blood, and sat next to me. I ought to have cringed at his proximity, but I don’t think I did. Under the heat of his gaze, my mind emptied of everything except a loose, preverbal fear and an irrational hope.

The assassin pointed the gun toward the ceiling, unscrewed the silencer, and then ejected the clip and removed a bullet from the firing chamber. Keeping his eye on me, he placed these accessories in his backpack and then set the gun on the table. I stared at it. We didn’t have guns in my family. We didn’t have firearms or knives or even baseball bats under the bed. We didn’t handle weapons. If there were mice in the house, we called an exterminator and let him touch the traps and the poison. I came from a background of squeamishness, and I’d been raised to believe as a matter of faith that if I handled anything with the capacity to do harm, it would turn on me like a mutinous robot and destroy its master.

Now, there it was, right in front of me: the gun. Just like in the movies. I understood the pistol wasn’t loaded, but for a moment I thought I should grab it, do something heroic. Maybe I could smack the assassin with the gun. Pistol-whip him or something tough guy-ish like that. While I pondered my options, however, the assassin took another gun out of his backpack, so pistol-whipping became less of an option.