“This is where you stop and think,” he said.

Mather’s eyes went wide. He held out his palms and shook his head. “Hey, shit. I mean, hey.”

Even while the kid stood there, still running his mouth, flashes started going off in Tony’s head. He thought about the scene. Thought about where he was standing. Thought about the odds of this mutt Mather keeping his shit together for more than a day.

He squeezed the trigger and shot him, high and right, one ring wide of center mass.

The range was too close, even for the low-grain rounds Tony carried. The bullet passed through Mather on a short rope of blood, spidering the one-way plate-glass security window looking out on the darkened store. The sound of the discharge in the space of the office was enough to make Tony’s ears ring.

Troy Mather flailed to his right and stumbled back two or three steps. His face had gone dull with shock.

“Motherfuck.” His features contorted and he gripped his shoulder. Within moments his sweatshirt had soaked through. “You shot me, man.”

“Yeah,” Tony said. He must have nicked the brachial artery, the way the kid was pumping out. “Why you standing around?”

“I…”

“You’re getting blood all over the place,” Tony said. “I’d be hauling ass out of here. That’s me personally.”

Mather didn’t look well at all. He looked at Tony like he’d been betrayed by a brother.

It took a lot to get a reaction out of Derek Price. He stood there, leaning back just a little on his heels, his expression somewhere between surprise and amusement.

All at once Troy coughed, turned, and staggered out of the office, trailing blood the whole way.

“Derek,” Tony said. “How’d you like a lifetime get-out-of-shit-free card?”

It took a couple beats before Price said, “Cool.”

“Drive him to the ER,” Tony said. “Take the long way. Make sure he’s out of mud before you get there. Get what I’m saying?”

“Yeah,” Derek said. He paused. “What do I say?”

Tony thought about it. “He have a cell phone on him?”

“I guess so. Yeah.”

“After he’s done, get his phone and call yourself. So there’s a record. At the hospital, say he called you from here and told you to come pick him up. Understand?”

“He called me from here.”

“You my guy?”

Derek Price shrugged. “Sure.”

“Get going.”

Price hustled out, following his buddy, being careful not to step in the blood trail. Tony thought, Attaboy.

He watched Derek disappear into the shadows leading out to the showroom floor. Then he went around the desk and pressed the .45 into Uncle Eddie’s cool dead hand.

He raised his uncle’s arm and fired two more shots, both in the vicinity of where Troy Mather had been standing a minute ago. They’d need blowback on Eddie’s hand for the lab. He lowered Eddie’s arm so that it hung the way it had been. He let the gun drop to the carpet.

Just before he turned away, Tony had another thought. He opened the whiskey drawer.

Yep.

He removed Eddie’s .38 and put it around his back, into the empty holster. He left the drawer open.

Ray was looking at him.

“What?”

“All finished?”

“About.” Tony straightened, looked things over. “What do you think?”

“I think we should be going,” Ray said.

26

Nine out of ten women murdered are killed by men, the fact sheet said.

She’d found it in the blue folder Detective Kenna had given her. Gwen had seen the sheet before. It was a flyer published by a local coalition titled “The Truth About Domestic Violence.” One of her professors had used it as a handout in her social welfare seminar last semester.

Of those women, half are slain by their husbands or partners.

In fact, she’d seen the flyer even before then. A couple of times a year, somebody from the YWCA would go around the student union and distribute copies to all the tables and bulletin boards.

The first time she’d looked at this stupid piece of paper, she’d been at school. Sitting in the auditorium with a hundred other girls, a handful of amusingly uncomfortable-looking guys.

Now here she was, reading the same numbers in a victim’s hideaway provided by the same group that had published the flyer.

“Gwen, are you listening?”

She closed the folder and looked at Matthew across the small table off the kitchenette. It was six o’clock in the morning, still dark outside. She’d kept every light on in the apartment overnight.

“Do you understand what we need to say?”

“We’ve been sleeping together,” she said. “For about three weeks.”

“Since early October.” He seemed so tired. “Russell found out about a week ago, and that’s why he…that’s why it was so much worse this time.”

Something about seeing Matthew in street clothes instead of his uniform reminded her of what she’d found so sweet and appealing about him. It had grown harder and harder to remember, these past few days.

“I guess I don’t understand,” she admitted.

“We need to say that he came to the store to confront you, and I intervened. That’s what set him off.” Matthew closed his eyes and rubbed them with the backs of his fingers. “The parking lot cameras will back that up.”

She hadn’t told him how close to the truth that part of the story actually came.

“I mean, I don’t understand why you want to say we’ve been sleeping together,” she said. “It makes it sound…it makes you sound involved.”

“That’s what it needs to sound like now.”

Because they needed a way to explain, Gwen realized. To other people. They needed a plausible explanation for why Tony Briggs and Ray Salcedo were coming after both of them, and not just her.

It made no sense otherwise. Why would Briggs and Salcedo think Matthew had known anything about the money Russell had been carrying? He was just the police officer who had driven her to the hospital and filed the reports.

Unless the two of them had been having an affair. That made things different.

“But we’re changing our story,” Gwen said.

He nodded. “It actually helps. It looks like we tried to hide something small.”

If you let somebody catch you lying about something small, it’s that much easier to lie to them about something big.

He was a cop; he would know how it needed to look. Gwen imagined he’d probably run across every kind of liar in the world.

Still…

“All the pieces are there,” he said. “We just need to put them in the right light. And we need to do it first.”

“Nobody will be suspicious?”

“Everybody will be suspicious,” he said. “But there’s more evidence to support our story than theirs.”

“As far as you know.”

He didn’t have an answer for that.

They sat in silence for a minute.

Gwen said, “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“What happened between you and your wife?”

He looked at her like he didn’t understand the question. “How do you mean?”

“I mean, why did you get divorced?”

Silence.

“She wasn’t happy,” he said.

“Why wasn’t she happy?”

“Probably because I wasn’t happy.”

“Why weren’t you happy?”

He sighed. “I don’t know.”

“Did you ever hit her?”

“Jesus.” Matthew got a look on his face like she’d asked him if he had some kind of a thing for little kids. He leaned back in his chair. “No.”

“Really?”

“Of course not,” he said. “Why did you ask that?”

“I just keep thinking,” she said. “Sitting here in this apartment, it’s like I can’t stop thinking. Even when I try.”

“Gwen…”

“And I just can’t figure it out.” She paused, not sure how to say what she wanted to say. “I mean, I’m thinking, maybe this guy accidentally slapped his wife once, and now he’s trying to make up for it?”