His story was out. Andy recognized the phenomenon immediately, the sudden raw emptiness that infected an individual who had just given up everything, who now had no more to give. Jake’s confession had poured out of him, and as it had, it left space for what came next. Terror. Andy was on the top stair, level with him, six feet away.
“You can help me, right?” Jake said. “I mean, you … you’ll need cooperation. About the robberies. About other stuff. I can tell you everything we’ve ever done.”
“That can come later.” Andy put her hands up. “One step at a time, Jake. Right now, I want to know what I’m dealing with. Whose body did we just visit out there, near the harbor?”
Jake trembled.
“Was that Luna or Gabe?” Andy pressed. “Is Gabe’s body still here? Is that what the bags are for?”
“Gabe—” Jake started, reaching for his back pocket. Andy saw his face turn, whiplash fast, the bullet exploding through his forehead and spraying blood all over the door of the house before the sound of the gunshot even registered in her ears. Andy jolted, her body moving ahead of her thoughts, wheeling toward the source of the shot before Jake’s corpse hit the floor. She had her gun pointed into the dark beside the porch and was firing without knowing what, or who, she was firing at. She saw Newler’s face lit for a second in the muzzle flash, bloated and shocked and white. Her elevation meant she fired well above his head. He was emerging from the streetlight that fell on the lawn as Andy backed up, still trying to decide if she herself was in the firing line.
“Jesus, Tony, Tony, Tony!” she was stammering. His gun was down. She knelt and held what was left of Jake’s head, turned it limply on the ground, felt the weight of it, saw the flatness in his eyes. One of his arms was twisted behind his back. As she shook him, the house keys he’d been reaching for rattled and clunked on the porch, tangled in his fingers.
“Dahlia.” Newler grabbed her biceps and tried to pull her to her feet. “It’s over. It’s over. I’m sorry.”
“He was going for his keys, Tony!”
“It had to end,” Newler said. “You were too deep in.”
Andy let him hold her. There was blood in his hair, on his face, and his clothes were rumpled. He stank of body odor. His grip was too tight, squeezing the air from her lungs, and as she stood there swaddled by him she smelled his sweat and heat and hardness and knew that the final seconds of their lives together were ticking away. She tried to pull away and he held on tighter, and she wriggled and groaned and clawed at him.
“Let me go! You’re hurting me!”
“We’re not doing this, Dahlia.” He let her go, and she felt freedom for a half a second or less before he had her by the throat and the hair. “You’re coming in, okay? Look what you just did. For God’s sake. You just let yourself almost be taken down by some fucking teenager on a porch in Shitsville, New Jersey!”
“He wasn’t going to shoot me!”
“You’re so deep in this, you can’t even see it. You need me to pull you out.”
“Let me go!”
She went for his fingers, though she didn’t want to. She wanted to do what was smart. To kick him. To claw at his face. But some part of her, the part that had loved him once, wanted to give him one last chance. But the fingers around her larynx only tightened, and the lightness in her head as the air left her was almost a relief. It made the decision easier. She pushed the barrel of her gun deep into his ribs, so he would feel it.
And she fired.
She sucked in a deep, cold breath as though breaking the surface of the sea.
He fell on her. The grateful breath she’d filled her lungs with became a great balloon of pain crushed under his weight as he staggered forward, not back, as she’d anticipated. The darkness on the porch twisted her sense of up and down, and his great arms were around her again, and before she could stop it they’d collapsed together onto the boards. A white flash as her head hit the wood. Andy heard him groan, or maybe it was her, and the blackness seemed to have extended out to encompass everything—not just the roof over them but the street, too, the nearby houses, the distant stars and the loom of the city. Some cold, clear, calm part of her brain was whispering in that darkness, telling her she’d hit her head bad and needed to swim for the surface of her consciousness before she passed out. Kick. Kick. Kick.
She twisted out from under Newler’s dying body and dragged herself somewhere; to the steps, to the rail, to the door, she didn’t know. Like a sleepwalker, Andy pawed her way up a wall and stood there wobbling and holding her bleeding skull. A woman was out on the driveway in a robe, trying to speak to her, but all Andy could hear was a hard buzzing in her ears like an electric razor raking over her scalp.
For some reason, she grabbed the keys from Jake’s limp fingers and swayed on the wildly rocking floor to the door. She was thinking of getting a towel for her head, or finding a chair to sit in, or turning on a light, or nothing at all; just letting her limbs follow habitual actions as her mind gripped for purchase.
She walked in and turned right and went down on her knees at the edge of the kitchen, and from deep inside her memories she heard the voice of the child inside the burning schoolhouse calling her through the smoke.
“Mommy? Mommy?”
Only it wasn’t the voice of a memory at all that Andy was hearing, but a real voice. The small boy rushed from the hallway shadows into the moonlight spilling through the kitchen windows. Gabriel. Thin, tired, wide-eyed Gabriel Denero threw his arms around her neck.
“Mommy?”
Andy held Gabe in fingers wet with her blood, with Jake’s blood, with Newler’s blood, and heard the distant peal of sirens.