I grasped the cold metal in my damp palm, my rage and fright momentarily smothered by relief. But when my safety dug in, the anger blew out. “So I’m supposed to walk away pretending you don’t exist?”

“For all intents and purposes, Matthew, by tomorrow I won’t exist. I don’t understand your dissatisfaction. We helped your friend Washington Clifford close down Collins’s operation, and I’ve already been told your other friend, Roth, will be able to keep the Never Agains from moving up here. What’s your complaint? Do you still carry around some antiquated fantasy about crime and punishment, guilt and innocence?”

Deirdre unhooked the silencer from her pistol, placing it along with the gun on the seat of her chair. “I couldn’t chance your being irrational,” she explained. “I apologize if it led to the wrong conclusion and made you uncomfortable.”

I don’t know if it was the words or her matter-of-fact delivery. My rage screamed for action. Deirdre might be gone tomorrow, but she was here now. And very real. If I let her disappear she would just turn up somewhere else wearing a different name and hair color. Someplace where more unsuspecting people would be manipulated, and perhaps killed in the name of her commitment. I lifted my arm and pointed my gun at her face. “Washington Clifford has a job, Roth has a reputation and career. I just work for myself.”

My gun hand trembled. “I’m glad about Collins and the Never Agains, but someone has to pay for Dov and Kelly. Someone has to pay for the nightmare you’ve put people through.” My voice quivered and I blinked rapidly to clear my vision.

“Whose nightmare are you talking about, Matthew, yours?” Deirdre asked sarcastically. “Go home to your friends, go back to being a private detective. It’s the right job for someone who sees the world split between good and evil, right and wrong.”

I cocked the hammer of my gun, the tiny click booming like a thunderclap. “Move away from your chair, Deirdre.”

She stood where she was. “We look at the same world through different lenses, Matthew. I didn’t use my gun on you because I had no reason. You aren’t going to use yours because it would place you on the wrong side of your dividing line. Two different pairs of eyes, two different sets of lenses, but the same conclusion. Says something about life, doesn’t it?”

Deirdre scowled. “It’s time for you to leave, Matthew Jacob, time for you to go back to your safe, American world.”

My teeth clenched and a newer wave of cold sweat bathed my body. I closed my eyes, exhaled, and shut down my one-man army. With shaking hands I stuffed my gun back into its holster, nodded silently, grimly, and shuffled out of the apartment.

Deirdre’s laughter cascaded around my ears as I closed the door. I heard her laughter while I walked down her steps, crossed the porch, trudged back to my car. I heard her laughter while I hit the ignition and stomped the accelerator. When I continued to hear it a block or two away I swerved into the nearest parking spot and killed the engine. I was afraid it would never go away.

I put my back up against the door, stretched my legs across the seat, and lit a cigarette. The laughter didn’t entirely disappear but my trembling was easing. I leaned against the window glass and watched a montage of faces and listened to snatches of conversations replay in my head. Yakov’s gawky body; Collins’s slick, hearty handshake; Cheryl’s casts; Blue spitting blood. Too many had been bruised, broken, or left dead on the altars of belief. Deirdre’s, Never Agains’, Blue’s, Collins’s, Yonah’s.

Maybe my own. There was a finer line than I had imagined between victim and victimizer.

I turned my head and stared at the lighted houses on the pleasant residential street. This one square mile had been a converging point for disparate fears, a battlefield for divergent ideologies. Blind to the suffering, inured to the cost, their invisible presence left lifeless bodies, shattered lives.

I pushed the spent cigarette into the ashtray and lit another. I’d wanted to stop Deirdre from finding another neighborhood, town, city, country, to work her ugly magic, leave her trace.

But I hadn’t uncocked the hammer with my left finger. Hadn’t been willing to keep her from her appointed rounds. It wasn’t fear or self-preservation that stopped me. I just wasn’t willing to be another walking ideology blinded by commitment to my own dubious vision of right and wrong. The gun was stuffed back into my holster because there weren’t enough bullets to stop Deirdre, to stop whoever followed her, and whoever came after that. There were never enough bullets. History swore to that.

Simon had asked if I was tired of living without belief. His question had recalled the sixties when belief had been my food, when a vision of a new age had consumed my life. But right now, with Deirdre’s mocking laughter only an echo, I was relieved. I had no higher guide or guideline dictating where to go, what to do, who to be. Without any organized belief I had to find out for myself. And right now, I liked that. Deirdre wasn’t the last one standing.

I swung my legs off the seat, stubbed the cigarette, and thought about home. Then I heard my stomach growl with hunger and saw my grin in the rearview mirror. I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want the couch, the television, the stash, or the Wild Turkey.

I started the car and pulled into the street, smile still in place. Right now I wanted more of Mrs. Hampton’s, Charlene’s, home-made ham.