"They won't believe me."

"About what?"

He didn't say anything for a while.

We drove back to town on a gravel road. Gravel dust plumed up behind us like a ghostly tail.

"I did you a favor," he said, looking over at me.

"You did?"

"Yeah. I took her away from you."

"Some favor."

"You don't know about her, man. Believe me, you don't. That's why I said the cops wouldn't believe me. They wouldn't. You know that time they put her away?"

"Yeah."

"They thought she was making all that s.h.i.t up, what she told them and everything. But she wasn't. It was true." He turned away from me, back to the moon.

Town lights lined the horizon.

He reached down and picked up the gun again.

"I just need five minutes with her."

"Maybe they'd let you see her after you turn yourself in."

He reached over and grabbed my shoulder so violently that he pulled me up from the seat. "Knock off the s.h.i.t about the cops. You're taking me to her place. You understand?"

He was shouting at me.

Gravel road became asphalt street, timberland became small bungalows, prairie darkness became street lights.

Cindy lived on the far side of town.

With all the cops looking for him, it was going to be a long drive.

"I didn't mean to kill her."

I just looked over at him.

"I didn't want to."

I looked back to the street.

"It wasn't mea"not really."

He was on that again. If it hadn't been him, then who had it been?

I wondered if he was insane. That was possible. People did that sometimes. Just went insane.

I'm not sure just when Garrett saw me. Maybe he picked me up a couple blocks sooner than I realized.

He was used to pulling me over and having a little talk and maybe that was what he originally had in mind.

I didn't realize he was behind us until we'd reached the outskirts of the shopping area, where the lights got about ten times brighter.

That's when he must have seen Myles silhouetted in the front seat.

He hit his cherry and he hit his siren.

Myles came up from a kind of stupor, jerked around for a look behind and then said, "Get me down to J Street and then let me out. I'll be better off on foot."

Garrett rammed us then, doing to me what Myles had done to me a few weeks earlier.

The police car hit us with such impact that I was knocked into the curb.

"Don't stop!" Myles shouted, pushing the gun into my face. He looked lurid, sweat like silver blisters all over his face, dark eyes bulged and crazed, tears running from his eyes.

We went up over the curb and crashed back down.

"Step on the gas!" Myles shouted.

Then we were doing 60 mph down a narrow town street. I just hoped n.o.body stepped out in front of us.

Garrett rammed us again.

This time he knocked us up and over the curb completely.

We skidded across dew-wet gra.s.s, through a shrubbery, through a picket fence, and right up to the front door step of some elderly people who were just now peeking out their front window.

When we stopped, I saw that Myles had struck his head against the dashboard. He looked dazed. The gun was on the seat next to him.

I grabbed it, got the door open and crawled out of the car.

Garrett was on the lawn now, gun drawn.

"Get away from the car, Spence," he said, walking closer and closer to Myles' door.

I hobbled away, my knee painful and bleeding from where I'd cut it on the underside of the dash.

Garrett was at the door now.

He approached cautiously and then said, "Come out of there, Myles. Right now."

"He doesn't have a gun anymore, Garrett," I said.

"Just shut up, Spence," he said. "This is police business."

Sirens in the distance, rushing here.

Dark lawn. Two scared oldsters peeking out the window. Garrett in Clint Eastwood stance, gun drawn.

Myles inside the car.

I heard him say: "I want to see her."

"Shut the f.u.c.k up and get out of the car."

"You hear me? I said I want to see her. She can explain all this."

"You're never going to see her again, a.s.shole. I can promise you that."

Sirens. Closer.

Garrett raising his Magnum.

Me wanting to shout out that Myles didn't have his gun anymore.

And then Myles saying: "I want to see her, man. That's all I'm asking you. I want to see her."

That's when the two shots exploded in the night.

Right through the open window, they went.

Right into Myles' chest.

I'd never heard a man die before. The sound was kind of funny, kind of a cry and kind of a grunt, and then a slumping forward, and then a long deep silence.

The silence scared the s.h.i.t out of me. Then Garrett walked over to the car and looked inside.

"Oh, Jesus," he said. "Oh, Jesus Christ."

Then there wasn't any silence at all, not for a long time, not with the cop cars and the ambulance and the coroner's van and all the fascinated onlookers and then the weeping family of David Myles.

They took me down to the police station and I was there for six hours and when I got out there were a bunch of reporters there and then Josh had me by the arm and he was pushing me through the crowd and out into the chilly prairie night.

Garrett hadn't merely shot David Myles. He'd executed him.

That was the only thing I could think of all that night as I lay awake still shaking from everything that had happened.

He'd known Myles didn't have a gun. He'd executed him.

PART TWO.

CHAPTER ONE.

"I'm sure he didn't hear you."

"I said it real loud."

"Spence, put yourself in his position," Chief Stewart said.

Paul Stewart had been the police chief in this town ever since I was in grade school. He was generally considered to be fair, open-minded, and not at all impressed with his badge, the way some cops get.

But he was protective of his cops to the point of obstinacy.

He sat on the edge of his desk and looked down on me in my chair.

"It's dark," he went on. "You've just seen a car crash up through a fence. You approach it with your gun drawn. And then in the front seat, you see somebody who has just murdered somebody else in cold blood. You don't think you'd be a little scared?"

"Sure, I'd be scared buta""

"You don't think you might be totally focused on the killer in the car?"

"Sure, I'd be focused on the guy in the car buta""

"And if somebody said something to you, don't you think there's a possibility that you might not hear them?"

"Sure, there's a possibility buta""

"And that's what happened last night, Spence. He's a young cop and he wanted to be sure he handled the situation the proper waya"and he was also scared. It was real easy for him to imagine that Myles had a gun in his hand and was bringing it up to shoot him."

I didn't say anything for a time, just sat in his sunny office with the four filing cabinets and the big desk with framed photos of his grandkids all over it and a wall filled with awards and plaques and a few pictures of the Chief with minor celebrities. The one of him shaking hands with Hulk Hogan struck me as pretty funny.

"That's what happened, Spence."

"He thought that Myles had a gun?"

"Right."

"And when he approached the car, he thought he saw Myles bringing the gun up?"

"Yes."

"And so he shot him?"

"Right."