“I can’t get a signal. It’s says No Service. Let me try again.” He entered Bullock’s number again, put the phone to his ear. “Cut out. Fucking cells.”

I went to reach for mine, then realized it was in a cardboard box on Bullock’s desk. “Try again!” I said.

“Okay, hang on, it’s ringing.” A pause. “Hey, it’s me. Checking in … Yeah, I was having trouble getting a signal. Everything okay there?” Another pause. “We’re on our way back, actually… . We had a visit with Eddie… . No, listen, let me tell you about it when we get back… . Yeah, bye.”

Trimble cleared his throat. “I think Bullock could sense that things didn’t go as well as they might have.”

I had us on the highway to downtown. Trimble seemed contemplative.

“Imagine what that must have been like, huh?” he said. “Ten floors down. Then splat.”

“Imagine,” I said, “thinking that was preferable to being taken back to see Bullock.”

As we got closer to downtown I asked Trimble what was on his mind.

“I was thinking about when you have a scarf, or a shirt maybe, and you get a tear at one end, say, and the threads start coming apart. And you try to tidy up the edges, you snip off the loose strings, but then, after another day or so, there are more loose threads. And you realize that the thing is just going to keep unraveling and there isn’t a fucking thing you can do about it.”

I slowed for a red light.

“You know how many people have to die tonight for things to not unravel?” Trimble asked. I thought it was more a rhetorical question, so I didn’t say anything. “You, of course. And your daughter. And Eddie would have had to, if he hadn’t taken care of that himself. And his wife, of course. That one’s going to haunt me forever. There’s enough witnesses to fill a streetcar.”

“Some have died already,” I said. “There’s a photographer at my paper. His name was Stan Wannaker, and your friend Bullock smashed his head in a car door earlier this evening. Not to get anything from him. Just to settle a score. And Lawrence is still probably iffy. It’s only luck that’s kept him alive. When Bullock left him, he had to believe he was leaving him for dead.”

Trimble said nothing. I guess he didn’t have the energy this time to defend Bullock on that one. He was staring out the window. It was odd. He seemed at peace somehow, like maybe he’d arrived at some kind of a decision.