A car door slammed toward the front of the van and I scrambled around and saw that the fat boy had a gun tucked into his pants. I yanked that out, sprawling across him, my stomach on his thick legs, and G came around, talking on his cell phone, probably to a girl; he was saying, “Okay, baby,” and he was five feet from me and he said, “Oh, fuck,” and I had the gun pointed right at him. I pulled the trigger and nothing happened. It was on safety.

G dropped his phone and reached for his own gun, which was in a large pocket in the side of his pants, and I flipped the safety—my dad had guns when I was a kid and I knew where the safety was—and I shot at G and somehow I missed and he was bent over, struggling with the Velcro on his pocket, and I fired again and it went right through the top of his sleek black head and he went down.

I looked around me. We were near the water, the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. I could see the Verrazano Bridge to the north. We were on some bumpy, broken-up service road off the Belt Parkway. High weeds and concrete barriers hid us from view, but high-powered streetlights from the highway, about two hundred yards away, cast everything in silvery shadows and light came off the water like a mirror.

G and the fat boy were probably going to shoot us and then dump us in the current. I dropped the gun and went into the van. I shook Lisa and poured a bottle of water on her face and she still wouldn’t wake up. I worried about hurting her, but I yanked off her mouth tape and vomit spilled out. I realized she was dead. She must have vomited behind that tape and choked to death.

Somehow, shifting their bodies a little at a time, I got G and his friend into the back of the van and closed them in there with Lisa. I looked for my phone on G and the fat boy, but they didn’t have it, and they also didn’t have my wallet. So I thought of using G’s phone to call the police, but then I felt like I had to keep moving; I didn’t want to wait for the cops to come to me. I started the van up, found my way out to the highway, and decided to go to my own neighborhood, to go to my precinct. It was some kind of muted desire to just go home, but I knew I couldn’t go home just yet, so the best I could do was go to the police near my home.