I sat up and fired six rounds into the mirrors and bottles behind the bar, but Gerry wasn’t there.

Phil was on the floor by his stool, grasping his throat.

The front door shattered off its hinges as I crawled to him and I heard Devin yell, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! He’s a good guy!” Then, “Kenzie, put your gun down!”

I laid it on the floor beside Phil as I reached him.

Most of the blood came from the right side of his throat, where Gerry had made his initial incision before cutting a smile toward the other side.

“An ambulance!” I screamed. “We need an ambulance!”

Phil looked up at me, confused, as the bright blood flowed between his fingers and over his hand.

Devin handed me a bar towel and I pressed it to Phil’s throat, placed my hands tightly on either side.

“Shit,” he said.

“Don’t speak, Phil.”

“Shit,” he said again.

Twin pearls of defeat were imprinted in his eyes as if he’d been expecting this since he was born, as if you come out of a womb with a winner’s luck or a loser’s and he’d always known he’d find himself on the floor of a bar some night, the stench of stale beer soaked in rubber tile all around him, his throat cut.

He tried to smile and tears spilled from the corners of his eyes, slid across his temples, and were lost in his dark hair.

“Phil,” I said, “you’re going to be okay.”

“I know,” he said.

And died.

39

Gerry had run down to the cellar and crossed into the building next door, let himself out the back door as he’d done the night he’d shot Angie. He hopped into his Grand Torino in the alley behind the bar and drove toward Crescent Avenue.

A cruiser almost collided with him as he shot out the alley onto Crescent, and by the time he squealed onto Dorchester Avenue, four police cars were in pursuit.

Two more cruisers and an FBI Lincoln came down the Avenue and formed a blockade by the corner with Harborview Street as Gerry’s car slid along the ice toward them.

Gerry spun the wheel at the Ryan Playground and drove straight up entrance stairs so slick with ice they might as well have been a ramp.

He fishtailed in the center of the playground as the cops and the Feds were getting out of their cars and aiming their weapons and then he popped the trunk and pulled his hostages out.

One was a twenty-one-year-old woman named Danielle Rawson, who’d been missing from her parents’ house in Reading since this morning. The other hostage was her two-year-old son, Campbell.

When Gerry pulled Danielle out of the trunk, there was a twelve-gauge attached to her head by electrical tape.

He strapped Campbell to his back using the backpack Danielle had been wearing when he kidnapped them.

Both of them had been drugged and only Danielle came to as Gerry wrapped his finger around the shotgun trigger and doused himself and Danielle in gasoline, then poured a circle of it around the three of them in the ice.