“Tired,” I said.

“Your eyes are red.”

“If you say so.”

“Phillip Dimassi is dead, I take it.”

“Yup.”

“You wept for him.”

“Yes, I did.”

I looked at Danielle Rawson, tried to find the energy necessary to care what happened to her.

“Patrick?”

He leaned back against the car and the shotgun taped to Danielle Rawson’s head pulled her back with him.

“Yeah, Gerry?”

“Are you in shock?”

“I dunno.” I turned my head, looked around at the prisms of ice and the dark drizzle and the blue and white lights from the police cruisers and the cops and federal agents stretched across car hoods, splayed haphazardly on telephone poles, kneeling on the roofs surrounding the playground. All of them, to the man, with guns extended.

Guns, guns, guns. Three hundred and sixty degrees of pure violence.

“I think you’re in shock.” Gerry nodded to himself.

“Well, shit, Gerry,” I said and found myself scratching my head as it was pelted with rain, “I haven’t slept in two days and you’ve killed or wounded just about everybody I care about. So, I dunno, how’m I supposed to feel?”

“Curious,” he said.

“Curious?”

“Curious,” he repeated and wrenched the shotgun so that Danielle Rawson’s neck twisted in his grip and her head banged off his knee.

I looked at her and she wasn’t terrified or angry. She was defeated. Just like me. I tried to find a bond based on that, to force emotion to rise in me, but it wouldn’t come.

I looked back at Gerry.

“Curious about what, Gerry?” I rested my hand against my hip, felt the butt of my gun. He hadn’t asked me for my gun, I realized. How odd.

“About me,” he said. “I’ve killed a lot of people, Patrick.”

“Kudos,” I said.

He twisted the shotgun and Danielle Rawson’s knees lifted off the ice.

“You’re amused?” he said and his finger curled tight around the shotgun trigger.

“No, Gerry,” I said, “I’m apathetic.”

Just over the trunk of the car I noticed a piece of the fence push forward in the darkness and a gaping space open in its place. Then the fence fell back and the space disappeared.

“Apathetic?” Gerry said. “Tell you what, Pat—let’s see how apathetic you are.” He reached behind his head and came back with the baby, his fist gripping its clothes at the back, and held it aloft. “Weighs less than some rocks I’ve thrown,” he said.

The baby was still drugged. Maybe dead, I didn’t know. His eyelids were clenched shut, as if from pain, and his small head was feathered with blond whiskers. He seemed softer than a pillow.

Danielle Rawson looked up and then she banged her head into Gerry’s knees, her screams muffled by the tape over her mouth.

“You going to chuck the baby, Gerry?”

“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

I shrugged. “Why not. He ain’t mine.”

Danielle’s eyes bulged and their pupils damned me.

“You’re burned out, Pat.”

I nodded. “I got nothing left, Gerry.”