“I’m not going to kill you, Gerry.”

“What?” His head reared back.

“You heard me. Let someone else send you to your blaze of glory. You’re a speck, man. You’re nothing. You’re not worth the bullet or the mark on my soul for taking you out.”

“You trying to piss me off again, Patrick?” He removed Campbell Rawson from his shoulder and held him aloft.

I tilted my wrist so the cylinder dropped into my palm, shrugged. “You’re a joke, Gerry. I’m just calling it like I see it.”

“That so?”

“Absolutely.” I met his hard eyes with my own. “And you’ll be replaced, just like everything else, in maybe a week, tops. Some other dumb, sick shit will come along and kill some people and he’ll be all over the papers, and all over Hard Copy and you’ll be yesterday’s news. Your fifteen minutes are up, Gerry. And they’ve passed without impact.”

He flipped Campbell Rawson upside down in his hand, grasped his ankles again, and his finger depressed the shotgun trigger an eighth of an inch and Danielle closed one eye against the blast she was sure was coming, but kept the other eye on her baby.

“They’ll remember this,” Gerry said. “Believe me.”

He swung his arm back in a softball pitcher’s windup and Campbell slid back into the darkness behind him, the small white body disappearing as if it had gone back to the womb.

But when Gerry swung his arm forward to release the baby into the air, Campbell was no longer in his hand.

He looked down, confused, and I jumped forward, hit the ice on my knees and slid the index finger of my left hand in between the shotgun trigger and the guard.

Gerry clamped back on the trigger. When he met my finger, he looked at me and then clamped down so hard that my finger broke.

The straight razor appeared in his left hand and I shoved the one-shot into his right palm.

He shrieked even before I pulled the trigger. It was a high-pitched sound, the yip-and-bark of a kennel’s worth of hyenas, and the razor felt like the tip of a lover’s tongue as it sank into my neck, then snagged against my jawbone.

I depressed the trigger on the one-shot and nothing happened.

Gerry shrieked louder, and the razor came out of my flesh, then swung back in immediately, and I clenched my eyes shut and depressed the trigger frantically three times.

And Gerry’s hand exploded.

And so did mine.

The razor hit the ice by my knee as I dropped the one-shot and fire roared up the electrical tape and gasoline on Gerry’s arm and caught the wisps of Danielle’s hair.

Gerry threw his head back and opened his mouth wide and bellowed in ecstasy.

I grabbed the razor, could barely feel it because the nerves in my hand seemed to have stopped working.

I slashed into the electric tape at the end of the shotgun barrel, and Danielle dropped away toward the ice and rolled her head into the frozen sand.