My broken finger came back out of the shotgun and Gerry swung the barrels toward my head.

The twin shotgun bores arced through the darkness like eyes without mercy or soul, and I raised my head to meet them, and Gerry’s wail filled my ears as the fire licked at his neck.

Good-bye, I thought. Everyone. It’s been nice.

Oscar’s first two shots entered the back of Gerry’s head and exited through the center of his forehead and a third punched into his back.

The shotgun jerked upward in Gerry’s flaming arm and then the shots came from the front, several at once, and Gerry spun like a marionette and pitched toward the ground. The shotgun boomed twice and punched holes through the ice in front of him as he fell.

He landed on his knees and, for a moment, I wasn’t sure if he was dead or not. His rusty hair was afire and his head lolled to the left as one eye disappeared in flames but the other shimmered at me through waves of heat, and an amused derision shone in the pupil.

Patrick, the eye said through the gathering smoke, you still know nothing.

Oscar rose up on the other side of Gerry’s corpse, Campbell Rawson clutched tight to his massive chest as it rose and fell with great heaving breaths. The sight of it—something so soft and gentle in the arms of something so thick and mountainous—made me laugh.

Oscar came out of the darkness toward me, stepped around Gerry’s burning body, and I felt the waves of heat rise toward me as the circle of gasoline around Gerry caught fire.

Burn, I thought. Burn. God help me, but burn.

Just after Oscar stepped over the outer edge of the circle, it erupted in yellow flame, and I found myself laughing harder as he looked at it, not remotely impressed.

I felt cool lips smack against my ear, and by the time I looked her way, Danielle was already past me, rushing to take her child from Oscar.

His huge shadow loomed over me as he approached, and I looked up at him and he held the look for a long moment.

“How you doing, Patrick?” he said and smiled broadly.

And, behind him, Gerry burned on the ice.

And everything was so goddamned funny for some reason, even though I knew it wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t. I did. But I was still laughing when they put me in the ambulance.

Epilogue

A month after Gerry Glynn’s death, his killing ground was discovered in what had been the cafeteria of the long-closed Dedham House of Correction. Along with several of his victims’ body parts stored in a half dozen coolers, police also found a list Gerry’d compiled of all the people he’d killed since 1965. Gerry was twenty-seven when he murdered his wife, fifty-eight when he died. In those thirty-one years, he killed—either by himself or with the aid of Charles Rugglestone, Alec Hardiman, or Evandro Arujo—thirty-four people. According to the list.