Apparently it even looked awful to him, because after a moment of thinking about it, he threw it at my waste basket. He missed, of course. “Here's the problem” he said. “The fingerprints on the knife aren't his.”

About a year ago I'd had an impacted tooth removed, and the dentist had given me nitrous oxide. For just a moment I felt the same sense of dizzy silliness whipping through me. “The —urm fingerprints ...?” I finally managed to stutter.

“Yeah” he said, swigging briefly from the huge soda bottle. “We took his prints when we booked him. Naturally” He wiped the corner of his mouth with his wrist. “And we compared them to the ones on the handle of that knife? And hey. They don't match. So I'm thinking, what the fuck, right?”

“Naturally” I said.

“So I thought, what if there was two of “em, cuz what else could it be, right?” He shrugged and, sadly for all of us, fumbled another toothpick out of his shirt pocket and began to munch on it. “Which is why I had to ask you again what you think you saw.” He looked at me with an expression of totally focused stupidity and I had to close my eyes to think at all. I replayed the scene in my memory one more time: Deborah waiting by the door, the door opening. Deborah showing her badge and then suddenly falling but all I could see in my mind was the man's profile with no details.

The door opens, Deborah shows the badge, the profile —no, that was it. There was no more detail. Dark hair and a light shirt, but that was true of half the world, including the Doncevic I had kicked in the head a moment later.

I opened my eyes. I think it was the same guy” I said, and although for some reason I was reluctant to give him any more, I did. He was, after all, the representative of Truth, Justice and the American Way, no matter how unattractive. “But to be honest, I can't really be sure. It was too quick.” Coulter bit down on the toothpick. I watched it bobble around in the corner of his mouth for a moment while he tried to remember how to speak. “So it coulda been two of “em” he said at last.

I suppose so” I said.

“One of “em stabs her, runs inside like, shit, what'd I do” he said.

“And the other one goes, shit, and runs out to look, and you pop him one.”

“It's possible” I said.

“Two of “em” he repeated.