For once, a cab is right there. She gets in. Slams the door.

Emily Lane is gone.

62.

62.

Zack’s desperate rush down the stairwell to catch Emily leaves Steve and Joey suddenly alone in Steve’s apartment.

Neither one looks at the other.

Joey is thinking about the last time he was here. He figures Steve is too.

“I’ll…I’ll get out of your way,” Joey mumbles.

Steve manages to nod.

As Joey backs away, he says, “Pretty cool how you opened that phone. Pretty brave.”

“Pretty dumb,” says Steve.

“Pretty smart,” says Joey.

Steve shrugs.

Joey stops and turns. “I’m going to jail, Steve. I’m either going to die in jail or die before I get there.”

Steve says nothing.

“I’m going to die soon, and you’re not, Steve.” A simple fact, a simple formula, he wants Steve to remember.

Joey feels an urge to say more. But he knows how absurd, how inane an apology would be, or offering something philosophical or heartfelt or even some nervous random chatter.

So, wordlessly, Joey exits and gently closes the door.

63.

63.

That went about as badly as it could have, thinks Zack.

No. Worse.

Emily seeing them together. Seeing Joey in Steve’s apartment.

Hearing their three voices, no doubt, as she stood outside. Shaking with fury, with confusion, with an overwhelming sense of betrayal, in the dark hallway outside Steve’s dingy apartment. About to turn and walk away, no doubt, when the door opened, and there they were:

Zack, Steve, and the assassin who’d been ready to kill her. Kill them both. Kill them all.

Imagining it from Emily’s point of view, it would hardly appear as if Zack was there to save lives. Joey’s, yes. But maybe others too.

More likely, it would appear that he’d lost his mind. And, well, had he?

Because he knew Emily would react like this. Because her feelings, her grounding, were so clear. That’s something he loved about her, the clarity of her feelings, her convictions, her loyalties, her stances. And he went ahead and did it anyway—lied to her, went behind her back.

There is something self-destructive in him. His own Steve-like night stroll into the woods and jump into the lake. His own ticking time bomb, deep in his psyche, that he can’t keep from going off. From going off repeatedly in his life, probably, in quiet ways sometimes, detonating sometimes so quietly that he doesn’t even notice. But this one wasn’t quiet.

But he needs me. There’s no one else to help him. What crazy moral code, what weird compass, had him jeopardizing his relationship for that?

Innocent people might be in danger. Might be killed. This possibility only half understood from a strange, brief, tense conversation with an assassin—an isolated, disconnected, peripheral character—who may have easily misinterpreted the over-the-phone hints and insinuations of a mysterious, absent boss.