For a while, Karloff can’t be found. No trace. It’s assumed he’s abandoned the area—deserted his local empire, to be dismantled by the police department piece by piece—to resurface with some new identity somewhere. After all, he’s demonstrated the skills to pull that off before.

But months later, in an abandoned warehouse, he is reportedly cornered, trapped.

The police close in.

A dozen squad cars, two SWAT teams, command-and-control vehicles. A perimeter is established.

Shots are fired.

None, however, by the police.

Three shots, Zack is told.

Self-inflicted, Zack is told.

One after the other.

Why? Why would this criminal mastermind, so adept at survival, voluntarily sacrifice his survival instinct in the end?

It occurs to Zack Yellin that he alone might know the real reason.

Karloff’s singular, deep abhorrence at the idea of appearing in a courtroom to be judged. A courtroom like the one in Sofia that had shaped his life. Echoing with merciless judgments on child custody, foster care, and a life of childhood crime? Zack feels sure of it. Karloff sought to destroy a courtroom, after all. It clearly had some symbolic, weighted meaning for him.

Zack wonders if Karloff ever realized that, had he not showed up in that courtroom himself, he might never have been caught. He might have continued in his criminal life, unstopped and unstoppable.

But if he had never been in that first courtroom in Bulgaria, he would have never been on the path he was on.

Three shots, Zack is told.

As if it took three shots to kill himself. Three shots, even self-inflicted, to kill a man like Karloff. That’s how strong his survival instinct was. The survival instinct that he knew he had to overcome to successfully kill himself.

Two shots into his own torso first before a final shot to the head, apparently. To self-inflict pain first? To fully experience his own destruction? To be absolutely sure of getting the job done right?

Three shots. Further expanding the myth of Karloff.

Or shots fired by someone else? Shots that he commanded someone to fire? An underling or underlings so obedient to him that they’d do whatever they were told? A theory that furthered the myth as well.

Three shots. As if to finish off superhuman evil.

But Zack knew it wasn’t superhuman evil. Merely too-human evil. Unwilling to end up in a courtroom again. Unwilling for his life to circle back to that.

Three shots. Playing on the public’s imagination. And on Zack’s. What kind of a person can do something like that to himself? What does it take? Can that really even happen?

Zack ponders those questions in the days that follow. They play at the back of his mind even as he and Emily—tentatively at first, but fully and unambivalently very soon—start to see each other again.