“You’re a killer, Joey! A hired killer!” Irma is direct. Franker. Louder. As if freshly stunned by the idea of who he is, as if waiting for years to confront her son. “I can’t imagine anyone less human. No human feeling at all, if you do that job. If it’s even an actual job. And I can see how successful you are at it…since you’re back here begging for a place to spend the night.”

“I have been successful,” he says, and suddenly he wants to tell them about his successes, his triumphs, his patient craft, the loneliness, the discipline. But he is disciplined enough, lonely enough, to keep it to himself.

“How can you be out?” Sam says. “I don’t get it.”

“I don’t get it either,” says Joey.

“You think the police will just let you go free? They’re probably following you, and now you’ve come here and dragged us into it.”

He shrugs. “They’re not following me. And even if they are, you don’t have to talk to anyone. They’re not gonna bother sick people. You can just keep to your bitter, sick selves.”

“Well, if they’re not following you…please don’t tell anyone you’re here. Don’t tell anyone about us.”

“I got nowhere else to go.”

Irma twists the words around and sends them back bitterly to Joey: “Go anywhere else but here, Joey.”

Nothing about the past comes back to him, yet it all comes back to him. No specifics, but all the feeling, the frustration, the bitterness. He can’t remember anything but in an instant, he sees again how it was, how it always was here.

And what…should he bring it full circle, go load the Ruger…come back and put them both out of their misery, and him too? Put all three of them back where they started…dead to each other? A woman in a wheelchair, a cancer victim, and a killer who is about to be killed himself on his final assignment? It would be a favor to all of them, and a favor to the world.

He considers it. He considers it for several bites. Putting down his spoon, heading to his room to retrieve the gun, loading the clip, coming back to dinner, shooting all three of them right here in the kitchen. Why not? It’s one way out of Karloff’s suicide mission. Karloff might then realize Joey had figured it out. That he was smarter than Karloff thought. Of course, Karloff might just think he was crazy.

But Joey won’t do it. He doesn’t want to do the world any favors.

He eats in silence. Watches CNN with them silently.

Goes to bed with the gun tucked under the covers with him. In case Sam or Irma decide to try something heroic. Something dumb and heroic. In case they have the same homicidal thoughts he does.