Matt stared down at Jimmy and a sensation both hot and ice-cold swept over him. The baby had opened both his eyes and was smiling up at him.

“I’ll do that,” he muttered.

THERE WAS an obvious detail that did not have to be considered because it was … well, so obvious, besides being indisputable. Jimmy couldn’t be his kid because he had never had sex with Amy. Yet, once out of the trailer and on the road toward Debra’s house, Matt did consider the idea.

He was in a unique position to evaluate impossibilities. After all, as far as the cops knew, he could not have been the one who had kidnapped Jimmy because he was dead. And look how well that logic worked for the authorities.

He had not had actual intercourse with Amy, but they had fooled around mightily. One of her favorite tricks when they were hot and heavy and naked in bed together was to grab his dick and rub it against her clitoris. She really got off on it, and he had to admit he had almost come at such times.

The key here was, he had almost come.

Matt knew enough about physiology and pleasant tingling sensations to realize he could have had a significant amount of sperm at the tip of his penis when she had stroked him close to climaxing. He also knew that sperm trained for the hundred-meter butterfly from the moment they were born. And it wasn’t a far swim from the surface of her vagina up to her tubes. Indeed, he had actually read about such cases.

He might have impregnated her and not known it.

But had she known it? A disturbing question, to be sure, but then everything about Amy was disturbing. If she had indeed gotten pregnant with his baby and had still chosen David over him then that made her out to be worse than a whore.

An interesting idea … to no longer be dead. His prefabricated nonexistence was liberating and stifling at the same time. He missed his mom. He missed Los Angeles. He still missed Amy … No, it was better not to go there. No fucking way should he go there. Yet if Jimmy was his child and she did not know it, and he was able to prove it, then how long would David hang around?

“I’m not going back to her!” Matt screamed inside his car.

Even he was not that crazy. She wouldn’t come back anyway. She was a slut and he didn’t have any money. That was all she had wanted. Besides, babies looked like a lot of people when they were Jimmy’s age.

Still, the possibilities were interesting.