"I don't want to hear that kind of talk," Betty said. "He's blood."

"Hah. Wait until you're out on the street because your no-good nephew blew our pension plan. Wait until you need to get into a nursing home. You think they're gonna let you into assisted living on your good looks? No sirree."

Betty put her grocery bag on the small kitchen table and started to unpack. Orange juice, bread, bran flakes, a box of three-ply jumbo-sized trash bags. "We should have gotten two boxes of these trash bags," she said.

This made me swallow hard. I had a pretty good idea what they were going to do with the trash bags and chain saw.

"So go back to the store," Leo said. "I'll start downstairs, and you can go get more bags. We forgot to get steak sauce anyway. I was gonna grill steaks tonight."

"My God," I said. "How can you think of grilling steaks when you've got a dead man in your basement?"

"You gotta eat," Leo said.

Betty and Leo were standing with their backs to the side window. I looked over Leo's shoulder and saw Lula bob up and look in the window at us, her hair beads flopping around.

"Do you hear funny clicking sounds?" Leo asked Betty.

"No."

They both stood listening.

Lula bobbed up a second time.

"There it is again!"

Leo turned, but Lula was gone from the window.

"You're hearing things," Betty said. "It's all this stress. We should take a vacation. We should go to someplace fun like Disney World."

"I know what I heard," Leo said. "And I heard something."

"Well, I wish you'd hurry up and kill her," Betty said. "I don't like standing here like this. What if one of the neighbors comes over? How will it look?"

"Downstairs," Leo said to me.

"And don't make a mess," Betty said. "I just cleaned down there. Choke her like you did Nathan. That worked out good."

It was the second time in twenty-four hours someone had pointed a gun at me, and I was beyond scared. I was vacillating between cold, stark terror and being truly pissed. My stomach was hollow from fear, and the rest of my body was spastic with the need to grab Leo by his shirtfront and rap his head against the wall until his fillings fell out of his teeth.

I imagined Lula was scrambling to help, calling the police. And I knew what I needed was to stall for time, but it was hard to think coherently. I was sweating in Betty's forty-degree kitchen. It was the cold sweat of someone facing death badly. Not ready to go.

"I don't g-g-get it," I said to Leo. "Why are you doing all this killing?"

"I only kill when I have to," Leo said. "It's not like it's indiscriminate. I wouldn't have killed that sales clerk, but she pulled Betty's ski mask off."