I fired once more, this time at the man’s head, and a soupy slop of gray, red, and black splashed out his opposite temple, a small black hole appearing on the nearer one.

The bound figure slumped now, lifeless.

I grinned, nodded back at the slumped figure in the chair. “Your pal didn’t think I’d do that.”

I thumbed back the hammer on the .45—the click seemed to fill the big room—and walked back over to Colby.

“Of course, Harry Strutt was lucky,” I said. “He went fast. You? You’re going to get it nice and slow…arms, legs, then your belly, where it takes a good while, but don’t worry, you won’t pass out—you’ll have plenty of time to think about what you did to a good man named Casey Shannon.”

He was shaking now, like a bad dancer at the Tube. “You can have your damn money!”

I laughed. “No, Vinnie, that was just theater! Melodrama, my man! But it did get your attention, didn’t it?”

“You bastard!”

“I get that a lot.” I shoved the gun’s snout into his belly. “Time to die, you psychotic son of a bitch…”

“No! No!”

My narrowed eyes looked into his wide ones. “Unless…”

“Unless what?”

I stepped back, the gun no longer in his belly. My voice was the essence of reason.

“Unless,” I said, “you’d care to confess. With that on tape, I would have options. We could talk real money…regular payments…”

His eyes went wild, his so-white teeth bared. “I’ll confess, goddamn you! I’ll tell you everything!”

I stepped away and folded my arms, gun still in hand. “I’m listening. Sit your ass back down. And we’re recording.”

He spilled. Spilled everything, except for the two earlier murders. I let him have those. These four kills would be enough. And Jasmine Jordan had been blackmailing him, as I’d thought, foolish girl. Kraft had wanted more money, too. Foolish man.

“That’s all,” he said, exhausted.

“Lights!” I said.

The lights came up on the huge, mostly empty room, the bricks, the catwalks, the spots hung above, all came into sharp relief.

African-American hands, never really tied (they had controls to work), came around from behind the chair in which the “dead man” sat; then Thalmus Lockhart pulled the tight-fitting prosthetic mask off his head. He’d made the mask right there at the farmhouse, utilizing the corpse of Harry Strutt, who had split his skull when he fell, hitting that projection TV.

All it took was Vaseline, alginate, plaster tape, gypsum-base plaster, sulfur-free plasticine clay, gypsum slurry, and genius. And the bullet hits and squibs and gore effects had gone off perfectly.

To say that Thal and I were even now—for me getting him out of that barroom manslaughter beef—was an understatement.

Gotta love movie magic.