“This is a third-generation Sankt-Moeller button with GPS,” I tell him, holding it up. “I already pressed it. The building is already in silent shutdown. The response team is on its way. They’ll be here in under a minute. You’ve got nowhere to go. So just be cool, and—”

Then the Rat Burglar is moving. He bobs under my aim, dips a shoulder, spins, and suddenly a leg is sickling through the air at an improbable angle toward the gun. Color and shadow flash before my eyes. Part of me thinks of the four French policemen. Another part realizes suddenly, and with formidable desperation, that I have been laboring under a significant misapprehension regarding my relationship with the gun: I am not a killer. I don’t want to shoot anybody. Not in his personal person. And not to kill. Not dead for all time.

A related epiphany: I don’t even want the gun to be a gun. I want it to be a time machine. I want it to shoot me back in time to before the Rat Burglar. To when I first met Charlie. The day at the Frick, maybe. The moment when I first unhooked that bra. I’d settle for two weeks ago or the night of the botched proposal.

Any time when it still seemed possible that Charlie could love me.

This comes to me in a neural flash, an instantaneous electrochemical burst, and before I fully process my choices—shoot or retreat—I am already yanking my hand away. As I pull it away from the accelerating foot, whiplike, over my head, I can’t help admiring my speed. I am fast. Very fast. But not fast enough.

It’s hard to tell what happens first: the fearsome, godlike crack; the gun jumping in my hand like an angry animal; the blood exploding from the Rat Burglar; his body hitting the concrete.

It’s only been a split second, but he looks dead already. His muscles are absolutely soft and unresponsive and his body is crumpled, his limbs all jacked up at crazy, Keith Haring angles.

“Shit,” I say. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Don’t die. Please don’t die.”

For the first time I realize how woefully unprepared pulses are for any emergency situations that require something more than clicking a button. I can sit around in a chair for seventy-two hours without the teensiest reduction in attention or sensory acuity, sure; I can detect nearly any sign of intrusion, no doubt; I can take heavy shots of almost any toxin on earth. That I can do straight. That I can do butch. In that particular freakish, sedentary, do-nothing discipline, my kung fu is strong. But what about anything else? Anything normal? I don’t know how to fight; I can’t shoot straight; I know next to nothing about providing medical aid. What use am I?