She takes another few delicate steps toward the other end of the alley. This doesn’t seem like my reality. It seems like someone else’s, a dramatization, a novelty, a faker. I couldn’t possibly shoot Charlie. But I must.

“Stop or I’ll shoot.” I try to say this like I mean business but the oxygen pipes tightly in my throat and I feel the tears cooling my face. “I mean it, Charlie.”

Charlie takes another cautious, balletic step backward, then turns and starts sprinting down the alley. I raise the sights to my eyes and try to make my arm firm yet relaxed, just like Herk taught me. It’s a clean shot. No obstructions, no tricky angles. I slow down my respiration, put my heart on mute, and make the sacrifice I knew in my gut I would have to make.

I set my stance, steady my aim, fire. For once, I don’t miss. I hit my mark, dead.

I murder a trash can.

Otto Starks, Supernova

Otto Starks, Supernova

As I’m waiting for the cops, Kong excoriates my ear. He is unquiet with questions to which he urgently craves answers. Where am I? Where’s Charlie? What was that gunshot? What’s going on? Where’s his goddamn title?

Answers don’t do much to cool his temper. He alleges that I had planned this all along, that he was never going to get the title, that I’m a louse, a double-dealer, a miscreant afflicted with underendowment, that my life is no longer worth the excrement of a constipated pelican.

“You got that right,” I tell him.

The cops show up, accoutered in assault gear and balaclavas and proboscis-like optics, chitting like insects. Hordes of them Busby Berkeley past me and dissolve into Azar’s building; when they’re gone Nunes just stands there coolly, hand-rolled cigarette lolling from her mouth, umbrella hanging from her arm like a corpse. I should be panicking, cooking up plausible story lines, inveigling clemency. But I don’t have the strength. I am insensate, dead. I feel like a toy from a fairy tale who, after being vivified by some benevolent magic, has again been made unreal.

“Where’s Azar?” she says.

“Beats me.”

“Where’s Jimmy the Hat?”

“Dead.”

“And the Rat Burglar?”

With my chin I indicate the wrong end of the alley.

“Clean getaway.”

“You lost her?”

I nod as if it doesn’t hurt me.

“And she went that way?”

Again I nod and use my chin to indicate the east end of the alley. To a pair of cops behind her, she points west and says, “That way, boys. Quick.” I should have known better than to try to outsmart her. Don’t I ever learn anything?

“You remember the terms of our deal?” she says.