“Luck, hell.” His eyes strain to move and find mine. “I’ve been with you every day. Every night. Just like your daddy told me to. No luck involved.”

A strange feeling goes through me, almost déjà vu. “Every night? What are you taking about?”

“You saw me . . . you just don’t remember. The old man walking his dog?”

As I stare in disbelief, Walt’s lips crack into something between a grin and a grimace. “Wasn’t even my dog. Just a damn mutt I tied some string to . . . looked less suspicious. He dragged me all over downtown.”

“Walt, what the hell?”

“No time now . . . Here’s how you’re gonna pay your debt to me. Swallow your pain . . . and your pride. And take care of your daddy. You hear me?”

Unbelievable. At the end of his life, this man isn’t giving me a message for his wife or his children. He’s trying to break down the wall between me and my father.

“I hear you, Walt.”

“Bullshit.” His eyes look fearful, desperate. “We all make mistakes, son. Tom made some big ones. I made some bad ones in my day, too. And you’re making one now. If you don’t wake up soon, by the time you realize it, it’ll be too late to do anything about it.”

I gently squeeze his hand.

“I’m done preachin’,” he groans. “The damn pain’s breakin’ through. And civilian paramedics don’t carry morphine.”

“Well . . . I’m not shooting you.”

That’s probably the only thing I could have said that would make Walt laugh. But laugh he does, a rough chuckle. And before he’s done, the light in his eyes winks out. The last air in his lungs passes over my face as it leaves him. I don’t know whether his heart gave out or his brain stem swelled too much or an embolus hit his pulmonary artery, and I don’t care. I’m just glad I didn’t have to watch him die in agony.

The sirens have built to a mind-numbing wail, but somehow I’m only just hearing them. As Annie and Mia pull me to my feet, I see a paramedic checking Serenity, who’s now sitting in the van doorway with her feet on the pavement. Her naked breasts hang in plain sight, and she plainly doesn’t give a damn.

As the second paramedic kneels to check Walt, I slip my pistol back into my holster and say, “He’s gone.”

“I gotta check his vitals, regardless.”

A sheriff’s cruiser squeals to a stop, and two sheriff’s deputies run over to us and ask me what happened. I just point up Washington Street.

“That’s where all the shooting was. You’ve got multiple victims down.”

Both deputies run back to their cruiser, which peels around the block, headed for my house.