“I don’t leave here very much,” she said brightly, taking one of the remotes beside the chip bowl covered with ants. There were five of them. I looked around for the fifth TV. A puzzle piece missing. “I don’t have a boyfriend. I could go out on dates if I had a boyfriend. We could go to the movies and hold hands.”

I decided I was underqualified for interviewing Mona. I went to the kitchen doorway, putting my glass of chocolate milk on the edge of the sink.

“Mona,” I said. “I’m going to go. I’m running late for an appointment. But I might send back another officer. I hope you’d be willing to—”

The click of a gun. I froze, my hand on the glass, half my body in the living room, half in the threshold of the filthy kitchen. The sound was unmistakable, yet it didn’t make sense in the absurd environment in which I stood. I tried to convince myself that Mona had simply turned the television on, my hand still frozen on the glass, ants wandering up from the sink top toward my fingers. As I let the glass go and turned slowly back around I saw that Mona had a gun pointed right at me. A huge chrome magnum revolver, a Desert Eagle, I thought, though I could barely look at it, the terror was so fast and heavy in my chest. Mona held the gun out from her body like a practiced gunslinger, her flabby arm outstretched.

“Bang, bang!” She smiled. I jolted at the words, sweat now pouring down my body beneath my shirt, making the fabric stick to my back.

“Mona,” I said gently. “Is that thing loaded?”

She still had the remote in one hand. She turned the television on without looking at it. I half expected the “Do You Feel Lucky?” scene from Dirty Harry to come on. She had this calm, cheerful look to her face. But a portly man with a shiny bald head was simply reading the economic forecast. Mona put down the remote and picked up another revolver from the table on the other side of the armchair, out of my view. Another revolver, a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson. She pulled the hammer back and pointed the two guns at me.

“Mona,” I said, trembling. I was having flashes, not for the first time that week, about what an investigation into my murder would entail. Whether anyone would ever even bother prosecuting this woman for it. Whether Kelly would come to my funeral. “Please put the guns down.”

“Watch this,” she said. I braced for impact, a slug in the guts or chest, tearing through bones and organs. But instead, the barrels of the guns flipped. She twirled the two revolvers on her index fingers expertly, her tongue wedged between her lips, giving each a dozen or so spins before jamming them simultaneously down the sides of the armchair cushion as though inserting them into holsters. I watched as she quick-drew them again, spinning them out to aim them both at me, then spinning them back into the imaginary holsters.