Desiree’s head jerked around to look at Julian, then jerked back to Trevor.

“I wouldn’t know about her mother’s, sir.”

“Come now.” Trevor chuckled. “Don’t be modest, Julian. For all we know, you’re this child’s father, not me.”

Julian’s hands tightened, and his feet parted slightly. “You’re imagining things, sir.”

“Am I?” Trevor turned his head and winked at me.

I felt like I was locked in a Noël Coward play that had been rewritten by Sam Shepard.

“You think this is going to work?” Desiree said. She rose off her knees. “Daddy, I am so beyond normal concepts of proper and improper sexual behavior, it’s not even quantifiable.” She stepped past me and came around the desk behind him. She leaned over his shoulders. She placed the muzzle of her gun against the left side of his forehead then drew it across to the right so hard the target sight left a thin line of blood. “If Julian were my biological father, so what?”

Trevor watched as a drop of blood fell from his forehead and landed on his cigar.

“Now, Dad,” she said and nipped his left earlobe, “let’s push you out into the center of the room where we can all be together.”

Trevor puffed on his cigar as she pushed, trying to appear as casual as he had when he entered the room, but I could see that it was beginning to wear on him. Fear had found its way into his proud chest, into the cast of his eyes and the set of his ruined jaw.

Desiree pushed him around to the front of the desk until he was facing me, the two of us sitting in our chairs, wondering if we’d ever stand up again.

“How’s it feel, Mr. Kenzie?” Trevor said. “Bound there, helpless, wondering which breath will be your last?”

“You tell me, Trevor.”

Desiree left us and walked over to Julian and they whispered for a moment, her gun pointed straight at the back of her father’s head.

“You’re the wily type,” Trevor said, leaning forward, his voice lowered. “Any suggestions?”

“Far as I can see, Trevor, you’re fucked.”

He gestured with his cigar. “As are you, boy.”

“A little less so, though.”

He raised his eyebrows at my mummified body. “Really? I think you’re mistaken. But if the two of us put our heads together, why we might—”

“I knew a guy once,” I said, “he molested his son, had his wife killed, caused a gang war in Roxbury and Dorchester which killed sixteen children at least.”

“And?” Trevor said.