I walked down the hall to my study, where, if I still wrote science fiction novels, I’d be writing them. It would be nice, I thought, to be doing that again. How much more relaxing it would be spending my days imagining encounters with multi-eyed, acid-spewing aliens than dealing with real-life thugs.

I found my address book and opened it to J, found the phone number I was looking for, and dialed.

“Jones,” said a voice after the third ring.

“Lawrence,” I said.

“Zack, I’ll be damned,” said Lawrence. “How ya doin’?”

“Well, I’m thinking that I might be in a situation where I’m in over my head.”

“Well,” said Lawrence. “There’s a surprise.”

Of course, Gary denied having anything to do with Eldon’s death. Shocked, he was. Simply shocked. But Miranda was pretty good at spotting liars. She’d had one for a father. When Gary said, “I can’t imagine what happened. How could he not see that train coming?,” it was just like when her father would say, “I was just tucking you in, sweetheart, don’t make a federal case out of it.”

And there was what the police had told her. That the engineer, up in the cab of the diesel that took Eldon’s Toyota for its harrowing trip down the track, said he’d seen a pickup behind the car, that he could have sworn the truck rammed the car, shoved it right onto the tracks just before the impact.

The police already suspected Gary’d had something to do with that other gang member whose Super Bee got pushed into the side of a moving train. So they figured this for a retaliation, a tit-for-tat kind of thing. Give them a taste of their own medicine.

“That must be what happened, Candy,” Gary said, when Miranda told him the theory the cops were working on. “A revenge thing. Although, still, it might have been an accident. You never know, right? Crazy shit happens sometimes.”

“It’s just funny,” Miranda said, trying to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. “Eldon dying just like that other guy.”

“Yeah, well,” said Gary.

The thing was, if the other gang had killed Eldon, why didn’t Gary want to launch some sort of counterattack? Even Payne and the others were puzzling over that one. “It’s time to be reasonable,” Gary said. “We need to come to some sort of a whatchamacallit, an accommodation.”

Accommodation my ass, Miranda thought.

She could have gone to the cops with her suspicions. That detective, Cherry was his name, he’d been around asking questions, but he didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. She could talk to him, tell him, Yeah, Gary did that other guy, but he did Eldon too, because he was getting too uppity, too big for his britches. Followed him around until he could do him the same way he did Grant Delmonico.