It gave me immense pleasure not to tell her. En route to Treasure Island that evening, I’d stopped off in Oakland’s Chinatown and visited a pawnshop that had nearly a dozen musical instruments in its front window and some two hundred unregistered pistols under its rear counter. The proprietor advised me that the petite .38 that most interested me was considered a lady’s gun, and I reassured him that this was fine, as I intended it for a lady. I then walked two doors down the street to a haberdashery, where I asked if they might have a suit one size larger than mine that fitted tight in the shoulders, causing the back of the collar to puff away from the neck. The suit they sold me might have been a bit snug on Quasimodo, but it suited my needs admirably. I then visited the nearest Chinese laundry and paid a seamstress seated at a table in the window to sew a pouch for me in the lining of the jacket near its collar, one that would be just big enough to hold the trim .38 invisibly between my shoulder blades.

I’d worn this less-than-fashionable suit to my appointment on Treasure Island, the gun’s weight settled reassuringly between my shoulders. When Gunther had frisked me, I’d placed my hands behind my head and moved my elbows outward in what seemed like a maximum effort to cooperate. But this had actually elevated the pistol even farther from his searching hands, in a location Gunther would never have thought to frisk: the momentarily cloaked nape of my neck. When I’d whisked off my jacket, supposedly to drape it around Gail’s shoulders, I’d kept the lining side toward me. It had been a breeze to extract the gun, the jacket effectively hiding the pistol in my hand until the moment I’d tossed the jacket toward Gunther and held the gun against Martha’s head.

My plan now was to hit them with all I’d pieced together in the last forty-eight hours so as to jar Gail, and possibly even Martha, into telling me everything I didn’t already know. Not that I was trying to be some kind of detective; I was just compelled to see if there was some way, any way, that I could extricate Gail from the corner she’d backed both of us into and buy her a future, even if it was at the expense of my own.

“Gail.”

She looked up at me.

I said calmly, evenly, like a knowing but forgiving parent, “Gail, I know that Swing is actually a coded message giving detailed information about the naval base that’s going to be built on Treasure Island.”