Gail.

“No, Ray, you got me wrong. I’m really quite the good person. Now let me take the gun and I’ll send you back out into the night, I swear to you. You tried to come to my rescue, and you were brave and my hero. But you’re fooling around with my whole world and you think you know what you’re doing and you don’t.”

She started to reach again for the Luger. I placed the barrel of my revolver against her hand.

She said, “You won’t shoot my hand. I play piano with this hand. You won’t shoot me at all.” Her ample eyes looked up at me for reassurance. “Now I’m going to take the gun and then I’ll let you leave, I promise.”

Could I shoot her? I could shoot her in the calf, that would stop her without permanently crippling her. I wouldn’t want to shatter the bone. I looked at her leg to find the safest location to—

“That’s enough,” said Martha, as I felt the barrel of a gun against my head.

Chapter 52

52

The Final Notes

“Oh Gail,” I said quietly. “What have you done?”

Martha spoke so close to my ear that I could smell her breath. It was poison to me. “When you take a gun away from someone who does this kind of work on a regular basis, you don’t simply assume that’s the only gun she has on her person. You should have checked my inside left thigh. Now it’s your turn to drop the gun. Don’t worry, Ray. I’ll let you go when I’m sure I don’t need you any longer.”

I didn’t believe her for a second, but I didn’t seem to have a choice. Her gun was at my head; mine was, brilliantly, pointed at Gail’s leg. I dropped the gun, and damned if Gail didn’t scoop it up and hand it to her mother, saying, “I told you you’d see I was doing the right thing, remember? You wouldn’t have had the chance to sneak up on him if I hadn’t distracted him. We’re still on, right?”

I was beyond anger and rage. “Gail,” I lamented, “don’t you understand she’s going to murder me?”

Gail pleaded, “Forgive me, Ray, I don’t have a choice! If you would have just let me take the gun, I’d have let you leave—” She looked at Martha, desperately afraid of the words she’d just spoken. “Oh God, I shouldn’t have said even that.”

I was no longer going to keep the secret of who I might be from her, not if I was going to die because of it. “Gail, you don’t understand.”

“No, you don’t understand!”

“Gail, you could be killing your own father!”

“I know!” she cried in despair.