Mickey comes to see me at the Ambassador. She’s still packing, all dressed up with a bulky jacket. I know she has my .38 under there. It was her baseball cap I saw bent over the garbage heap the day the cops picked me up. I wonder if maybe she came to kill me, that day or today. She did and didn’t, in that order. The cops are looking for her; they’ve got her and Connie’s apartment staked out. She’s been wearing the same clothes for days.

“I thought you did her,” Michelle tells me, sitting on the edge of my bed. “Who else could get to her like that? But now I figure it wasn’t you who killed her.”

“It wasn’t.”

The .38’s out of her pocket like a quick whisper of death, pressed hard in the hollow under my jaw. Mickey’s in my face, her teeth set, her lips curled back under the thin mustache.

“But you know who did.” She’s all stone butch shit, and I know if I had done Connie I’d be dead by now.

I stare her down, waiting long seconds before answering her. When she doesn’t say anything, I know she’s going to let me live.

“It was her brother,” I say, the .38 pressing against my throat. “Her half brother. The only one left. She was taking the fall to protect—”

Mickey still has the .38 under my chin. “That bastard raped her, didn’t he?”

“Not Jimmy,” I say. “Frank.”

“Frank? Who the fuck is Frank?”

“It was a long time ago,” I tell Michelle. “A long, long, long time ago. Frank’s dead. Jimmy’s the one who got Connie done like that.”

“Where does he live?”

I look at her, cold. She doesn’t deserve to die like that, but then again, neither do I. Neither does anyone, with a few distinct exceptions.

I stare at the dyke, wondering just how much she loved and wanted Connie, just how much she needed her around to keep her warm in this city of fog and stone-cold bullshit, how much her stone-butch cojones, pencil-mustache bravado, and stuffed-jean swagger are worth when it comes time to pull the trigger. Wonder what will happen if the whole fucking world gets blown up by one bullet from a .38, in the forehead of a scumbag who would murder his own sister for supposedly doing something that should have gotten done a lot more than five years ago.

I reach up and take the .38 out of Mickey’s hand. “Tell you what,” I say to her. “I’ll take you to where Jimmy works. We’re gonna go over there together.”