He’s still alive.

I kneel next to him.

He’s talking to me, cursing me, promising vengeance, a violent death.

I shove the end of my pistol into his mouth.

His eyes widen; he tries to scream with the cold metal in his mouth.

I lean over so he can hear me.

“Remember the other day when I said I’d screw my pistol into your worthless mouth and pull the trigger?”

I push it in farther. “It was you who sent people to attack Marlene! To trash my truck!”

His eyes are wide and he’s trying to talk, but I don’t take the gun out. I don’t care what he has to say. “It was you who sent those Nazis after Vanessa! Why? To get to me? Are you the one who told Lucas Dodd about me and Vanessa, too?”

He’s coughing and gagging, trying to explain himself, but there’s nothing he can say. And I can tell from his desperate expression that all my accusations are true. “Sixty-five thousand people! You were going to murder sixty-five thousand people!”

His good arm lifts up, tries to push me away, but he can’t do it. He’s too feeble and I’m too determined.

“Sixty-five thousand! And those innocent people—innocent children!—killed in the parade! You animal!”

Then I pull the pistol free.

He coughs, chokes.

The end of the muzzle is wet with his bloody spit.

“Go to hell, Billy,” I say. “But it won’t be today … because each bullet in my pistol is worth about fifty cents, much more than you’ll ever be.”

Then I sit back and wait.

CHAPTER 99

“Gimme five scoops, three quacks, six waddles, two meows, and nine shakes!”

I’m hunched over the flaming-hot stove, soaked head to toe in sweat.

I’m scarfing an endless stream of jalapeños, so many that I’m getting heartburn.

Or maybe it’s my healing sternum and three ribs, still aching after the Kevlar vest stopped the round from Billy Needham’s .357 Magnum.

I’m scooping grits, charring sausages, toasting baguettes, searing duck breasts, sautéing shrimp, blackening catfish, and deep-frying dough strips like a maniac, working furiously to fill the orders my ex-wife is barking at me.

I’ve never been happier in my life.

It’s been two weeks since Mardi Gras, and things here in the greatest city in the world are back to normal, or whatever passes as normal in this wonderful, crazy metropolis. The news media coverage has dwindled away, Billy Needham is no longer mentioned on the front page, and the breathless stories about the “miracle of New Orleans”—the multiple crashes of the deadly aircraft drones on Emily Beaudette’s estate—has been replaced by stories about the upcoming NFL draft and what it means for our Saints.