“Just tell me,” she says. Amelia Sachs delivers news straight. She expects the same.

“You’re going to hear it soon. I wanted to tell you first. I’m in trouble.”

She believes she understands. Nick’s a cowboy, always ready to pull out his MP-5 machine gun and exchange lead with a perp. Sachs, a better shot, at least with a pistol, is slow to squeeze the trigger. (Her father again: “You can’t take back bullets.”) She supposes that there’s been a firefight and that Nick has killed someone—maybe even an innocent. Okay. He’ll be suspended until the shooting review board meets to decide if it was justifiable.

Her heart goes out to him and she’s about to say that she’d be there for him, no matter what, we’ll get through it, when he adds, “I got busted.”

“You—”

“Sammy and me . . . Frank R too . . . the heists—the truck-jackings. We got nailed. In a big way.” His voice is shaking. She’s never known him to cry but it sounds like he’s a few seconds away from bawling his eyes out.

“You’re on the bag?” she gasps.

He stares at her green carpet. Finally a whisper: “Yeah . . .” Though now he’s started the confession, he doesn’t need to pull back. “But it’s worse.”

Worse? What could possibly be worse?

“We were the doers. We jacked the trucks ourselves.”

“You mean, tonight, you . . .” Her voice has stopped working.

“Oh, Amie, not just tonight. For a year. The whole fucking year. We had guys in warehouses tell us about shipments. We’d pull the trucks over and . . . Well, you get it. You don’t need to know the details.” He rubs his haggard face. “We just heard—they’ve issued warrants for us. Somebody dimed us out. They got us cold. Oh, man, did they get us.”

She’s thinking back to the nights he was out on a set, working undercover to collar hijackers. At least once a week.

“I got sucked in. I didn’t have any choice. . . .”

She doesn’t need to respond to this, to say, yes, yes, yes, my God, we always have choices. Amelia Sachs doesn’t offer excuses herself and she’s deaf to them from others. He understands this about her, of course, it’s part of their love.

It was part of their love.

And he stops trying. “I fucked up, Amie. I fucked up. I just came by to tell you.”

“You going to surrender?”

“I guess. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Fuck.”

Numb, there’s nothing she can think of to say, not a single thing. She’s thinking of their times together—the hours on the range, wasting pounds of ammo; in bars on Broadway, slogging down frozen daiquiris; lying in front of the old fireplace in her Brooklyn apartment.

“They’ll look into my life with a microscope, Amie. I’ll tell ’em you’re clean. I’ll try to keep you out of it. But they’ll ask you a lot of questions.”