Owen walked around her. I started to say something, to talk him down. “Shut up,” he yelled. He stopped. Standing over her. By her feet. He poured. Not a lot. Just enough. On to her shoes. It began to eat through the leather or whatever they were made of. Allison shrieked and started to kick her shoes off.

I yelled, “Stop it, motherfucker!”

Owen turned to look at me. A thin-lipped smirk. Uneven, a diagonal line cutting across the lower part of his face. Intense eyes. Two steps over the sanity line. As his focus moved toward me, his whole head turned. Allison’s hand went into her bag. It came out with a revolver. A small one. A tiny thing. She shot. It hit Owen.

Surprised, like he’d been punched by a ghost, he turned back to her, acid in one hand, 9mm in the other.

It gave me time to pull Liz’s hot pink and black Glock from my pocket and shoot. It hit him on the side somewhere. There was more surprise. But he was still alive. Still standing. Still holding a weapon in his hand. I shot again. Then two more. Womp, womp, into his body. He fell backward against his desk, then slid, his back against it, alive or dead or nearly dead, I couldn’t say, but without enough strength left to lift his hands. The bottle of acid fell from his fingers, spilling on the carpet, cooking it and stinking. He kept hold of the gun, but the hand that clutched it went down to the floor. It twitched, but it couldn’t rise.

Allison rose to her feet. She let go of the handbag. She held her little revolver in her right hand, steadied it with her left. It was a .22. She stepped forward, until she was standing right over Owen, one foot between his sprawled legs, the other outside his left leg. Then she fired. The bullet went in his left eye, through his brain, and bounced around the back of his skull.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

NOW AND ZEN

“One day, death will come. Before it knocks you down, have a good laugh…”

OSHO: Never born, never died. Only visited this Planet Earth between December 11, 1931 and January 19, 1990

ALLISON SAID, “WE SHOULD CALL the police.” But her tone made it a question.

“Seven minutes,” I said.

“What?”

I sat down. I was tired. “I told him,” I said, meaning Owen, “right at the start, that I was too old for this shit.”

“What’s seven minutes? What does that mean?”

I took off my hat. Kept my coat on. Put the hat in my lap. I closed my eyes.

“Are you going to sleep?”

“No,” I said. “But if I start to snore you can wake me.”

“I’m going to call them. It was self-defense. He shot first. He was going to burn me. Look at my shoe and my wig. That proves it.”