All this had happened when Eric and Charlie and Dr. Dave were dying and when God knows what Dave’s parents were up to, or their Russian driver. Nora and Em ended up taking two guns from Henrik’s stash. Contradicting herself, Nora slipped a double-barreled, twelve-gauge shotgun into a ski bag, carrying it over her shoulder from her parking garage to her apartment. Em had chosen her own handgun—one she’d used at the quarry. “Em wanted the Colt,” Nora said to Mr. Barlow and me. Em’s gun was a .357 Magnum—“a different kind than you have,” Nora told us. Em’s pantomime was startling to the snowshoer and me; Em seemed to be saying that her penis was bigger than both of our penises, together. “She means her barrel—the barrel of Em’s gun is twice as long as your barrel,” Nora explained.

The snowshoer and I had been waiting for the next time it snowed all night in New York City. And when it did, Elliot Barlow and I had a plan. We were New Englanders—we knew what to wear for snow. We wore our winter hiking boots to the Gallows Lounge. We wore our snowshoeing clothes, the layers and layers. We had extra gloves and ski hats in our backpacks—rain gear, if the snow turned to sleet, extra socks and warmer clothes, if it turned cold. I’d put a second pair of hiking boots in my backpack. “Overkill, Adam—you’ll regret carrying the extra weight,” the snowshoer had said, but we were proud of ourselves. New Yorkers were lost souls in a snowstorm; New Englanders were prepared. We’d planned a late-night hike home from the Gallows—from the West Village to East Sixty-fourth Street. We knew some New Yorkers who would think this was a long way to trek through the snow, but we were snowshoers—the walk from the West Village was just a warm-up for us. When we got to East Sixty-fourth Street, we would put on our ski boots and grab our ski poles and our cross-country skis. Still later that night, we thought they would be closing Park Avenue to traffic; from the forecast of the snowstorm, it sounded like a skiing-on-Park-Avenue night to the snowshoer and me.