“Honey?”

        “Yeah?”

        “It’s Frank,” your wife says.

        What the fuck is Frank doing here? You can’t remember
if you’ve seen him outside of church, but even if you have
it was at a grocery store or something. You’ve never seen
him socially.

        You work your way off the mattress, your shoulder
throbbing, and you try to slip into a t-shirt to hide your
bandaged shoulder, but the pain is too much, and so you
call your wife into the bedroom, and she is good enough to
get you into t-shirt and a pair of pants.

        Then you walk out of the bedroom and into the living
room where Frank is standing and waiting for you.

        “Frank,” you say. “How you doing?”

        Frank smiles. He says, “I just want to let you know,
if you need to, and I think you do because the police are
onto you, and if they’re not they will be soon, because I’m
onto you, and I’m hardly the best card in the deck – if you
need to, you can stay at my place for a little while, till you
figure a way out of the country.”

        You nod at Frank, and then you say, “Do you want a
drink?”

        Frank nods, and you head into the kitchen and mix two
cocktails, and what mix means in this case is that you pour
some whiskey over ice cubes.

        “Hey Frank?” you say.

        “Yeah?” he says from the living room.

        “What you say we drink these out back? I need some
fresh air, and a cigarette.”

        You and Frank are sitting in plastic lawn chairs, each
with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. And
you’re looking out to the blue sky. And you’re happy.

        “I really don’t think,” Frank says, “that you should
stay here too much longer. There was some kid on the news,
talking about your car. He even gave the police a sketch of
you that was your goddamned spit and image.”

        You take a drag off your cigarette.

        “It’s okay, Frank,” you say.

        “What do you mean, it’s okay? I just told you it
wasn’t.”

        “But it is. Don’t you see? I got away.”

        “You didn’t get away,” Frank says. “Not yet.”

        “Yes,” you say. “Yes I did. I mean, I realize I might
get caught by the police. I mean, I won’t get caught. I
refuse to get caught. But they might catch up with me. I
realize that. But I got away from the job, from my life. I
got my wife to love me again.”

        “Honey,” your wife says from just inside the open
sliding glass door.

        And when you turn around, you see standing behind her,
a roomful of cops.

        Jesus fucking Christ on a canoe that happened fast.
One minute you’re sitting and having a drink and a smoke
with Frank, and the next you’re standing in the middle of
your backyard, surrounded, alone, your wife and Frank
looking at you through glass.

        And a smile touches your lips.

        Look at you. A couple weeks ago, you were some
anonymous motherfucker in a cubicle, and now you’re a
celebrity criminal. True, they’re trying to stick you in
another kind of cubicle, this one with bars on the doors,
but you’re not about to let that shit happen.

        Not today.

        “PUTS YOUR HANDS INTO THE AIR!”

        You take the last swallow from your drink, and then
you set the glass down on the grass.

        You raise your hands into the air.

        You look past the dozen cops to your wife standing
near Frank, hugging Frank to her with worry, looking out
through the kitchen window at you.

        “I love you, baby,” you say. “You gave me the happiest
ten years of my life. But I know they weren’t so happy for
you. And I’ve always subscribed to the philosophy that one
should leave at a point when the people most important to
him will miss him, not after they already started wishing
he was dead. And I don’t think there’s much chance of us
having a moment better than the one we just shared. I think
the likeliest thing that would happen is that we’d fall
back into similar routines. And you’d get tired of me
again. And you’d start thinking of leaving again. I might
be wrong, but I don’t think so. I really don’t.”

        And with that, you start reaching behind your back.

        “FREEZE! PUT YOUR HANDS INTO AIR!”

        And you momentarily hook your hand in your back belt
loop, hoping that it may look as if you’re grabbing
something (pow).

        “PULL YOUR HAND OUT FROM BEHIND YOUR BACK SLOWLY, SIR!”

        You make your hand into the shape of a gun.

        “DON’T DO IT! PUT YOUR HANDS INTO THE AIR! NOW!”

        You bring your hand out from behind your back quickly,
and you point your finger at the cop nearest you, and you
almost manage to get out the word “Bang!” before the first
bullet smashes into your guts. But once the first bullet is
released, it sets off some of the other cops, and the
second hits you in the neck, the third hits you in the
center of your chest, and at this point you’re falling, and
as you fall, bullets four through thirteen lodge themselves
into your body. And you find yourself laying e-down on your
lawn.

        Your cheek is against the grass, and you can see
blades of grass inches from your eyes, and past them the
cops, and past them your now sobbing wife.

        And you know that this was the best way to end it, at
a point when she loved you again, before she started to
hate you again.

        The world goes gray and you fall into what feels very
much like sleep. Then the world goes black. Completely. In
the distance, then, a pin-point of light opens up. And then
suddenly you’re rushing toward it, and it’s like something
out of a movie, you’re rushing toward the light, and
anything could be waiting in all that white space, you
don’t know what’s out there, it could be anything, it could
be anything at all.

        And then finally you’re there, and you know.

        But the real question is:

        What the fuck are you gonna do now?