For an infinitesimal moment—barely a nanosecond in terms of real time—Oswald sees the oily black pupil of that barrel, aimed directly at the bridge of his nose, like an accusing eye, without mercy.

  In real life, the moment lasts only for the briefest whisper of time, but it seems to burn itself into Oswald’s consciousness like a digital photograph, as he clings, simian-like, to the side of that speeding car. “Oswald, are you there? Are you like giving me the silent treatment now? That’s, like, real mature—!”

  In that last horrible instant before the blast comes, Oswald has no epiphany, no searching moral inventory, no realization of a misspent life, no grief, no regret, no sorrow, not even a mild recognition of the irony of being on the wrong side of the same instrument he has used to cause so many other deaths over the years.

  He feels nothing except for one thing: it’s good that he will die before his wife.

  The muzzle barks.

  6.

  Down through the ages, in the sordid history of Chicago emergency services, a few misadventures involving unstoppable bodily forces meeting immovable inanimate objects stand as legendary. In 1936, a mob lawyer named Marvin Prudhomme—according to the lore, at least 250 pounds buck naked—plunged to his death from the rooftop of the Ambassador Hotel. Whether he was pushed or committed the act in a pique of depression, we may never know. But what is certain, and to this day survives in the historical record, is the fact that Mr. Prudhomme’s flailing figure landed squarely on the rooftop of an International Harvester garbage truck, penetrating three inches of tempered steel and eleven feet of miscellaneous refuse—including an old bunk bed, three railroad ties, a broken bird bath, and a half a ton of empty cartons and table scraps—exiting through the bottom of the vehicle and smashing down through a manhole cover embedded in South State Street, landing in three feet of brackish sewage with a splash that would have shamed a cliff-diver off the coast of Borneo.

  That night, as the muzzle flashes inside that hurling BMW, Oswald Means will not come anywhere near surpassing Mr. Prudhomme’s dubious record. But Oswald does slam into a bike stand at the corner of North and Narragansett at the precise moment of the blast, mangling a Schwinn ten-speed and throwing the gun’s aim off just enough to exempt Oswald from a fatal head-shot. A piece of shrapnel grazes his temple as he is thrown from the speeding car.

  He tumbles across a half-acre of pavement, insensate and flailing, splashing through the gutter water, as the Beamer fishtails into the night.

  The impact that follows—while nowhere near as epochal as the Plunging Lawyer of 1936—will ultimately cause numerous heads to be scratched later that evening among the investigative team. Oswald’s entire three hundred pounds—including his steel-toed Wolverine boots and his back pockets full of nearly five pounds of spare ammunition—collides with a rust-pocked old VW bus parked at the corner of Narragansett and Montrose. The collision caves in half the rear quarter panel of the bus, shatters the back window, and knocks the bumper free, sending it skidding under the vehicle.

  Just before passing out, Oswald finds himself wedged under the greasy enclosure of the chassis, a trickle of blood running into his eyes.

  He tries to blink it away, tries to move, but he’s caught up in the manifolds and pipes lining the underside of the bus. He coughs, choking on the thick, acrid odors of gasoline and grit, and he hears a melodic sort of ringing in his ears. He thinks of a musical saw being played with a bow by a man in a tuxedo on the old Ed Sullivan show. He thinks of those vintage cartoons where a character gets hit on the head, and little birds circle his cranium.

  The birds circling him are the last things that occur to him before the darkness presses in.

  7.

  “WHOA!”

  He jerks awake in the back of the S-10, en route to somewhere in a hurry.

  At first it takes him a moment to simply register the fact that he’s lying supine on the cold corrugated steel of the truck’s rear cargo bed, wedged between the road case and the bulwark, numb and sticky with blood, his skin on fire, the pickup rattling around a corner at Grand and State. His hair hangs in his face, matted with blood, and his temples throb unmercifully. He still has one boot on. Passing streetlights swim by him and blur in his vision.

  “Easy there, Tonto!”

  The voice comes from somewhere nearby, and when Oswald cranes his neck around to see its source, he gets an eyeful of Gerbil inside the truck cab, behind the wheel, her eyes wild, her char-black dyed hair flying every which way as she leans out the open driver’s side window. Oswald yells back at her: “The fuck are you doing?”

  “The fuck you think I’m doing?!” she calls through the window with an exasperated tone that pierces the slipstream. “I’m taking you to the fucking hospital!”

  “Negative! Negative!” Oswald manages to sit up, then manages to scoot backward on his ass until he’s able to rest his tailbone against the rear wall of the cab, the wind tossing his hair, the blood stinging his eyes. He fights the dizziness and nausea and disorientation that are threatening to take him back down into the darkness. In his bleary vision he notices the passing storefronts of North State Street, all dark and gated up, the sidewalks deserted. “I’m fine!” he yells, loud enough to penetrate the wind.

  “You’re not fine, Ozzie!”

  “No hospitals!”

  “Jesus Christ, man, you got tagged in the head!”

  “I got grazed!”

  “Bullshit!”

  “No big deal!”

  Gerbil yanks the wheel, and the pickup keens around another street corner, the tires squealing. A homeless man pushing a shopping cart looks up at the passing ruckus like it’s an alien spacecraft, as Gerbil yells out her window: “You were out cold back there, Oz, bleeding like a stuck pig—!”

  “No doctors!”

  “You were, like, mumbling and giggling and slobbering on yourself like a fucking skel!”

  The S-10 hits a pothole, and Oswald bounces, the pain shooting through his skull with the force of a ballpeen hammer. He has to hold onto the bulwark to avoid bouncing out of the truck. His head is wrapped in a makeshift bandage that Gerbil fashioned out of a rag: a jury-rigged Indian headdress. “How long did I black out back there?” he calls out. “What time is it?”

  “It’s almost 2 o’clock!” replies the shrill voice through the open cab window.

  Oswald grips the side of the truck as they hit another bump. He thinks about it for a second, does the math: He was unconscious for nearly an hour. A bolt of electric pain zips down his side, probably from a broken rib. He cringes. “Doctors file reports, Gerbil!”

  She leans out and yells: “We’ll get in and get out!”

  “They gotta call in the Man! You know that as well as I do!”

  “You’re not gonna die on me, asshole!”

  “Gerbil, listen to me. I have to go home. Matilda’s the one dying. And I’ve been away from her too long.”

  The house on Mundt Avenue began its life as a typical Chicago shotgun-style bungalow in the post-war building boom of the late 1940s. Constructed from common yellow brick, the rooms set in a linear fashion, like an elaborate train car, the place originally was a tidy little home for families with flower boxes under the front window and a picket fence around the postage stamp-sized yard. Today, after decades of decline and the accumulated sediment of Oswald and Matilda’s life together, the place resembles something more like a second-hand bookstore run by a religious crack dealer. Paperbacks are stuffed into every shelf, every nook, every crevice—mass market pulp potboilers from the 1970s with private detectives and slinky ladies on the covers, lurid horror novels with demonic children etched in foil, softcore porn with titles such as Sex and Single Soldier or The Isle of Lesbos—each and every one dog-eared, scrutinized from cover to cover by both husband and wife. Much of the wall space is adorned with Matilda’s kitschy New Age iconography—glass bubble-encased monk dolls, little Buddha bobble-heads, dream catchers, and all manner of prayer cards received over the decades, archived in dusty displays and haphazard matrices. The rooms all need a good cleaning, and the furnishings are all in the style of early college dorm. But there’s also a civilized quality to the place, a certain coziness—in the way the coffeemaker has two cups next to it turned upside down on a towel, or the way the bedroom closet has two pairs of slippers on the threshold, or the way in which the bathroom is equipped with a little portable radio, ashtray, and bong next to the commode so a person can evacuate their bowels in tranquil, stoned peace.

  “Matilda, honey?” Oswald creeps into the bedroom where the woman lies like a rag doll in the high-tech gurney-bed. Her spindly bare feet poke tragically out of the bottom of the linens. Oswald feels as though there’s a fist ramming down his throat, and he swallows it. “You want me to get another dose of the happy juice?”

  He can’t tell if she’s even conscious. Her eyelids are as translucent and thin as moth wings. The hospice people gave Oswald lessons on how to administer the horse tranquilizer that is supposed to painlessly usher her off to the Great Beyond. But right now, her eyelids flutter feebly. She barely gets them half open when she manages to croak, “No drugs... not yet.”

  Oswald kneels by the bed as though taking communion. He puts his big head on her cold, brittle arm. He can smell cleanser masking decay like a sour corsage—the odor of dying—and he wells up. He staves off the tears as best he can. He has a feeling he needs to pay attention. “Just let me know, sweetie.” His voice sounds alien and small in his own ears. “The pain gets to be too much, we’ll go ahead and—”

  “No!” She grasps the hem of his collar and squeezes with her bloodless hands, pulls him toward her. “I got something to say, need my mind to be right... one last time.”

  “Okay, Matty, fine, I’m all ears. Go ahead. Lay it on me.”

  “Ozzie.” Her delicate eyelids open further, revealing lucid, grave, serious eyes staring back at him. “I know what you do for a living.”

  Oswald had expected this moment to come sooner or later—the old building contractor ruse can only have legs for so long before the wife starts to notice flecks of blood instead of Sakrete under the nails—but not like this. Not a person’s last words. Not in between waves of agony writ large and ugly across her once cherubic features. Oswald looks up at her and starts to formulate a response—the words sticking in the back of his throat—when he sees her shudder slightly, slamming her eyes shut and writhing for a moment. The wave crashes through her midsection and makes her twitch. Late-stage pancreatic cancer is like that—the pain comes in waves—tidal waves of agony. Her head lolls, and Oswald rises to his feet, heart thumping, road rash stinging, his blood seeping into his shoes. Matilda doesn’t notice how badly hurt he is, his bloody hair matted to the back of his skull. She’s got her own pain to deal with. Oswald considers going in the next room and grabbing the .38 Police Special nestled in a hatbox on the top shelf of the coat closet.

  He imagines himself loading the weapon just outside the bedroom door—three practiced moves as his tears drip onto the blue metal of the cylinder—snap, spin, click. He imagines walking back into the room, going to her bedside, grabbing a stray pillow, putting it over her head, pressing the muzzle into the pillow’s folds and... BANG! ?

  Her eyes open suddenly. She stares down at him, a desolate look, her body as still now as a sculpture. “Maybe I will go ahead and take those knock-out drops,” she decides.

  Oswald rises to his feet, goes over to the dresser, and gets the pre-loaded oral dispenser, which looks like a fat fountain pen.

  Hands shaking, he comes back to her, gently prods the tip between her lips, and dispenses about a hundred milligrams in liquid form. He begins to sob. He gives her another hundred, and another, a lethal amount. Her eyes tell him that she knows and she’s okay with it. His tears track down his face, tracing the contours of his chin and dripping down the front of his shirt. This is it. This is the end.

  Matilda is saying something to him. Oswald can’t hear a word. Her lips are moving, but he can’t hear a thing she’s saying. He leans down and sniffs back his sorrow and listens more closely.

  “How many?”

  It comes out of her on a breathy wheeze, but calmly, a woman at the threshold. Oswald looks down. “I don’t know if we have to—”

  “How many?!”

  Oswald thinks about it. “I guess about seven... no, eight... no, wait.” His stomach clenches. His head is bleeding. He can feel the delicate rivulet of blood on his temple. He reaches for his handkerchief and dabs the wound, and then dabs his moistening eyes. He is watching his wife die. He reaches out and strokes her arm. “Okay. So... there was this guy, died from a coronary before I had a chance to... okay, let’s say seven.” The fact is, Oswald has no idea how many he’s taken out. “Yeah... seven.”

  Matilda gazes at him with a strange, wistful expression, her eyes going glassy and unfocused. “Oswald... sweetie pie... you have lived a life of sin.”

  “Yep.” He looks down. “Yep.”

  She sinks deeper into the cushion of narcotics, her eyes rolling back in her skull. Her head lolls. Oswald looks up, his heart seizing with terror. Is she going out? Is this it? He touches her cheek. It feels as cold as an ice pack. Her head droops forward. Her breathing gets shallow, faint, like a dying sparrow. Her head lolls backward again and she murmurs. “You must atone.”

  Oswald looks at her. “Huh?” He studies her bloodless porcelain face. “What was that, honey?”

  She fixes her glazed stare on him. “You have to atone, sweetie. For your sins.”

  “Atone?”

  She lies back again. Her breath comes out of her on a low, plaintive moan. “Listen to me, Ozzie, because it might be the last thing I ever say.”

  Oswald stuffs back the urge to sob. He coughs. “I’m listening.”

  “I want to see you again someday, my love... somewhere down the line. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  He tries to respond but he has a lump the size of a Volkswagen in his throat. All he can do is make a low, moaning sound.

  “Someday, I want us to be reunited in heaven,” she reiterates. “I want this more than anything else.”

  He manages to croak, “So do I, darlin.’ And we will. I promise you we will.”

  “You promise?”

  “Yes... yes.”

  “There’s only one problem, Ozzie.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Your soul is lost. It’s lost.”

  “It is?”

  “It is... it’s lost... along with the souls of all the poor, wretched victims you’ve killed—they’re wandering in limbo.” Her eyes go vacant again for a moment. She gazes up at the ceiling, head swiveling aimlessly, a satellite dish hunting for a signal. Her voice changes as though possessed by some strange inner reserve. “There’s only one way you’ll ever get to paradise and see me again.”

  “Name it, Tilda. I’ll do anything.”

  “It’s the only way you can save yourself, and the souls you’ve ruined.”

  “Anything.”

  All at once, she looks at him and her expression hardens and her eyes fix themselves—as lucid and sober now as a biblical prophet—directly at Oswald. “You have to atone for the killings.”

  Oswald stares, a momentary pause as he processes. “Yes, absolutely. You bet. I will atone.”

  “I mean it, Ozzie. If you ever want to see me again, if you want to restore the balance... you have to atone for your sins.”

  Oswald is vexed. What is she talking about? She’s been quoting the Bible lately, sure, looking into the abyss, getting herself prepared. Getting right with the Lord. Who can blame her? But where is this going? He looks at her, wipes the tears from his eyes, and mutters, “Copy that, Tilda. I’m totally going to atone. Don’t you worry about—”

  “PLEASE DON’T PATRONIZE ME!—I’M DYING!” Her spindly body convulses and shudders, a stick figure tossed by invisible gusts. Her head lolls again, and she has to work in order to keep her gaze focused on her husband. Her voice crumbles. She mutters as though to herself. “‘The moon... the moon... she is earth’s dead child... doomed to perpetual return.’” She swallows dryly, agonizingly, her chapped lips making smacking noises. “From new moon to new moon, all mankind will come to bow down before me, sayeth the Lord.’ Isaiah... Chapter 66... Verse 23.”

  “It’s okay, darlin’... tell me. Give me my marching orders.”

  She looks at him with her last scintilla of strength. Then she speaks in a clear voice. “Save as many lives as you’ve taken.”

  He gapes. The silence grips the room. “Excuse me?”

  “By the next full moon, Ozzie.” She speaks calmly, her voice filled with certainty. “You have to save as many people as you’ve killed.”

  * * *

  The chills start on the backs of his legs, the gooseflesh spreading up his arms, rashing his scalp. The heat from his injuries—his abrasions and scrapes—starts to fade and turn icy cold. At first, he can’t understand what’s happening. It’s as if the fear has suddenly overridden the grief and the sorrow. But why now? What is it that he is suddenly afraid of? He has known this moment was coming for months. He has lived with his wife’s cancer for almost a year. The disease has become a countdown clock. So why now? Why the tidal wave of terror?

  He blinks, the revelation striking him with the force of a battering ram. He realizes right then that he never truly believed she was leaving him. It never even occurred to him that they would never see each other again. Oswald never thought of himself as much of a Christian, even though he was raised by so-called Christian parents, but he now realizes that he apparently absorbed the faith on a cellular level. He believed with every fiber of his being that he would meet his beloved Matilda in the afterlife.

  Now she has placed an untenable quest between him and that reunion.

  All at once, the realization brings back a vivid memory from the deepest recesses of Oswald’s mind—fully formed—something Matilda once told him. He remembers it was early in their marriage, a Saturday night, late, after they had tied one on down at Simon’s Pub. It was summer, and hot, and they had wandered home on foot, collapsing in their front yard on the cool grass, giggling like little children. Then Matilda had latched her gaze onto the full moon, which loomed above them like a yellow beacon, and she had gotten serious all of a sudden.