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Again, Melton considered my words. This was one of those games of chess where the pieces were nameless pawns who would actually die if they were captured.

Melton seemed to be trying to read my mind. Maybe he succeeded.

“I could have Kenny shoot off one of your kneecaps and then trade your good one for the information you have.”

“You could try, but I know that you know neither one of you could afford to leave me alive after something like that.” I was a condemned prisoner speaking truth to power.

We were all concentrating by then, praying, regretting, hoping for a way out.

Melton’s small eyes got large. Rouche’s orbs formed into slits. I was wondering what my daughter was doing in New York. One of the last times we’d talked, she had said she was with a man-friend and that she didn’t have to tell me his name. I tried to think if it could have been some guy I’d met. When she was small, before my wife and I separated, Aja had a little five-year-old boyfriend named Leon. He was dark-skinned with a buzz cut on a very round head.

That was a beautiful memory. I smiled.

“So,” Melton said of the wonky position I represented. “I pay you and then you tell me where Arman and Dalia are? And maybe you help us get to them?”

This was where I wanted him to be, starting to work with me, getting himself and his gunsel friend to make their way toward the demolition of the witnesses. Hopefully, good police work would find proof against them before we had to go in that direction. But if not, I was pretty sure I could get Melton under police surveillance and then, sooner or later, he’d slip up.

And then, for some unknown reason, my tongue went dry.

“If that’s what you want,” I croaked, “then I’ll do it.”

That was when I knew that my plan had failed. I didn’t know what had gone wrong, not exactly. Maybe it was the way my voice went bad. Maybe I was overconfident and Melton was a bird-in-the-hand kinda guy. I didn’t know what it was, but something in the rapist’s eyes told me that I would be a dead man before long.

Malto turned his gaze to Rouche.

The killer smiled and then turned to me, stretching out the ball gag between his fists.

“Everybody talks,” he said. “All you got to do is take everything that means anything to ’em away. The only thing they want after that is for the pain to stop. That’s when they talk turkey.”

“But what if I lie?” I was trying to make it seem like I was holding a better hand, but all that came out of my mouth was a question born of desperation.

Rouche smelled it. He smiled and said, “That was a problem I used to run into. But all I do now is ask the question again and again. Do that long enough and the lie gets heavier, and the truth finally comes out.”

I looked the killer in his eyes, trying my best to come up with just the right words to make the chains fall away and to make our way down to the lowlands where we could work out a plan that would rot away the ground beneath my enemies’ feet. But there were no words. I had played my last card in the gamble.

That was when I learned something about myself, the answer to a question I had never asked: I was not afraid to die. I had seen what Rouche could do. I knew that I would feel the pain, probably cry out and curse. But I wouldn’t be afraid. I had played the game out to the end and come up short. Like that Inuit hunter a thousand years ago… I had tried.

The revelation showed on my face. I know this because it inspired a question in Rouche’s eyes. He made a sound like a snarl, like that grizzly when Inuk started to run.

Then there came the sound of a door opening.

“Hey, Ken,” the driver called Travis called out.

“What?”

“There’s a car comin’ up the hill. It’s slowin’ down.”

“Just one car?”

A momentary pause, then: “Yeah—just one.”

The gunman went through to the vestibule. When he was out of sight, Melton grabbed my lapel and held something that was hard, sharp, and cold against the side of my neck.

There came the sound of a scuffle, maybe a struggle at the door to the carport.

“Ken!” Malto shouted.

Two burly police, dressed more like soldiers clad in storm trooper–like uniforms, barreled through the door. They wore bulletproof clothing, helmets with yellow-tinted visors, and both—a man and a woman—bore rifles buttressed against their shoulders, aimed at Malto and me.