Frankenstein

Carson said.
    Michael said, “I don’t see one, honey.”
    “Let’s not be hasty, sweetheart.”
    “At least there’s all that life insurance,” Michael said.
    “They won’t pay it, dear.”
    Chang said, “Don’t talk to each other. You talk to me.”
    “All right,” Carson said. “Chang, explain to Michael that the insurance company won’t pay off with you and me dead—and only him alive. It’s just too suspicious.”
    “Chang,” said Michael, “tell her that if you shoot her first and then I shoot you, the ballistic evidence will
require
the insurance company to pay off.”
    “Shut up, shut up!”
Chang commanded. “You’re making me very nervous.”
    “Chang, you’re not a calming influence yourself,” Carson said.
    Chang slid the muzzle of his pistol up from the nape of her neck to the back of her skull and dug it into her scalp. “With Beckmann dead, I have nothing to lose.”
    Because she was at the front of the death line, Carson had no one to whose skull she could hold the muzzle of
her
pistol.
    “We could make a deal,” Michael said.
    “You have a gun to my head!”
Chang complained bitterly.
    It seemed to Carson that the killer was so obsessed with the weapon pressed to
his
head that he had all but forgotten that, like Michael, she was armed.
    “Yes, I do,” said Michael, “I have a gun to your head, so I’ve got a negotiating advantage, but you’ve got some cards to play, too.”
    Carson’s right arm hung at her side. She turned her hand and directed her pistol toward the deck immediately behind her.
    “You have no reason to trust me, and I have no reason to trust you,” said Chang with what sounded like a perilous degree of despair.
    “You have every reason to trust us,” said Michael. “We’re nice people.”
    As Carson squeezed off a shot, she dropped toward her knees, intending to fling herself flat on the deck.
    Chang screamed in pain and fired a round the instant he was hit.
    Maybe Carson didn’t really feel the bullet sizzle across her scalp, but there was muzzle flash, the smell of burnt hair.
    She sprawled facedown, rolled on her back, sat up with the pistol in a two-hand grip, saw Chang flat and Michael on top of him with a knee in his back.
    “My foot, my foot,”
Chang screamed, and Carson said urgently, “Michael, is my hair on fire?” and Michael said, “No, his piece is on the deck,
find it!”
    Carson found the weapon—“Got it”—and Michael said he needed to vomit, which he had never done in his years as a cop, so Carson knelt beside Chang and put her pistol to his head, which she greatly enjoyed. Chang kept screaming about his wounded foot, and Michael leaned over the railing and spewed into the bay. In the distance a siren rose, and when Michael had purged his stomach, he announced that he had called 911 from the quay, and then he asked Carson if she needed to vomit, and she said she didn’t, but she was wrong, and she vomited on Chang.

    
chapter
10

    Mr. Lyss pointed a finger at Nummy. His fingers were long. They were more bone than flesh. The nails were the color of chicken fat.
    Squinting down his arm, along his finger, right into Nummy’s eyes, Mr. Lyss said, “You’re sitting on my bunk.”
    “I figured this must be my bunk.”
    “You figured wrong. You’ve got the top one.”
    “Sorry, sir,” Nummy said, and he got to his feet.
    They were eye to eye.
    Mr. Lyss’s eyes were like the gas flames on the kitchen cooktop. Not just blue, because lots of nice things were blue, but blue and hot and dangerous.
    “What’re you in here for?” Mr. Lyss asked.
    “For just a little time.”
    “Moron. I mean what’d you do to land here?”
    “Mrs. Trudy LaPierre—she hired a man to break in her place and steal the best she’s got.”
    “She hired her own damn burglar?” Mr. Lyss chewed his pale, peeling lips with his dead-charcoal teeth. “So it’s an insurance scam, huh?”
    “Insurance what?”
    “You’re not that dumb, boy, and the jury will know it. You knew why she hired you.”
    Mr. Lyss’s breath smelled like tomatoes when you forget to pick them because you don’t like tomatoes, and then they rot on the vine.
    Nummy moved away from Mr. Lyss and stood by the cell door. “No, she never done hired me. Who she hired is Mr. Bob Pine. She wanted Mr. Bob Pine to steal her best, then beat Poor Fred to death.”
    “Who’s Fred?”
    “Poor Fred. Grandmama always called him Poor Fred. He’s Mrs. Trudy