Mr. Murder

asshole!
        Now!"
        Marty realized he was still holding the 9mm pistol. The cops knew nothing more than what Paige had told them when she'd called 911, that a man had been shot, so of course they figured he was the perp. If he didn't do exactly what they demanded, and do it fast, they would shoot him and be justified in doing so.
        He let the gun fall out of his hand.
        It clattered on the pavement.
        They ordered him to kick it away from himself. He complied.
        As they rose from behind the open car doors, one of the cops shouted,
        "On the ground, facedown, hands behind your back!"
        He knew better than to try to make them understand that he was the victim rather than the perpetrator. They wanted obedience first, explanations later, and if their positions had been reversed he would have expected the same thing of them.
        He dropped to his hands and knees, then stretched full length on the street. Even through his shirt, the wet blacktop was so cold that it took his breath away.
        Vic and Kathy Delorio's house was directly across the street from where he was lying, and Marty hoped Charlotte and Emily had been kept away from the front windows. They shouldn't have to see their father flat on the ground, under the guns of policemen. They were already scared.
        He remembered their wide-eyed stares when he'd burst into the kitchen with the gun in his hand, and he didn't want them frightened further.
        The cold leached into his bones.
        The second siren suddenly grew much louder from one second to the next.
        He guessed the backup black-and-white had turned a corner to the south and was approaching from that end of the block.
        The piercing wail was as cold as a sharp icicle in the ear.
        With one side of his face to the pavement, blinking rain out of his eyes, he watched the cops approach. They kept their guns drawn.
        When they tramped through a shallow puddle, the splashes seemed huge from Marty's perspective.
        As they reached him, he said, "It's okay. I live here. This is my house." His speech, already raspy, was further distorted by the shivers that wracked him. He worried that he sounded drunk or demented.
        "This is my house."
        "Just stay down," one of them said sharply. "Keep your hands behind your back and stay down."
        The other one asked, "You have any ID?"
        Shuddering so badly that his teeth chattered, he said, "Yeah, sure, in my wallet."
        Taking no chances, they cuffed him before fishing his wallet out of his hip pocket. The steel bracelets were still warm from the heated air of the patrol car.
        He felt exactly as if he were a character in one of his own novels.
        It was decidedly not a good feeling.
        The second siren died. Car doors slammed. He heard the crackling static and tinny voices of police-band radios.
        "You have any photo ID in here?" asked the cop who had taken his wallet.
        Marty rolled his left eye, trying to see something of the man above knee-level. "Yeah, of course, in one of those plastic windows, a driver's license."
        In his novels, when innocent characters were suspected of crimes they hadn't committed, they were often worried and afraid.
        But Marty had never written about the humiliation of such an experience.
        Lying on the frigid blacktop, prone before the police officers,.he was mortified as never before in his life, even though he'd done nothing wrong. The situation itself-being in a position of utter submission while regarded with deep suspicion by figures of authority-seemed to trigger some innate guilt, a congenital sense of culpability identified, feelings of shame because he was going to be found out, even though he knew there was nothing for which he could be blamed.
        "How old is this picture on your license?" asked the cop with his wallet.
        "Uh, I don't know, two years, three."
        "Doesn't look much like you."
        "You know what DMV photos are like," Marty said, dismayed to hear more plea than anger in his voice.
        "Let him up, it's all right, he's my husband, he's Marty Stillwater,"
        Paige shouted, evidently hurrying toward them from the Delorios' house.
        Marty couldn't see her, but her voice gladdened him and restored a sense of reality to the nightmarish moment.
        He told himself that everything was