I knew something was wrong as soon as we walked into the place. It was cool and dim after the dry-roasting glare of the street, with all the usual glass cases full of earrings and necklaces and bracelets and pins. The problem was the man behind the counter. A tall old man with a buzz cut and a perfectly trimmed beard, barking at us: “What he hell are you doing here?”

When I adjusted to the light I saw something else. He had her eyes – slightly too big for the face, spaced wide, the same pale green iris. That couldn’t be a coincidence.

“Get out of my store,” he said, getting himself under control now.

“Come on, Daddy. We just got here.”

I had known it instantly, but hearing it still chilled me, as if someone had turned the air conditioning up to meat locker.

“This is my place of business,” he started. “I refuse to have it -- ”

Susan pulled her gun, leapt up onto the counter and smashed the video surveillance camera with the butt. He must have thought she was coming for him. He cowered back as she approached, arms crossed over his face: not exactly a Norman Rockwell painting.

 She hit the camera again and again, until it was dangling on its cord from a hole in the ceiling, with bits of dry wall and plaster dust, broken glass and chips of plastic at her feet … all on  my orders, as she told the story later. She was crying on the witness stand when she recounted this part of her tale. We never even bothered to cross-examine. “I’ll just look like a bully,” my lawyer whispered, a grating murmur in my ear as his hand clamped over my upper arm, shackling me to the chair. “And no one will believe you, anyway.” He certainly didn’t. Check his book – Defending the Indefensible. It’s coming out next year some time.

I’m chapter thirteen.

She jumped down and backed toward me with the gun still aimed at her father. “Hit the switch,” She said to him. “Lock the door. We don’t want to be disturbed.”

“All right, all right.”

I heard a sharp, metallic click in the new silence.

“I thought you resolved your Daddy issues,” I said.

“I exaggerated. Cover him,”

 I pulled out my gun but I didn’t aim it at him.

“You robbed my house,” he said to her.

“So what?”

“And now you come here to finish the job.”

She smiled. “You always told me to finish what I started.”

“I should have changed the locks. And the alarm codes. Everything. The safe -- ”

“But you didn’t, because you knew I’d never be back. Because you banished me. Right, Dad?”

“You stole my guns.”

“Does that balance the ledgers for you?”

“You violated my home. You violated me.”

“I violated you. Really? That’s how you see it. I violated you. That is exactly how fucking clueless you are. But it’s okay, Daddy. That’s why we’re here.”

“What are you talking about?” the old man said.

“Don’t be so grumpy. I just want my new boyfriend to meet my parents. Like when you were a kid. Except Mom committed suicide and I’m not allowed to go home. So I guess it has to be here.” She turned to me. “He inherited this place from his brother -- the one who didn’t change his name. The one who wasn’t ashamed of his own family. Right Dad?”

 “What are you talking about? You never knew Isaac! You never even met him! How dare you -- ”

“He sent me a letter, written by his daughter. That’s what I got in the will, remember? An envelope with my name on it? You probably thought it was a savings bond or something. I guess it was in a way. Since money is power with you, and I felt powerful for the first time in my life, when I finally got to read it.”

He seemed to sag a little. “Why did you never tell me this before?”

“I never had a gun pointed at you before, Daddy. And I didn’t get the suicide gene. So anyway, here we are, all nice and cozy. So we can all get to know each other. You start.”

I stepped forward. “Susan -- ”

“No, David you should hear this. You need to know all the interesting facts about your new family.”

“New family?” The old man was on the attack again, palms pressed to the mahogany edging of the display case. “You’re going to marry this man? Are you insane? He’s old enough to be -- ”

She pulled the trigger. The shot reverberated, as loud as if one of the free standing jewelry cases had fallen over. The glass frontage behind him shattered into a hail of shards The old man staggered back a step and caught himself.

Susan was shouting “Do not finish that sentence, you fucking pathetic piece of shit! Or I will put the next one into you.”

 “Now you’ve done it, you little fool,” he screamed back, into the echoing disordered air and the sharp stink of gunpowder. “Someone will call the police!”

“Good.”

“I’ll push the alarm myself if you don’t leave!”

“Do it.”

“I just did,” he crowed. “We installed silent six months ago! With a direct line to the police. They’ll be here in two minutes!”

“But they won’t come in. Because David is holding us hostage. Aren’t you, David?”

I realized at that moment, it didn’t matter what I said, it only mattered how it looked. She was Patty Hearst. I was the Symbionese Liberation Army. She’d made sure of that at the Mevlana Boutique. There was no way out. The door was locked. But I’d been trapped long before the old man set the dead-bolt.

“There’s not going to be any Mexico, is there?” I asked. It wasn’t really a question.

She gave me a rueful little lift of her hands. The gun rolled sideways. “Sorry, David. This is my Mexico.”

I could hear the sirens now, distant, but getting closer. They had haunted me for weeks, always meant for someone else, Dopplering away toward some stranger’s inconsequential doom, but now they were finally coming for me. It was almost a relief: the waiting was over.

“Let’s start with Uncle Isaac, Dad. Tell David about my cousin Deena. How old was she when you caught her coming out of the shower?”

He glowered at her. “What are you talking about? How dare you -- ”

“Okay, I’ll get things started.” She turned to me, but the gun was still pointed at him. He was dangerous, I could feel him tensed for an opportunity to attack. I bet he could move fast and he probably had a gun somewhere himself. This was quite a gene pool.

“Well, David, my cousin Deena developed young. At twelve she looked like a grown woman, I guess that was Daddy’s excuse.”

The old man’s voice was hoarse. “This is madness! How can you -- ”

“You tell the story or I will, Dad. But don’t interrupt. She was staying with us while Isaac and Nell were touring Europe. Mom didn’t want another kid in the house for a month – maybe some part of her knew something was up. The way Dad snatched little glances up her skirt and down her shirt at family gatherings. I don’t know. But Dad did whatever Isaac told him in those days – sucking up to get the store. Anyway that first night, he tied her wrists to the bed post while she was sleeping  and pulled her pajama bottoms down like a frat boy in a panty-raid. He grabbed her and … what’s the delicate term for it? Oh yeah. He finger fucked her, right in the guest bedroom.. Mom was out for the evening at her reading group. She always came home late from those sessions. They were reading The Color Purple that month. That’s the best part.”

The old man addressed me now, his voice a rough whisper. “Don’t believe her. These are the ravings of an unstable -- ”

“This is directly from her letter, Dad.”

“She was psychotic! The girl killed herself.”

“And let’s try to think why. Everywhere you go, people commit suicide. Do you think that’s a coincidence? In her case, I think it probably had more to do with having to suck an old man’s cock every night for months. The smell and taste of it just permeate everything, like cigarette smoke stink in your clothes. You can’t wash it out. Finally you just have to throw the shit away.”

She glanced over at me. I knew exactly what she meant.

“Young man -- ”

“Shut up.” Her voice stabbed like an awl. He shut up. The sirens had reached a crescendo and stopped. I could visualize the street outside: a dozen cop cars, the growing crowd of on-lookers, the press vans starting to crowd the perimeter. “Isaac was coming over to shoot you when he shot himself with his own gun. Deena had just told him everything. He shouldn’t have gotten drunk first. Pausing to change the will might have been more prudent.”

The phone rang.

“It’s the cops,” she said to me. “Stall them.”

I stared at her.

“David you have to do this. Please.”

The phone kept ringing, and old fashioned land-line in a store that looked like it hadn’t changed much since the 1970s. We all knew they’d let it ring forever.

I picked it up.

“David Hamlin?”

How did they know it was me? How was that possible? Had they traced us to the motel? Found the stolen car? Or maybe they’d just figured out that Joseph Bishop was Susan’s father, and put the pieces together. That was their job. They were supposed to be smarter than me.

“Who is this?”

“My name is Carl Pozniak, David I’m with the Beverly Hills Police Department. I have two FBI Special agents and a SWAT team here. But they’ve agreed to let me talk to you first. You don’t have to make this any worse than it already is. If you come quietly now that will influence the judge. He would definitely take that into consideration.”

“He or she.”

“Yes, of course. He or she. They would respect your choice. What you do here this morning matters. You have your fate in your own hands.”

I almost laughed out loud at that one.

“Stay out. Give me your number.”

“310-546-9810”

“Good. I’ll call you when I’m ready to negotiate. If you try to break in before then, I’ll kill them both.”

“All right David, but I need a time frame on this so we can begin to at least – ”

 I hung up on him.

“Good enough?”

Susan nodded. “Perfect. Thank you. That was great.”

We were suspended then, between  action and history, sham and revelation, ferocity and grief.

Life and death? Oh, yeah -- that too, I felt it. The police couldn’t help. They were in a different world, the street world they had silenced somehow. I couldn’t hear anything but the faint growl of the air conditioning, but the smells were strong: old wood and furniture polish, sweat and cigarettes – clothes the old man should have thrown away long ago; and the bitter tang of cordite.

“Well, we’re not really here to talk about Isaac and Deena, are we, Dad?” Susan said at last.

“Susan, this is wrong. Stop now, before you -- ”

“Before what, Daddy? Before what?  Before David hears the truth? Be glad it’s just him. I could have written one of those tell-all memoirs. Or just written a letter, like Deena. But we’re private people. ‘We don’t air our dirty linen in public’. That’s one of his favorite phrases, David. Dirty linen! Who knew it meant soaking through my panties because he liked the sight of menstrual blood? Who knew it meant losing control of my bowels when I realized that five of his friends were going to strip me naked and rape me?”

            “That never happened! These are the ravings of a diseased mind. You must not under any circumstances believe what she --”

            “They tied me to the bed spread-eagled that night. My wrists and ankles were chafed  for weeks afterward. I remember he’d touch my wrist with a little smile at dinner sometimes, just to remind me. The smile was the worst thing. Worse than the rape. The smile said he could do it any time he wanted. Mom never asked why I was so sore. She didn’t want to know the answer. I ran away but they brought me back. I was fourteen years old and I had no money. A friend took me in once but their parents busted me. Oh, he was angry then. He thought I’d told them something. But I was too scared. Anyway, that’s when the blow jobs started. He knew that was the worst thing for me, the thing that scared me the most, the thing I couldn’t … endure. The worst thing. Unzipping him, smelling him -- ”

            “STOP IT!”

            “Make me stop it!” She threw the gun away. It clattered over the marble floor. She walked around the counter to face him. “I’m unarmed now. I’m helpless. Hit me like you used to, right in the stomach so no one could see. Then we can do the dog and pony show for David. One last deep throat blow job for old times’ sake.”

            “I said stop it!”

            “The best part is the sounds he makes, David.”

            “Shut up! I’ll kill you, you little bitch, you filthy little--”

            “It starts with the grunting. Then when he grabs the back of my head and pushes you get the long moan and then the whimpers. Mom never heard those whimpers I bet. Come on Dad, let’s go. I bet you’re hard already. Don’t come in you pants, Dad, that would spoil everything. That, or not being able to get it up at all. Those were my good days. Christmas in July, when you were too limp to mouth fuck your own daughter.”

            The old man let out a subhuman bellow, something between a screech and a roar and a sob and he flung himself at her, hands outstretched, fingers wide, going for her throat. It was bestial, inhuman, an alligator lurching out of the mud. She didn’t try to defend herself. She just stood there as he lunged, as if she wanted him to strangle her, as if she’d been waiting for it all her life.

I pulled the trigger. I shot him just like I shot that Mexican clerk, the same lizard-brain reflex, the same gut-sprung impulse to protect her. Maybe that day in the convenience store had given her the idea – the final piece of the patricide puzzle. I’ll never know.

It was one of the many questions Oprah didn’t ask.

My shot took Susan’s father in the shoulder and spun him around. I shot him four more times in the chest, slamming back against the shattered display case. I kept pulling the trigger until the gun was empty. I was deaf from the noise, I felt like I’d dislocated my elbow and my shoulder, but I just wanted to keep on killing him. I threw the gun at him, but I missed.

            Sometime during that seizure Susan hit the switch, unlocked the door, tumbled past me and flung herself out into the street. The door blew off its hinges a few seconds later. The SWAT team cascaded into the room and jacked me onto the floor. I broke my jaw on the marble, but I didn’t even realize it until they were booking me.

            All I knew was Susan was gone, and her father was dead and I was the child raping ex-con killer who murdered him.

So that’s it.

They booked me in Beverly Hills, but I wound up in Corcoran again: old home week. I was kind of a star this time. Murderers get respect up here. You never run out of cigarettes when you’re doing time for murder. They decided on the Pelican Bay transfer when the third circuit court refused to hear my appeal, and I’ve been waiting here since then: three squares a day, a typewriter and all the shitty onion skin paper I can use.

You may have a few unanswered questions. Did Monica come to the trial? No.

Did she visit me in prison? Nope. Did I ever see my daughter again? No, not even a photograph. No one showed up, not even my crazy sister Kelly. And I don’t think they mounted a plaque in my honor on the wall at the Dunham school. You might want to check that one out for yourself.

            And how about my old friends at Corcoran, the Black Guerillas? I saw Rodell yesterday and told him my proposition. He gets to close the book on Tyrese and I get out of this place on my own terms.

            “Everybody happy,” he said.

            I nodded. “Just make it quick.”

The shrink asked me what I thought about everything that happened and I didn’t know what to tell him. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since then, maybe too much. Sometimes I think it was all worthwhile – Susan finally faced down her demons, let me do the dirty work and wound up with a shiny new life. I realized lying on that marble floor that she goaded her father into jumping her for just one reason --  she knew I’d never kill him in cold blood. Hey, she knew what she was doing. Her story in the magazines makes me out to be the Hannibal Lecter of the PTA, but so what? My life is finished anyway and hers is just beginning.  It’s the perfect American model of an old-fashioned Greek drama: a tragedy with a happy ending. I did kill a man but he was a bad man and he deserved to die. I can rest easy with that.

But there are  times, usually late at night, after working on this book, or when the prison food gives me indigestion, or some strange dream wrecks my sleep and I realize it’s just a replay, just a memory of what really happened, and I wonder – what if it was all a lie? All that crap about the sexual abuse and the gang rape and Susan’s childhood traumas? What if she was just telling me the story I wanted to hear, the way the world at large wants to hear that I’m the predatory stalker?  What if her little Freudian autobiography was the convenient explanation for something else, something so unfathomable and vile that you just turn away from it by instinct:  authentic evil? 

Jeffrey Dahmer’s parents were perfectly nice people. The Dad wrote a mea culpa book after Dahmer died. It was the saddest thing I ever read. The old man never figured it out – Jeffrey was a freak of nature. Some people are born without arms and legs. He was born without a conscience.

Maybe Susan was the same way. Her father denied everything that morning. Maybe what he said was true, maybe he never did anything to her. Maybe I killed an innocent man, shot him dead in his own store just to maintain my sex-addled delusions about his crazy daughter. Maybe she was an infinitely worse monster than I ever suspected and I’m going to die so she can walk around free and hurt more people and do more damage and poison the world with a force so toxic no one but a Jesuit priest could even recognize it.

I hope that’s not true.

I choose to believe that’s not true. I have enough to worry about right now. I don’t have more than a day or two left to live, but I’d like to spend them with some peace of mind.

I know I’m going to hell.

I just want to put it off for as long as possible.