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Burns," he said.
    I jumped, startled. His piggy eyes shone meanly, and I was afraid he'd pop me one.
    But there were other people in the hallway too, coming out of meetings or just hanging out. Surely Pop wouldn't do anything violent now. Too many witnesses.
    In fact, as I would learn later, there were exactly twelve witnesses, not including my family and Tony. And all twelve of them eventually wound up giving statements to the police about what they saw, which was:
    They saw Pop touching my arm. As far as they could tell, he was touching me gently.
    The three witnesses who were standing close to us heard Pop say, in a friendly voice:
    "Just wanted to say, Mr. Burns, no hard feelings. You're entitled to your opinion."
    And here's what all twelve witnesses saw and heard next:
    My face exploded with fury. I yanked my arm away from Pop and instantly shoved him backward so hard he reeled, all 220 pounds of him. Now I'm no Hulk Hogan, and ordinarily Pop would beat the stuffing out of me, but I caught him by surprise and threw him down like a wet towel. Then I stood over him and started yelling.
    And here's what the witnesses heard me yell:
    "You motherfucker, don't you dare do that again!"
    And then a lot of things happened at once. Pop tried to jump up, presumably so he could attack me, but suddenly my three Ninja Turtles leaped into the fray. Babe Ruth karate kicked Pop in one leg and Wayne Gretzky karate kicked him in the other, while Tony, more wise to the ways of the world, karate kicked him right in the balls.
    Pop howled with pain. Tony kicked him again, paying Pop back in spades for having beaten him up once. Andrea, shouting, got in the Ninja Turtles' faces and tried to push them away. But they had picked up my angry adrenaline and it was carrying them to superhuman, or should I say superturtle, heights. They darted around Andrea and jumped up and down on top of various parts of Pop's body, starting with his knuckles.
    I would have tried to stop them—well, maybe I would have—except that a lantern-jawed man in his thirties who turned out to be an off-duty police lieutenant pushed me up against a wall, away from the action. I started to explain to him the reason why I had exploded, and what had really happened between me and Pop—because eyes can deceive, and what the witnesses saw was not what really happened, as I'll explain to you in a moment—but the lieutenant wasn't listening. He was just repeating over and over, like a mantra, "Calm down, calm down, calm down." But it was kind of hard to calm down when the man had one hand grabbing the front of my T-shirt and another hand balled into a fist, ten inches from my nose.
    It got even harder to calm down when I heard a loud clattering noise and saw, out of the corner of my eye, a gun sliding along the floor. It must have come loose from Pop's holster when the kids were mauling him.
    The next thing I saw was Babe Ruth racing for the gun.
    Immediately I visualized the whole thing: my six-year-old son grabbing the gun, firing at Pop and the lieutenant too, and ending up on the cover of People .
    I ducked down so fast I left the lieutenant grabbing a fistful of air and dove for the gun, desperate to reach it before Babe Ruth did.
    My hand and his found the gun at exactly the same time. I grabbed the barrel and his hand tugged at the handle, with one finger way too close to the trigger for my comfort. "Let go!" I screamed.
    Thank God, he did.
    I held the weapon gingerly, by the barrel, with two fingers. Then I walked up to Pop, who was still down on the floor, protecting his battered body from the continued onslaughts of Tony and Gretzky.
    "Kids, stop it!" I shouted.
    They looked up at me. "But, Daddy, he's a bad guy," Gretzky complained.
    "Here, Mr. Doyle," I said, holding the gun out to him.
    "Don't give him the gun! He might shoot us!" Babe Ruth called out.
    Pop sat up and glowered at me, his relief mixed with hatred and shame. Finally he took the gun and put it away in