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middle of the night.”
    As if to punctuate the point, a fourth crack of fire ripped open the air.
    “ Fuck . Fine. Don’t tell anyone I let you in front. Let’s go check this out.”
    Walter slipped in and shut the door. No one who knew Walter would’ve been surprised to learn that he’d finally found his way into a cop car—the surprise would come in knowing that he’d sat up front.
    Officer Corey slammed his door, radioed in that he was heading up to Doris’s house to investigate suspicious gunfire, and then he floored the gas, expertly fishtailing out of Nigel’s driveway and propelling them up the hill.
    They tore up the hill for fifteen short seconds, and then Walter said, pointing ahead to the left, “That’s her driveway.”
    “Are you serious?” growled Officer Corey as he jammed the brakes. Obviously there had been no need for Walter’s accompaniment—a quick “drive and turn left” would’ve sufficed for directions.
    Walter shrugged. The adrenaline had started to fade while futzing around in Nigel’s house, and, as with all substance abusers, his normal state of being was not a happy or satisfactory one. He had seized this chance to reinvigorate the night with, honestly, some sense of entitlement: in an odd way, it had become his night when the mutilated man had rear-ended his van.
    Officer Corey’s car bounced and the tires spun as he powered them up Doris’s steep, twisting, dirt driveway. He had to navigate widening erosions along both sides of the driveway cut out by high, fast, frothy brown water.
    The cruiser came to a skidding, muddy halt next to Doris’s blue station wagon.
    Officer Corey disembarked with a gruff, “Stay here.”
    Walter waited until Officer Corey had started up the steps to the front porch, and then he clicked open his door.
    Officer Corey banged on the door, “Doris Hanes?”
    He opened the door.
    A voice neither he nor Walter recognized, a man’s voice, came from somewhere in the house, “Come on in. She’s here.” His words were misshapen by a faint lisp that was oddly childish and disarming.
    Officer Corey kept to the entrance’s threshold.
    “Sir, this is Officer Corey. I was nearby and I heard gunfire from the direction of this house.”
    “Yep, that was the lady who lives here,” agreed the voice of the unknown man. Walter, still seated, now placed the lisp: the man sounded like he’d just had braces put in; like he was speaking through excess saliva. “I don’t know what she’s doing. Shouldn’t take more than one shotgun blast to kill herself, should it?”
     “ What? ” Officer Corey put a finger to the strap holstering his gun and put a foot into the house. Walter jumped out of the car and started after him.
    “Oh! Oh ,” said the man, excitement turning to disappointment in quick succession. He was not far away; a room or two from the entrance. “ I know what. She was shooting the shotgun to get your attention. Too bad . . . too bad . . . too bad . . .”
    “Sir, you are not making sense,” Officer Corey, pulling out his gun, moved all the way inside. Walter, right behind, caught the screen door before it whipped shut.
    “That’s funny, because, tonight, everything makes sense.”
    Something about how the man emphasized the word “everything” gave Walter goose bumps. He had never heard the word spoken with such pure certainty.
    “ What makes sense?” asked Officer Corey. He was moving carefully over the wood floor of a darkened living room. He was so intent on the voice that he didn’t notice Walter, shadowing him only a couple steps behind.
    A room up ahead was lit, and the unknown voice seemed to come from that direction when he spoke again.
    “Mister Corey, some truths have to be experienced to be understood.”
    It was just after the man had finished saying this that Officer Corey came to the open doorway of the one lit room. He gasped—a slow, shuddering gasp—and fumbled and raised his gun.
    “What are you doing ?”