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keep track of.”
    “It’s a lot of work,” she said, “raising a human.”
    Evan flashed on a memory: Jack standing beside him at the firing range, hand on his boy-thin shoulder, assessing his shot grouping.
    “Yes,” he said. “It is.”
    The dishes were done. As Evan thanked Mia for dinner, Peter emerged and gave him a little fist bump on his way out. It left his knuckles sticky with fruit punch.
    Back upstairs, Evan stared at his dinner plate where he’d left it on the gunmetal gray counter. The ahi steak, uneaten, centered on the white plate. The subway tiles of the backsplash gleamed darkly, throwing off a multitude of reflections, his tiny form bathed in the soothing blue light of the cityscape.
    Scraping the fish into the garbage disposal, he noticed the knuckles of his right hand, tinged a faint red from the fruit punch.
    He circled the island and washed his hands.

 
    6
    Please Don’t
    Killing a cop was no small business.
    Evan sat in the dark of the cramped bedroom that Morena Aguilar shared with her eleven-year-old sister. The chair, dragged in from the kitchen, barely fit between the twin mattresses. In his loose fist, he held one end of a common household string that arced across the room to where it was tied to the lever handle of the closed door. Perfectly still, he waited.
    The drawn curtains glowed faintly from the streetlights beyond, and he heard distant voices from various yards. Even here in the locked room over the stench of the birdcage, he caught the faintest whiff of barbecue.
    The Victorinox watch fob clipped to his belt loop showed 9:37. He’d been in position for over an hour, and still twenty-three minutes remained until Detective William S. Chambers’s scheduled rape of Carmen Aguilar.
    “Please don’t!” the parrot squawked. “Carrot, please!”
    On Evan’s right knee rested Morena’s on-call cell phone, on his left his Wilson Combat 1911 with the suppressor twisted on. He’d painted a tiny arrow onto the steel of the suppressor so he could index it to the identical position every time. In addition to the magazine in the pistol, he carried three more in his cargo pockets. They were go-to-war ready, validated in the desert on a makeshift range. As Jack used to say, The loudest sound you’ll ever hear in action is a click.
    Generally Evan preferred Speer Gold Dot hollow points, but tonight he was loaded with 230-grain hardball. The heavier round traveled at 850 feet a second, just below the speed at which it would break the sound barrier. The suppressor would take care of the sound signal of the gun’s firing, but given the bustling neighborhood, Evan needed to ensure the bullet didn’t make noise on its own.
    The parrot shifted from claw to claw in the darkness, the cage clanking. The faded yellow sheets mussed on one of the mattresses were patterned with watermelon slices. The dinged-up trumpet case leaned in the corner by the door. A single red Converse shoe lay on its side in the closet, the toe worn through. Elmo looked out from a peeling sticker on the stained, empty fish tank, reminding Evan of Peter and his lively Band-Aids. Then Evan thought of the grown man en route to this room.
    “Please don’t!” the parrot squawked cheerily. “Please don’t!”
    Evan breathed. Never make it personal. Assume nothing. Never make it personal. Assume nothing.
    He felt the weight of the pistol resting on his thigh. The weapon, it was always there for him, tried and true, a constant. Steel and lead, they responded predictably. They were finite, unchanging, able to be mastered. He could count on them. People failed. He couldn’t rely on flesh and blood, sinew and bone.
    Too often it ended badly.
    *   *   *
    There is still dark at the windows of the dormer room when the alarm screeches, but Evan is already awake. Most of this first night in Jack’s house he has spent staring at the ceiling. He rises and regards the room. The rolling chair is perfectly centered at a desk,