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choir would still be singing 'Walk with Me, Jesus.' "
    Nick felt a pang of jealousy. No one had ever called while he was being flayed alive on a radio talk show to say, If I hadn't smoked five packs of cigarettes every day for forty years, I'd be dead by now.
    Bobby Jay, eyes bulging, went on. "Gordon was in seventh heaven. He kept her on the line for must have been fifteen minutes. She went on and on about how what a tragedy it was she didn't have her little S & W .38 airweight with her in that pew, how the whole misery could have been avoided. She was this far away from him! She couldn't have missed him! A clean head shot." Bobby held out his arm in combat shooting stance and aimed at a person at the next table. "Bam!"
    "You're scaring the other patrons." "So what did you do?" Nick asked.
    "What did I do?" Bobby Jay bubbled. "What did I do? I'll tell you what I did. I put the pedal to the metal and went straight to National Airport and got on the next plane to Carburetor City. There is no 'next plane to Carburetor City.' You got to go through Dallas. But I was in that little lady's living room before six o'clock that afternoon."
    " 'Littl e lady's'?" Polly said. "You're such a trog."
    "Five-foot-four," Bobby Jay shot back. "In heels. And every inch a lady. A simple descriptive sentence, so may I continue, Ms. Sty-nem? I had our camera crew there by noon the next day. It is as we speak being edited into the sweetest little old video you ever saw." He spread his hands apart like a director framing the scene. "We open with . . . 'Carburetor City, Texas. A mentally unbalanced federal bureaucrat—' "
    "Nice," Nick said.
    "Gets better: '. . . attacks a church minister and choir . . .' Footage of ambulances, people on stretchers, people gnashing their teeth and rending their hair—"
    "How," Polly said, "do people rend their hair?"
    "Everywhere a scene of carnage," Bobby Jay continued, "a scene of devastation. Red chaos!"
    "Red chaos?" Polly said.
    "Shut up, Polly," Nick said.
    "Voice-over. And guess whose?" Bobby Jay asked coyly. "Charlton Heston?"
    "No sir," Bobby said, all tickly and beaming. "Guess again."
    "David Duke," Polly said.
    "Jack Taggardy," Bobby Jay said triumpha ntly .
    "Nice," Nick said.
    "Didn't he have his hips replaced? I read that in People."
    "What do his hips have to do with anything?" Bobby Jay said.
    "Is he in a walker, or what?"
    "No he's not in a any damn walker!"
    "Go on," Nick said.
    Bobby reframed the scene. "So Taggardy's voice-over: 'Could this awful human tragedy have been avoided?' " "Question," Nick said. "Why 'human'?" "Why not 'human'? They're humans." "I would have thought, 'inhuman tragedy'?" "He's got a point," Polly said.
    "Look, we can edit. Do you want to hear this?" "Yes," Nick said, "very much."
    "Now we cut to my little lady. She's sitting in a chair, all prim and pretty. Darling girl. I had her hairdresser come over. She wanted to do her makeup but I wouldn't hear of it. I wanted her eyes red from crying. We dabbed a little onion under the eyelids, nothing wrong with that, just to get her in the mood, get those ducts opened up."
    "Onion?"
    "Didn't even need it. Soon as she saw those color police photos i was holding up for her off camera she started bawlin' like a baby. She's going on about how awful it was, and then she gets to the part about how she had to leave her pistol in the glove compartment. Then she looks right into the camera, right in your face, and dabs the corner of her eye—and that was not in the script—and says, 'Why won't our elected lawmakers just let us protect ourselves? Is that too much to ask?' Fade to black. Then Taggardy's voice comes back on and there's no mistaking that voice, like bourbon over sandpaper: 'The Second Amendment says the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Does your elected lawmaker support the Bill of Rights? Or are they selling you a Bill of Goods?' " Bobby Jay leaned back in his chair. "What do you