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“That’s so weak? The pigs were waiting in ambush. Fuck them. They brought it on themselves.”

Slammer’s sitting on a kitchen chair, knees splayed, flicking bits of dough on the floor.

“Stop that!” I snap.

I am not going to make it if I have to chop zucchini and babysit a couple of spoiled, ignorant, hormone-deranged teenagers for the next six months, waiting for something that might not ever happen.

Angelo Gomez warned about this very moment: “You’re driving yourself deeper,” he said of one of his own undercover assignments that lasted thirteen months. “Losing your identity and becoming part of the criminal element. I looked bad, smelled bad. I had a big beard all filled with food and crap. I lived a lie. I was a lie. I wore this big gold cross, and that’s what saved me. I’d lean against the bar so the cross would press against my chest, and something inside would keep me going.”

“Look,” says Sara. “The pig’s still there.”

The lineman’s truck has moved down the road, but he is still up in the cherry picker, a splotch of blue overalls below the branches of a pine tree, face hidden in the green. He seems disembodied—a faceless man in a generic uniform, the top of his body gone.

The smell of burned brake lining seems to rise from the pots on the stove. I cannot look again, because I know it will be the face of the police detective that I shot, suspended between heaven and hell. Like a clumsy drumroll, my heart skips a beat and hits race pace in three seconds. The ghost outside the window, ordinary as a telephone repairman, splits my mind.

Who owns me?

“The cross would press against my chest,” Angelo said. “And I’d remember, There’s something else in life besides what I’m doing.”

A crimson trail is crawling down the sink.

I’ve sliced my finger and it won’t stop bleeding.

Dick Stone lumbers into the kitchen, boots unlaced after the morning’s work.

“I found this.”

He shows us Darcy DeGuzman’s cell. He’s gone through my stuff.

“Thanks.” I reach for it.

He swallows the phone in one big hand. “No personal cell phones allowed.”

“Nobody told me.”

Slammer and Sara have become alert. Suddenly, the boy is busy helping form the whole-wheat loaves.

“No wallets.” Stone is holding the one he has confiscated from my pack. “No watches, either.”

I remove my watch and smile feebly. “My time is your time.”

He drops my things into the bib of his overalls. Tension crawls into the kitchen and hisses.

Dick Stone waits, eyeing us.

Megan is downstairs, unable to intervene.

He raises an arm and presents a neon orange daypack.

“Who wants to test this out?”

“Me!” Slammer shouts.

The bandit considers. “I want Darcy to do it,” he says, and you can see the hurt cross Slammer’s face.

“Okay with me if Slammer really wants to.” I am pressing a paper towel around the finger cut.

Stone, quietly: “I said Darcy.”

Under a tree away from the house, Stone orders Slammer to help me put the backpack on. It weighs maybe fifteen pounds.

“What does it do?”

“Blows shit up,” Slammer replies. “You pull that cord.”

“I don’t think so.”

I try to wriggle out, but he’s latched the buckles.

“No big deal. Just a little pop and red stuff sprays all over the place.”

“Another blood bomb? Like the one at the school?”

“New prototype,” Stone says briskly. “Ten times more powerful. For the Big One.”

He adjusts something sticking out of the pack.

“What’s the Big One? Hey, what are you doing?”

He has flipped open my cell phone and is scrolling through the numbers.

“Where is area code five six one?” he calls, backing away.

“West Palm Beach, Florida.”

“Nervous, Darcy?”

“Not at all. Are you?”

“My heart is going pitty-pat.” He reads a number. “Whose is this?”

“My dad’s.”

“Pull the cord!” Slammer yells.

Sara’s beside him, arms crossed over her chest.

“Should I hit redial and find out?” Dick Stone asks. “You tell me.”

Is this another head game? He was undercover. Does he know how the phony phone numbers work? Did the FBI use the same technique in the seventies?

“Go ahead