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—You best get cleaning.

He took the rope to the corpse and used it to tie the bag around its neck.

—And then go get our can, and call.

He tossed Talbot's cellphone onto the carpet.

—Just call the last number he called on there.

He took the corpse under its arms, pushed up with his legs, let it flop over his shoulder and stood.

—I'll take care of this bit here.

He walked to the door, easy under the weight of the dead.

He opened the door.

—Go get my can. I want them damn almonds. Alright?

I stared at Talbot's blood in my kitchen.

The cowboy tapped a heel on the floor.

—Said alright?

I looked away from the mess.

—Yeah. Alright.

He touched the brim of his hat.

—Good then. And, oh yeah, I got your boss's van. You can have that back too, when you bring the can. Case you need any other motivation.

And he went out the door, corpse on his shoulder, apparently prepared for any questions such a thing might raise.

That or just quick on the draw.

Almonds.

As I cleaned yet another crime scene, I thought about almonds.

Stripped to my underwear, a pair of sneakers, and rubber gloves I took down the white pillowcases I had hung over the kitchen windows to keep the morning sunlight from pouring in when I used to get up early and have my coffee before going off to teach kids how to read and write and add and subtract. And I thought about fucking nuts.

In all their guises.

Starting with myself.

Dropping the pillowcases into the bathtub after rinsing them out and dousing them in about a half gallon of bleach, I considered just how crazy I actually was. Not a question I'd been apt to embrace for the last year, but one that seemed appropriate to the moment.

I brought my desk lamp and a clip light from Chev's bedroom into the kitchen and plugged them in. The improved lighting gave me a better idea of what I was dealing with. Studying the remains of a man's face spattered about the area where I prepared my meals, or opened my to-go containers anyway, and finding that I didn't really have any emotional reaction to speak of, gave me a better idea of just how out of normal mental alignment I'd gotten.

I looked down at my nearly naked, blood-scrubbing self.

—Skewed.

I pulled a strip of paper towels off the roll I'd gotten from under the sink and started wiping the little card table under the window.

—Your mentality, Webster Fillmore Goodhue, has become seriously fucking skewed.

I cleaned, wondering if the fact that it had taken witnessing a man deliberately murdered in front of me to shake this realization loose was a bad thing, or a really really really bad thing. There seeming to be no other options available.

The table clean, I carried it to the edge of the linoleum kitchen and set it safely across the carpet border of the livingroom. Along that edge, I spotted a rim of dark wet spots on the dirty carpet. I soaked a hand towel in cold water and blotted the spots before they could set. I worked some dish soap into the carpet fibers and left it to be finished later.

The worst of the mess was puddled below the window. Talbot had, quite fortunately it seemed, looked down after the first blow, sending most of the blood that had poured from his ruptured nose to the floor, rather than hosing the walls with it. Of course the cowboy had swung the phone in an uppercut on the second blow. Not so good. That meant the ceiling had a nice spray pattern on it. But the last three blows were all placed squarely once Talbot was on the floor on his back.

I looked up.

—Ceiling first.

I got the stepladder from the hall closet and started spraying and wiping, moving from side to side as my body crossed the beams of the lights and cast shadows over the blood, trying to see clearly.

When the worst was done, when I'd scooped the partially congealed blood from the floor and scrubbed the walls and mopped and wiped and wiped some more, and taken four ruined sponges and the shredded remains of two paper towel rolls and three old Ts I'd had to use as rags, and the mop head, and stuffed it all in the cleaning bucket and carried