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having given way to nonsense.
    Behind the bed Lillian had gone silent; Jared hadn’t known if she was hiding or dying.
    Another shot flew harmlessly into the ceiling, showering him with plaster.
    Then Anna was gone.
    Without so much as a sidelong glance to see if her lover still lived, Lillian rushed from the room, her hysterical sobs fading almost instantly in the growing chatter from the parking lot.
    Jared had risen slowly and managed to get his pants back up before the first wave of rubberneckers arrived.   Then he lay back down, ignoring the drone of questions, exclamations, and suppositions.   Holding his left hand firmly over the leaking hole in his shoulder, he had waited for the paramedics.   Inside his pants, his dick throbbed like a rotting tooth.
    He waited for what seemed an unbelievable length of time, all the while thinking the same thought over and over again: crazy bitch shot me with my own gun .   By the time help finally arrived, his mantra had changed to: I fucking deserved it.
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    T hat afternoon, post surgery and still half stoned from the morphine, he lay in the hospital remembering the time he had played truth or dare with his cousin and her friends.   He was eight years old, and they in their early and pre-teens.   His cousin, Terry, was spending the summer with them at Normal Hills and had been stuck with baby-sitting duty that day.
    About halfway through the game he had singled out the oldest and best developed of the group, challenging her with the most embarrassing question he could think of.   The alternative dare was almost as embarrassing; she would have to remove her training bra and lift her shirt over her head for exactly five seconds—enough time for all of them to get a really good look at her tits.   The question, just as he had hoped, had been too much, and instead of ducking out of the game, as he had feared, she took the dare.
    Red-faced with embarrassment she unhooked the bra and hoisted her faded Doors T-shirt.   A few of the girls there, the ones who were jealous, Jared supposed, thought it was funny as hell.   Shannon, who had refused to play the game, did not.   To Jared it was serious business, and he tuned out the laughter as he studied the gentle curves and soft brown peaks of her breasts.
    He spent the rest of the game terrified they would pull some equally embarrassing trick on him, but they didn’t.   Even if they had, it would have been worth it.
    Even back then, before he had sprouted his first pubic hair, he had been fascinated with sex.
    Jared knew he was a bad person, and worse yet he was also a cop, which made him a bad cop.   He wasn’t the sort of cop who would entrap young hotties and give them a choice between sex and jail, but he had entertained the idea a few times with some amusement.
    A bad person, a bad cop, and a bad husband.
    When his superior arrived that afternoon to question him, the lies came easily enough, just as they always had when he needed to get himself out of trouble.   This time it wasn’t his own ass he was saving.
    Exactly what the hell happened back there, Cruse ?   Who did this to you ?   They were simple questions, simple and direct as the bull-faced man who asked them.   Jared’s answers were also simple, as the best lies often are.
    Don’t know , he said.   Just some bitch I met outside the liquor store .   When I pick up a hump I don’t bother checking identification .
    Who shot me ?   Fucked if I know .   A jealous bull dyke maybe .   Your guess is as good as mine .
    Maybe Sergeant Winter had seen right through that lie.   Cops spent a good deal of their time being lied to and jerked around by John Q. Public, and usually developed a good nose for bullshit.   Either way it didn’t matter.   Winter never investigated the incident, a drawn-out investigation would have embarrassed the entire department, and Jared was