'You hit?' Susan said.
I put my arm around her.
'No,' I said.
'What's with the car alarm.'
'I banged into every car along the street,' Susan said.
'One was bound to have a motion alarm.'
'Smart,' I said.
'I have a Ph.D. from Harvard.'
'You didn't say stupid stuff when I told you to move,' I said.
'You'd be worried about me and Pearl,' Susan said.
'I'd have been in the way.'
Pearl weaseled her way in between us, and jumped up with her paws on my chest. I patted her head.
'They're dead?' Susan said. She didn't look at them.
'Yes.'
'Who were they?' Susan said.
'I don't know.'
In the distance, up Commonwealth Ave. from the Kenmore Square end, I could hear a siren above the racket of the car alarm.
There were lights on in many of the windows that had been dark.
'You should take Pearl and go back to my place, otherwise they'll want to talk with you too, and it'll take half the night, and Pearl won't like it.'
'No, you'll need a witness.'
'Good point,' I said.
'I'm glad you're not dead.'
'That's so sweet,' I said.
The first patrol car swung up over the curb at Dartmouth Street and drove down the middle of the mall toward us. The headlights lit the scene harshly and I could see the blood spreading out on the sidewalk around both the men I'd killed.
The patrol cops got out on each side of the squad car with guns drawn, hatless, keeping the open doors between me and them.
Pearl barked at them. Susan shushed her. I put my hands on top of my head.
'Gun's on my right hip,' I said.
'You want me to take it out, or you want to come get it.'
'Stay just like you are,' the cop on the passenger side said.
'And step away from the lady.'
I did as I was told and the cop came out from behind the door with his gun leveled.
'Walk over here, put your hands on the roof.'
I did as he told me. I backed away and spread my legs so that my weight rested on my hands and I couldn't move suddenly. The cop on the driver's side kept his gun on me over the roof, while his partner came and took my gun off my hip. He smelled it. Then he patted me down.
'Put your left hand behind your back,' he said.
I did and he put a cuff on it.
'Now the other hand.'
I had to straighten away from the car to do it. He finished cuffing me.
'You shoot them?' he said.
'Yes.'
'With that thing?'
'Yeah.'
When the cuffs were on his partner went to the two bodies and felt for pulses.
'They dead?' the first cop said.
'Yeah, both of them.'
His partner was young and muscular with his uniform shirt tailored and his hair cut very short. I could hear more sirens in the distance, coming from both ends of Commonwealth and at least one coming down Dartmouth.
