"And that's approximately where you were standing when you threw the chemical on him?" Galloway asks me.

"No. I was on the other side of the couch. Near the sliding glass door. He was chasing me and that's where I ended up," I explain.

"And after that you ran directly out of the house…?" Galloway scratches through something she is writing on her small memo pad.

"Through the dining room," I interrupt her. "Where my gun was, where I happened to have set it on the dining room table earlier in the evening. Not a good place to leave it, I admit." My mind meanders. I feel as if I have severe jet lag. "I hit the panic alarm and went out the front door. With the gun, the Glock. But I slipped on ice and fractured my elbow. I couldn't pull the slide back, not with just one hand."

She writes this down, too. My story is tired and the same. If I have to tell it one more time, I might become irrational, and no cop on this planet has ever seen me irrational.

"You never fired it?" She glances up at me and wets her lips.

"I couldn't cock it."

"You never tried to fire it?"

"I don't know what you mean by try. I couldn't cock it."

"But you tried to?"

"You need a translator or something?" Marino erupts. The ominous way he stares at M. I. Galloway reminds me of the red dot a laser sight marks on a person before a bullet follows. "The gun wasn't cocked and she didn't fire it, you got that?" he repeats slowly and rudely. "How many cartridges you have in the magazine?" He directs this to me. "Eighteen? It's a Glock Seventeen, takes eighteen in the mag, one in the chamber, right?"

"I don't know," I tell him. "Probably not eighteen, definitely not. It's hard to get that many rounds in it because the spring's stiff, the spring in the magazine."