“We’re trying to get her for you” Rydell said. “We’re sorry it’s taking so long, but we have to go through channels.”

“God damn it” Turvey said wearily, “doesn’t nobody understand I’m on a mission from God?” He didn’t sound particularly angry, just tired and put out. Rydell could see the girlfriend through the open door of the apartment’s single bedroom. She was on her back, on the floor, and one of her legs looked broken. He couldn’t see her face. She wasn’t moving at all. Where were the kids?

“What is that thing you got there?” Rydell asked, indicating the object across Turvey’s lap.

“It’s a gun” Turvey said, “and it’s why I gotta talk to the president.”

“Never seen a gun like that” Rydell allowed. “What’s it shoot?”

“Grapefruit cans” Turvey said. “Fulla concrete.”

“No shit?”

“Watch” Turvey said, and brought the thing to his shoulder. It had a sort of breech, very intricately machined, a trigger-thing like part of a pair of vise-grip pliers, and a couple of flexible tubes. These latter ran down, Rydell saw, to a great big canister of gas, the kind you’d need a hand truck to move, which lay on the floor beside the couch.

There on his knees, on the girlfriend’s dusty polyester carpet, he’d watched that muzzle swing past. It was big enough to put your fist down. He watched as Turvey took aim, back through the open bedroom door, at the closet.

“Turvey” he heard himself say, “where’s the goddamn kids?”

Turvey moved the vise-grip handle and punched a hole the size of a fruit-juice can through the closet door. The kids were in there. They must’ve screamed, though Rydell couldn’t remember hearing it. Rydell’s lawyer later argued that he was not only deaf at this point, but in a state of sonically induced catalepsy. Turvey’s invention was only a few decibels short of what you got with a SWAT stun-grenade. But Rydell couldn’t remember. He couldn’t rememher shooting Kenneth Turvey in the head, either, or anything else at all until he woke up in the hospital. There was a woman there from Cops in Trouble, which had been Rydell’s father’s favorite show, but she said she couldn’t actually talk to him until she’d spoken with his agent. Rydell said he didn’t have one. She said she knew that, but one was going to call him.