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While Albert Wicker is spending his first afternoon in the Wilder County jail, hardly aware of what he did—the last few days are a blur, that morning hardly there at all—Franklin Jalbert is sitting in his dining room in his bathrobe doing a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle.

When completed, it will show a collage of movie posters—classics like Casablanca, It’s a Wonderful Life, Jaws, two dozen in all.

Jalbert keeps track of how many pieces he’s put in.

After 10 pieces, he takes one step (in place, as if marching, so he can sit down again).

After 20, he takes two, one out from his chair and one back.

He’s up to 800 pieces, almost done, when his phone rings.

He looks at the screen and sees H.

Allard.

Hank Allard is a friend of his, a captain in the Kansas Highway Patrol.

Jalbert is torn between answering and doing the next set of steps, which would be one to eighty, inclusive.

He decides on the steps.

3,240—quite a lot! He starts at 80 and counts in reverse.

The steps take him outside to the small backyard of his ranchette and back again.

He sees that previous trips have made a path in the grass: a rut, in fact.

He’s aware that the step-counting thing—and running the chairs, that too—has gotten even more out of control since his failure to arrest Danny Coughlin.

Davis called it arithmomania.

While doing the steps associated with his jigsaw puzzle, Jalbert often thinks he’s like a hamster running on a wheel, going and going, shitting on the run and never getting anywhere.

But that’s all right.

What Davis couldn’t realize is that this minor craziness keeps him from the greater craziness of contemplating a future from which his job has been subtracted.

How many jigsaw puzzles can he do before facing the pointlessness of his life going forward and slides his service weapon deep into his mouth? Boom, gone.

God knows he wouldn’t be the first.

God knows he’s thought about it.

Is thinking.

He comes back to the steps when he’s down to five.

By the time he gets to zero, he’s in the kitchen.

Time for another 10 pieces and then he’ll count down from 81.

Possibly first by odd numbers, then doing the even ones.

After that it will be time for lunch, and a nap.

He loves his naps.

Such smooth oblivion!

His phone is beside the mostly completed jigsaw puzzle (he’s currently assembling The Ten Commandments, which he most definitely doesn’t consider a classic).

Hank Allard has left a voicemail, and he sounds excited.

“Call me, I’ve got news.

You’ll want to hear.”

Jalbert can’t imagine any news he wants to hear, but he returns the call.

Allard answers on the first ring and wastes no time.

“Your boy Coughlin has been shot.”

“What?” Jalbert stands up, giving the table a hard bump and sliding the nearly completed puzzle almost to the edge.

Several pieces patter to the floor.

Allard laughs.

“The Wicker girl’s brother shot the motherfucker.

You want to talk about justice? Whoomp, there it is.”

“Is he dead?”

“We can hope.

The first trooper to respond to the scene said there was a lot of blood and several bullet holes in the bastard’s truck.

They took him to Regional in an ambulance instead of treating him at that little excuse for a hospital in Manitou, so it was bad.

Maybe he died on the way.”

Jalbert shakes a fist at the ceiling, thinking closure, sweet closure.

“God did what I couldn’t.” His voice isn’t quite steady.

“I wouldn’t disagree,” Allard says.

“Keep me informed.

You know I’m out of the loop.”

“Which is one more fucked-up thing in a fucked-up world,” Allard says.

“You bet I will.”

That night Jalbert goes out to Bullwinkles and gets drunk for the first time in twenty years.

He does not count steps, which is a relief.

Counting steps and running chairs is hard work.

So many numbers to keep track of, so easy to lose count.

He supposes nobody would believe that, but it’s the truth.

If you lose count, you have to start over.

While Jalbert is drinking his second whiskey and soda, Allard calls again.

Jalbert has to shout because of the combined roar of the TV, the jukebox, and a bunch of unwinding KU summer students.

“Is he dead?”

“No! Serious condition! Shot in the stomach!”

Jalbert first feels disappointed, then happy.

Isn’t that better than life in prison, where Coughlin would get three meals a day, a TV in his cell, and time in the exercise yard? It hurts to get shot in the gut.

The pain is excruciating, so Jalbert has heard, and it’s the sort of wound that Coughlin might not—depending on the caliber of the slug—ever come back from.

“Maybe that’s good!” he shouts.

“I get where you’re coming from, buddy,” Allard says.

“And from the sound of it, I get where you are.

Have one for me.”

“I’ll have two,” Jalbert says, and laughs.

It’s the first real laugh to come out of him in a long time, and the hangover he wakes up with the next day feels entirely justified.

He takes a long walk without counting his steps, simply hoping—almost praying—that Coughlin will live, but get some sort of serious infection.

Possibly need to have his stomach removed.

Was it possible to live if that happened? Would you have to be fed through a tube? If so, wouldn’t that be an even greater punishment?

Jalbert thinks yes.

By noon his hangover is gone.

He eats a hearty lunch and doesn’t even think about going into the dining room to work on his Classic Movie Posters puzzle.

He is contemplating the idea of sending Coughlin flowers (with a card reading Don’t get well soon) when his phone rings.

It’s his ex-partner.

“Frank, I have some fantastic news.”

“I already know.

Our boy Coughlin took one in the belly.

He’s in the hosp—”

“They caught him!”

Jalbert shakes his head, not sure he’s following her.

“Do you mean Yvonne Wicker’s brother, or did you uncover some evidence about Coughlin? Did you? Is that it?” He could hope.

Gutshot and going to prison, how beautiful that would b—

“The man who killed her! They caught him in Iowa! His name is Andrew Iverson!”

Jalbert frowns.

His headache is creeping back.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Coughlin killed poor Miss—”

“Iverson was trying to take another one! She stabbed him and got away!” Davis pours out the whole story, saving the best for last: two of the charms from Yvonne Wicker’s bracelet in Iverson’s kill-bag.

“We hounded an innocent man for nothing,” she finishes.

“Because we couldn’t believe.”

Jalbert sits up straight.

His headache is worse than ever.

He will have to do something about it.

Take some aspirin.

Then run the chairs.

“We didn’t hound him, Ella.

We pursued him.

Given what we knew, we had every right.

Every duty.”

“Stop with the we stuff, Frank.” Now she just sounds weary.

“I didn’t give his name to that free newspaper and I didn’t plant dope in his truck.

You did those things on your own.

And I didn’t get him shot.”

“You’re not thinking clearly.”

“That’s you, not me.

I told him I went to Mass and prayed for him, and do you know what he said? ‘It helps if you believe.’ I’m going to keep that in mind going forward.”

“Then you better quit police work and get a job as a… a voodoo priestess or something.”

“Do you not feel the slightest shred of guilt, Frank?”

“No.

I’m going to hang up now, Ella.

Don’t call me again.”

He ends the call.

He runs the chairs.

He puts ten pieces in his jigsaw puzzle and then counts steps in his backyard: 81 down to 1.

A total of 3,321.

A good number, but his head still aches.