I am protected by an arsenal of aliases and disguises.

MY UNLIKELY WITNESS  ACT I, BOOK 2

The last job Roland Keach contracted paid one million dollars and was fly with or without me sure as shine on chrome. That much money meant it was complicated with bad dirt stuck on it. Any fool would know that, I say now, shamed that I didn’t.

That same gray October, I got pulled into a domestic. Trapped might be a better word, because I don’t do “domestic.” The contracts I take are strictly business, and honorably illegal if I may be so assuming to declare. Domestic is a world I am not, nor ever was, equipped to navigate. Husbands, wives, kids, cousins, or, for that matter, anybody seated at the breakfast table—every last one of them trouble is all I’ve ever seen.

Sometimes domestic goes away on its own. Reconciled. Burned out. Or the cops haul one of ’em away. I should be so lucky. Come at me like a snowball down the mountain.

Stand aside and clear a path might be the best I can do.

I am not the witness.

                                                              —the unlikely saint

My Unlikely Witness is Jude Templeton’s version of what happened in My Unlikely Saint. It is no longer a mystery. It’s a crime.

“I wanted the story to continue.”

—Robert Cowan 1966-2018