ECKER CATAPULTED HEADLONG into Leopold, finally delivering the hit on the field during the kickoff denied to him for two decades. It felt good.

Leopold fell sideways with the brutal impact. Decker was sure the man had never been hit that hard in his life. Those who only watched pro football from the safety of their stadium seats or big-screen TVs could never imagine the devastating power of enormous men running at speed into other enormous men. It was like being in a car accident over and over. It didn’t merely hurt; it stunned. It shocked the body in so many different ways that one could never be the same afterward. It pushed bone, muscle, ligaments, and brains to places they were never intended to go. It was no wonder that so many men who had played the game were now suffering the long-term debilitating effects of entertaining millions and making large sums of money for doing so.

Decker landed directly on top of Leopold, his full weight coming to rest on the much smaller man who was half his weight. A few seconds later Decker smelled the stench. He had hit Leopold so hard that the man’s bowels had involuntarily released.

Leopold kicked at him. Then he tried to raise the gun to fire at him, but Decker, just as he had with Bogart, brought his weight down on top of the man and felt all the air leave him. His wide, heavy shoulder jammed down on Leopold’s right arm, forcing it to remain straight out.

Leopold was trying with all his might to turn the gun back toward Decker so that he could fire, but the angle was impossible. With the barrel pointed that way, his finger couldn’t reach the trigger. The weapon was useless. Which meant that it was man versus man here. And with the difference in size, there would only be one possible outcome.

Leopold seemed to understand this, because he smashed his knee against Decker’s wound. Decker screamed in agony. But he closed his eyes and gritted his teeth and, little by little, managed to straighten his legs out from the sitting position he had been forced into by the chair and duct tape. He felt the tape lengthening, though it did not break. But inch-by-inch Decker pushed and stretched and pushed some more until he was finally flattened out and his three-hundred-and-fifty-plus pounds were lying directly on the much smaller man.

Leopold’s breathing was ragged now. His body lurched up, trying to throw Decker off. But it was like an elephanton his chest.

And then Decker started to do something he never would have with Bogart, because he had never intended to end the life of the FBI agent. He very much intended to end the life of this man. Without the duct tape holding him back, he would already have killed Leopold. But he still would, he just needed to be patient.

So he began to inch his right shoulder in a new direction, a small measure at a time, while his other shoulder and upper arm remained jammed down on the limb holding the gun, keeping his opponent, in effect, weaponless.

The Smith and Wesson was not going to kill again.

Leopold kept kicking and pushing and bucking but the space for him to operate was now severely limited and growing ever smaller. Decker kept his eyes closed but the tears were running down his face with the pain. The bile rose to his throat and he threw up on Leopold.

The smaller man gagged and spit and cursed and heaved. He knew time was running out, and he was not going to go quietly.

Decker was in terrible pain; the wound was bleeding freely again. He felt his strength start to be sapped by the blood loss. But he didn’t really need strength. He just needed his bulk concentrated on one spot in particular. So he kept working at it and his shoulder finally fell into the crevice that he had been striving so mightily for.

Under Leopold’s chin and directly against the man’s throat.

And then Decker let his weight bear down directly on this spot. His bare feet touched the concrete, gaining traction and leverage, and he thrust his pelvis forward and with it his huge shoulder, ramming it against the man’s windpipe and compressing Leopold’s chest so his lungs could not inflate. His big belly was sucking in and out through the opening of the jumpsuit with the effort of it all. Sweat dripped off him though the room was cold. He was not going to stop until this was done. His heart was hammering out of control. He felt dizzy and sick. His head felt ready to burst. But he didn’t think about any of that. His one focused thought was to kill this man.

Decker let his bulk collapse, making himself as much dead weight as possible. He wished he weighed a ton. He kept driving and driving like he was slamming into a blocking sled over and over. He never had the talent of others on the gridiron, but his motor had never stopped. And no one, from the superstars down to the journeymen, ever worked harder than he did.

So this was his moment. This was his one play to end all plays.

He heard gasping, which wasn’t enough.

He kept compressing. He was a gunner’s knot. He was the constrictor. He was never going to stop until this was over. Never.

He heard gurgling, which still wasn’t enough.

He pushed down harder. He was a whale on a minnow. It had never felt so damn good to be obese. He wanted to swallow this piece of shit whole. He wanted to make him disappear from the earth.

He heard a long, low exhalation, which would never be enough.

He rammed his body down with all his strength. In his mind his DVR whirled. Every victim, every face raced through his mind while he was slowly killing their killer.

Then his DVR slowed and two faces held steady. Cassie and Molly. That was all he could see in that enormous cavern his mind had become. It was the whole damn universe in there; it could hold so much and was ever-expanding. Yet still, right now, it held only their two faces. That was all. And it seemed more than fitting. More than right.

He smashed down one more time as he mumbled, “I love you, Cassie. I love you, Molly. I love you both so much.”

Then he heard nothing. Nothing at all.

The lungs had not inflated because they no longer could.

And Leopold’s body finally went limp and the gun fell to the concrete.

That was enough.

He lifted his head and stared down at the man.

There were few things in life that were certain.

There were many things in death that were.

He was staring at three of them.

Eyes wide open.

Pupils fixed.

Mouth involuntarily sagging.

Dead.

In Decker’s mind the images of his wife and daughter slowly faded, like a movie ending.

And I miss you both so much. I will miss you forever.

He rolled off Leopold and then lay there panting for a few minutes. He had never felt so tired in all his life. His gut was clenching, his legs and head were throbbing. He could feel the swelling on his face from where Leopold had struck him with the gun. And with his heart racing, blood was now starting to flow more rapidly from his wounded leg.

But most of him—the most important parts of him, anyway—felt good. Felt terrific in fact.

It took him the better part of five minutes, but he finally managed to stand with the chair and the saggy, stretched-out duct tape still wrapped around him. He threw himself against the wall repeatedly until the chair fell away in pieces. Then he tugged and ripped until he was free of the tape, and stepped out of his prison.

He turned to look across the room.

He hadn’t seen it before, during his struggles with Leopold, but, still, he had known.

She hadn’t joined the fight after all, either on his side or Leopold’s.

There had to be a reason for that.

Now he was looking at that reason.

He had been wrong. The Smith and Wesson had killed again. Or it was about to.

He staggered over to where Wyatt lay on the floor, blood still flowing out of her chest from where the shot had struck her.

He knelt down next to her. She looked far more male than female. But to him she would always be a woman. A sixteen-year-old girl, in fact, who’d suffered so much. Too much. More than anyone should.

Dr. Marshall had said that these days someone with Belinda’s intersex condition was always involved in the decision as to what gender to become fully and finally. But someone should never feel compelled to choose to be a man simply because she was terrified of being a woman.

She was not dead yet but she soon would be. The pool of blood around her seemed to exceed what was left inside her. He had no way to stanch the bleeding.

And in truth, Decker also didn’t have the desire.

He looked first at her hands. The hands that had strangled the life out of his daughter. Then at the finger that had pulled the trigger on the gun that had killed his wife. The hands that had slit throats and fired shotguns and wrapped a mother and father in plastic and stabbed an FBI agent in the heart.

Then he gazed down at the face. The eyes were starting to fix, the breathing to relax. The body’s transition to death was commencing in earnest. The brain was telling the rest of the body that it was over and that everything would soon shut down. It was doing all this in as orderly a fashion as possible given that the cause was a hole in the chest driven there by violent means.

Decker had died before too. He didn’t remember white lights, or a tunnel to brightness, or angels singing. For a man who could never forget anything, he could remember nothing of dying. He had no idea if that was comforting or not. He just wanted to be alive.

He sat down on his haunches next to her. Part of him wanted to take Leopold’s gun and blow her brains out. Part of him wanted to use his huge hands to crush the remaining life out of her. To hurry her on to where she was inevitably going anyway.

But he didn’t. Only once did her eyes flicker and seem to fix on his. There was a look there, just a glimpse, perhaps imagined, Decker didn’t know, when he thought he was looking at the scared sixteen-year-old girl back at the institute.

He sighed and closed his eyes for a moment, but didn’t even try to process what had become an unimaginable tragedy all around.

So he simply sat there and watched her die. And when she did, he closed her eyes. But he could close nothing that had come before. And Decker knew he never would.

And whether he wanted it or not, Amos Decker, Sebastian Leopold, and Belinda Wyatt, in life and now in death, were all bound together.

Forever.

But he was immeasurably relieved to be the one left standing.