“The way it figures,” David Brown said, “they were sitting in the middle of the movie theater and he leaned over to kiss her and slid the knife in nice and easy under her arm. It couldn’t have taken more than a minute or two and then of course they just looked like a couple of kids making out during the movie. She wouldn’t have said anything with her mouth full of his tongue, not that she could have anyway, the knife hit her lung pretty neatly. Maybe she sighed a little, or moaned, but that wouldn’t have surprised anyone very much.”

His hands twitched and spilled sugar all over the table. “It was perfectly done. He slipped out during the movie and just never came back. The chair was tilted back and kept her from slumping forward. Nobody realized she was dead until the ushers came in to sweep up afterwards and found her blood all over the floor. In the dark it would have seemed like just another spilled soda.”

He lit a crumpled cigarette and held both hands up to his face to smoke it. His eyes through the smoke were red and burning and utterly weary.