It is done.

Barbra is dead. Murdered. But from what the police said, they think it's just another random act of violence this city has become numb to.

I play it back in my mind...hearing the phone call from the police officer. My wife has been identified as a victim in a carjacking. Robbed at gunpoint and shot in the face. A witness at the scene said she pleaded for her life before the masked gunman pulled the trigger.

Why the face? I had hoped he would shoot her directly in the heart. I imagine her eyes seeing the cold barrel of a 9mm staring her down, frozen in complete fear, perhaps urinating on herself as she begged for her life.

BOOM!

The skin turning into a mesh of broken tissue, the splattering of blood through the car interior, a witness seeing a masked gunman run with her purse-- disappearing down an adjacent street, never to be found again.

A masked gunman paid by the wife's husband to take a life. Me, guilty of paying a scumbucket to kill the whining bitch who got what she deserved. Why am I so angry at her? And I think of the Menendez boys, killing their parents and crying to the media-- then blowing their cover by going joyriding in a sports car two days later. Were they angry at their parents AFTER pulling the trigger?

My fear.

Fear of getting caught, fear of my friends knowing I am a murderer, fear of my karma, fear of my own guilt consuming me, fear of taking my own life. I ponder OJ. I wonder if he has any fear-- or did he simply erase it from his brain-- pretending it never happened. I think anyone, if they believe strong enough, can change their reality and convince something never happened-- when in fact it did.

Denial is not a river in Egypt but it's certainly a way of life in Los Angeles where everyone lives in their own movie. And my crime thriller, starring me, is only at the opening credits.

I have to go down to the police station and make a statement. I'll need to cry.

Should I bring an onion to sniff in the car? The tears will fall and I'll play the grieving-in-shock-husband who's loss is "devastating."

Like they'll care. Barbra is nothing more than another number, another point in a numbers game of life and death in the City of the Angels.

I'll be free. But first I have to call her son Peter, the young man I've slept with, and tell him the news that his mother has been shot and killed.

Should I ask him to spend the night? I am kind of horny.