TREATMENT

FORMAT & TONE

Feature film. Crime drama. 134 pages.

AS HE FIRED UP THE DRUM MACHINE operates in the space between Bonnie and Clyde and Requiem for a Dream — a lovers-on-the-run story built not on glamour or velocity but on desperation, chemical dependency, and the delusion that one spectacular act of theft can purchase a life worth living. The film follows Mally, a twenty-one-year-old heroin-addicted sex worker, and Champ, her twenty-seven-year-old musician boyfriend, as they steal forty kilos of cocaine from Mally’s transgender pimp, sell it to a mid-level dealer in Baltimore, and flee toward the ocean — a place Mally has visited once, at age nine, and has organized her entire interior life around reaching again. The tone is unglamorous, ground-level, and stubbornly realistic. These are not criminal masterminds. They are broke, sick, exhausted people making the biggest bet of their lives with borrowed tools, a thousand-dollar car, and a plan held together by Mally’s nerve and Champ’s willingness to follow her.

The film earns its audience’s investment in these people before it tests them. The opening act is built on the texture of their daily lives — the dripping faucet in the motel bathroom, the cracked mirror with a beach postcard taped to it, the mechanical click of a drum machine at two in the morning, the particular silence between two people who love each other and are destroying each other. The humor is profane and lived-in: a waitress who skips Champ’s coffee because she doesn’t like his energy, a cousin who raises the price of a car between the phone call and the parking lot, a girl ordering the mystery pie at a diner because she’s made worse decisions. The violence, when it arrives, is sudden, clumsy, and irrevocable — a man on a staircase who trips and falls forward, a finger already on the trigger, and a sound that changes everything.

The visual grammar is grounded and naturalistic. Pittsburgh is shot the way people who are trapped there experience it — gray sky pressing down like a lid, shuttered storefronts, bars on windows, the same corner at two a.m. The camera favors wide shots of streets nobody wants to be on and tight, uncomfortable close-ups during moments of pressure: Mally’s eyes in a rearview mirror memorizing a cross street, Champ’s knuckles whitening on a steering wheel, a padlock hanging in the dark. There is no score. The sound design does the work — the rattle of an old Camry’s exhaust, the hiss of a cigarette dropped in bathwater, the mechanical loop of a drum machine playing to an empty motel room, and the silence of two people sitting in a parked car at three in the morning waiting for something terrible to begin.

The film’s most distinctive element is a recurring surreal interlude in which Mally’s bottle of sunscreen talks to her. An unopened bottle of SPF 50 she bought at a Dollar General in August — not because she needed it, but because buying sunscreen made her feel like someone who was going somewhere with the sun. The bottle develops a mouth in the plastic, speaks with gentle mockery and quiet patience, and presses Mally on the promise she keeps making to herself. These scenes are not comic relief. They are the film’s emotional spine — the private, irrational, deeply human way a person keeps faith with a future they have no evidence for.

The film’s central question is not whether they will get away with it. It is whether the cost of escape — measured in blood, in trust broken, in a man dead on a warehouse floor who did nothing except hear a noise and walk downstairs — can ever be reconciled with the thing the escape was supposed to purchase. Mally reaches the ocean. She stands in the water up to her knees. She whispers, "I made it." And then the world she thought she’d outrun arrives at the kitchen door.

SETTING

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — and then the road south to Baltimore and the Delaware coast. The film moves through three distinct geographies that function as emotional registers. Pittsburgh is entrapment: the extended-stay motel with weekly rates and no questions asked, the corners of Penn Avenue where Mally and Kezia lean against a chain-link fence in heels waiting for headlights to slow, the diner where nobody has enough money and everybody has opinions, the Strip District warehouses where the city’s hidden economy operates behind green roll-up doors and brass padlocks. The highway is purgatory: five hours of darkness between the worst thing Mally has ever done and the transaction that will determine whether it was worth it, the white lines pulling them forward, a gas station where thirty-two dollars buys half a tank and nothing resembling absolution. The Delaware coast is the promise: Fenwick Island, Beachcomber Lane, a blue house with sand in the driveway and a key under the porch light, the ocean Mally has been staring at on a postcard since before the film began.

The story unfolds across a handful of recurring locations that function almost as characters. The motel room is the couple’s entire domestic life compressed into two hundred square feet — a broken lamp, a dripping faucet, a mini-fridge with nothing in it, and music equipment spread across the bedspread because there is nowhere else for it to go. The motel bathroom is Mally’s private space — the cracked mirror, the beach postcard, the kit laid out on the toilet lid with practiced precision, and the bottle of sunscreen sitting on the edge of the tub like a companion. The Furnace, a narrow Strip District venue with Christmas lights and a hand-painted banner, is where Champ’s aspirational self lives — the thirty-person crowd, the buzzing PA, the moment when the music is better than the room it’s playing in. China Palace serves no role here; this is not a story about a criminal infrastructure, but about two people orbiting the bottom of one. Nihel Colbert’s Tudor estate in Sewickley Heights — the chandelier, the oil paintings, the cheese board with names you can’t pronounce, and a naked seventy-two-year-old man drifting through his own rooms like a ghost who owns the building — is the film’s portrait of wealth as loneliness made architectural. And the beach house is the destination that turns out to be another trap: small, dusty, beautiful, temporary, and exactly close enough to the road that Slayer’s burgundy LeSabre can find it.

CHARACTERS

MALLY ABIGAIL KEAN (21): The architect of her own escape and the person who pays for it with everything except the money. Mally is a heroin addict and sex worker who has been turning tricks on Penn Avenue under Slayer’s management since she was a teenager. She is gaunt, sharp-eyed, and operates with the clinical efficiency of someone who learned early that sentimentality is a luxury she cannot afford. She negotiates with johns in motel rooms, counts out crumpled bills for her pimp, and shoots up in a bathtub with the mechanical precision of long practice. But Mally is also the person who bought a bottle of sunscreen in August because it made her someone who was going somewhere, who taped a postcard of a beach to her cracked bathroom mirror and looks at it every night, who told Kezia on a freezing corner that she wants to live where she can hear the ocean every morning. She is not dreaming. She is planning. When Champ brings her the overheard intelligence about Slayer’s deal, Mally does not hesitate long. She takes control of the operation with an authority that startles Champ and reveals the person she has been building inside herself, while the world saw only a girl who gives money and does what she’s told. She buys the burner phone. She calls Luciano. She cases the warehouse. She secures the car. She moves the gun from Champ’s gig bag to the glove compartment without telling him, because she understands, in a way he does not, that the most dangerous moment will not be the heist but whatever comes after. Mally’s arc is not redemption. It is a woman who does terrible things — kills an unarmed man, robs the person who controlled her life, drags her boyfriend into a situation that gets him murdered — in pursuit of a simple, human desire: to stand in the ocean. She reaches the water. She whispers, "I made it." The film does not tell us whether that is a triumph or a delusion. It holds the image and lets the audience decide.

CHAMP ANTHONY MARTINEZ (27): A musician who is better than his circumstances and not quite good enough to escape them. Champ plays guitar in Raygun, a three-piece band that is tighter than the rooms they play in, and programs beats on a scratched Akai MPC1000 at 2 in the morning while Mally is working. He has the nervous energy of someone who has been almost succeeding for a decade. His Squier Stratocaster has a duct-tape patch over a crack in the body. He has had it since he was fourteen. He busked with it, played his first house party with it, and recorded every demo on it. The guitar is not a prop. It is the material evidence of a life organized around a talent that the world has declined to reward. Champ overhears the deal and brings it to Mally, but he is not the one who builds the plan. His role is to drive, to carry, and to trust Mally when she tells him only what he needs to know. He chafes against this — Googling the warehouse on the motel Wi-Fi, pressing for details, insisting he brought her the pieces — but he accepts it, because he knows she is smarter about this world than he is. Champ’s fatal flaw is not recklessness but faith: he believes Mally can get them out, he believes the ocean is real, and he believes the gun in his gig bag is insurance rather than prophecy. When Slayer arrives at the beach house, and Champ reaches for the gig bag pocket, his fingers find nothing. Mally moved the gun. She was protecting him. It is the thing that kills him. His death is the film’s cruelest beat — not because it is violent but because it is the direct consequence of the one quality that made him worth loving: he trusted her completely.

SLAYER (44): Mally’s pimp and the person against whom the heist is committed. Slayer is a transgender woman, broad-shouldered and heavy-set, who manages a small stable of girls with blunt authority and controls a low-level drug operation that she is desperate to scale up. She is not a kingpin. She is a mid-level operator with thirty-two thousand dollars, borrowed confidence, and a pitch that makes Care Bear look at her the way you look at a dog that keeps bringing you the same dead bird. Slayer sweats through her meeting with Care Bear, stumbles over her numbers, and asks for twenty-eight thousand dollars she has no leverage to demand — and gets it, because Care Bear sees a woman who is either about to make him money or become a cautionary tale, and either outcome is useful. Slayer is sharp with Mally, transactional with Kezia, and contemptuous of Champ, but the film gives her moments of unguarded humanity: she mentions a dead sister who used to say everyone is one good day from a different life, and there is real hope in her voice when she tells Mally that after Thursday, things will be different. They are. Just not the way she meant. When Slayer discovers the cut padlock and the empty warehouse and the dead man on the floor, the film watches her come apart with the specificity of a person who understands, instantly, that every thread of her life has just been pulled. She does not scream. She crouches because her legs won’t hold her. She dials numbers that don’t answer. She drives to Kezia’s apartment and extracts the information she needs, not through violence but through the precise observation of a girl who says, "She didn’t tell me where she was going," and doesn’t realize she’s just confirmed that someone was going. Slayer drives six hours to Fenwick Island. She kills Champ. She sits at the kitchen table with the gun in front of her and waits, because she has nowhere else to go and nothing left to protect. Her final sentence begins with the same five words that opened the film in flash-forward: "You don’t have the ball—" Mally finishes it for her.

KEZIA MOON (20): Mally’s closest friend and the structural weakness that destroys the plan. Kezia is a young transgender woman with warmth, dark humor, and the particular loyalty of someone who has nobody else. She stands on freezing corners with Mally and talks about the future. She orders the mystery pie at a diner because she’s made worse decisions. She calls her cousin about a car without asking what it’s for. She is the person Mally trusts enough to involve and not enough to protect. Mally tells Kezia to disappear after Thursday, promises to send bus money, and means every word of it — but she also tells Kezia about Nihel Colbert’s beach house, and Kezia, being twenty years old and terrified, gives up Fenwick Island the moment Slayer leans on her. Kezia is not a traitor. She is a girl in a room with a woman who has just lost everything, and she breaks because that is what people do when they are scared. The film does not judge her for it. It shows the mechanism by which love and loyalty become the vectors of catastrophe: Mally trusted Kezia because Kezia was the only person worth trusting, and that trust is exactly what Slayer followed south.

NIHEL MAINFRED COLBERT (72): A wealthy recluse who pays two women a thousand dollars to sit in his house and not look at him. Nihel opens his front door completely naked, holding a glass of wine, and does not speak for the entire evening. He drifts through his own rooms — a Tudor estate with oil paintings, a Viking range, and a swimming pool covered for winter — like a ghost who owns the building. His loneliness is so total that it has become a commercial transaction: he does not want sex, conversation, or acknowledgment. He wants the sound of other people existing nearby. In his living room, above the fireplace, hangs a watercolor of a beach that does not belong with the rest of the art — simple, amateurish, the kind of painting you’d buy at a craft fair. When a nature documentary plays underwater footage of whales moving through blue water, Nihel speaks for the first and only time. He tells Mally he has a beach house on Fenwick Island. Blue house. Beachcomber Lane. Key under the porch light. Nobody uses it. It just sits there. He offers this the way he offers everything — without expectation, without attachment, without any indication that the gift will save one person’s life and end another’s.

CARE BEAR (50s): The owner of The Furnace and the man whose money Slayer borrows to buy the cocaine. Care Bear is thick-necked, reading-glasses-on-forehead, Pittsburgh-Steelers-ring-on-the-pinky, and he conducts business from a cluttered back office with a rocks glass of Jim Beam he does not share. He listens to Slayer’s pitch with the patience of a man who has heard a hundred pitches and funded the three that didn’t insult his intelligence. He agrees to front twenty-eight thousand dollars at thirty percent, and he makes the terms clear: if one dollar goes missing, the conversation changes. Care Bear is not in the film long, but his presence organizes Slayer’s desperation. He is the reason Slayer cannot absorb the loss. He is the reason she drives to Delaware with a gun. He is the offscreen gravity that turns a theft into a death sentence.

LUCIANO PASQUALE DELUCA (34): A Baltimore music promoter and mid-level drug dealer who buys the stolen cocaine. Luciano has the face of someone who sells insurance and the back room of someone who does not. His operation is clean, methodical, and professional: a folding table, a triple-beam scale, a reagent testing kit, and a ceiling fan turning slowly in an aggressively white room. He tests the product from each bag, weighs every kilo, and names his price with the dispassion of a man describing the weather. He offers a hundred thousand for thirty-nine kilos. Mally negotiates to one-ten. He pays in banded cash from a faded JanSport backpack. Before they leave, he tells them never to call again. Whatever happened between Pittsburgh and Baltimore stays there. Luciano is the film’s only character who operates without self-deception. He knows exactly what he is buying, from whom, and why they are selling it cheaply. He does not pretend otherwise. He tells Champ he should keep playing guitar. It is the kindest and most useless thing anyone says in the film.

WINTHROP ADDISON FIELD (53): The man who lives above the warehouse and dies because he heard a noise and walked downstairs. Winthrop is gaunt, unwashed, and wearing a flannel shirt buttoned wrong. He is Slayer’s watchman — a marginal person given a place to sleep in exchange for a presence. He smokes cigarettes on the concrete step, his hands shaking. He comes down the stairs in his underwear, squinting into the work lamp, confused and terrified, asking if Slayer sent someone. He is not a threat. He is not armed. He stumbles, falls forward, and Mally, who is already aiming, fires. His death is the film’s moral pivot. He looks at Mally with quiet confusion — not anger, not fear, just the bewilderment of a man who does not understand how he got to the floor. That expression is the thing Mally will see every time she closes her eyes. She tells Champ this on the highway. She is right.

STORY

The film opens in the middle of its own ending. A kitchen. Thin light through a window above the sink. A gas stove. A pasta pot. Two mismatched bowls. Slayer sits at the table, breathing wet and ragged, her hands flat on the surface, a snub-nosed .38 in front of her. A hand holds a Smith & Wesson Model 10. Steady. The barrel hovers inches from Slayer’s forehead. We don’t see who the hand belongs to. Slayer looks up. "You don’t have the ball—" Bang. Blood and brain matter splatter across the camera lens. Through the red-smeared glass, Slayer’s body slumps forward. A shape moves behind the mess. A single droplet of blood slides down the lens. Title card: AS HE FIRED UP THE DRUM MACHINE.

Night. An extended-stay motel on the edge of Pittsburgh. The kind with weekly rates and no questions asked. Champ Martinez sits cross-legged on the mattress in a Guided by Voices t-shirt, programming a beat on a scratched Akai MPC1000. Cables run to a laptop. A duct-taped Squier Stratocaster leans against the wall. The door rattles. Mally Kean comes in — short skirt, leather jacket, makeup smeared at the edges. She drops her purse. They exchange words that function as both greeting and wound: he didn’t eat, she was working, he smells like failure, she throws crumpled bills across his equipment. Rent’s due Thursday. She slams the bathroom door. In the bathroom, Mally locks the door and prepares a fix with practiced precision — spoon, lighter, cotton, syringe. She pushes the plunger. Relief. Not bliss. On the cracked mirror: a sun-bleached postcard of a white sand beach. On the edge of the tub: a bottle of sunscreen, SPF 50, seal unbroken. She looks at it every night.

The first act establishes the world these two inhabit and the specific textures of being trapped inside it. Mally, Slayer, and Kezia sit crammed into a diner booth — coffee and the wreckage of shared fries, jokes about blackout drinking, the arrival of Champ, who can’t get the waitress to serve him because she doesn’t like his energy. The scene is funny, human, and undergirded by the power dynamics that organize their lives: Slayer assigns Mally to the east side tomorrow and expects no argument. Mally nods once. On Penn Avenue at night, Mally and Kezia lean against a chain-link fence in heels, freezing, waiting for cars to slow down. Mally tells Kezia about the ocean — the trip to Rehoboth Beach at nine years old, the smell of salt before she could see the water, standing knee-deep and refusing to come out. The postcard on her mirror. "Like a promise." "To whom?" Mally doesn’t answer. A john pulls to the curb. Mally gets in.

In a fleabag motel room, the john — Matt, fifties, wedding ring, separated, nervous in the way of a man who hasn’t done this before — fumbles with the light switch, folds his khakis, and apologizes repeatedly while Mally undresses with the efficiency of a doctor’s visit. The scene is deliberately anticlimactic, pathetic, and specific in a way that refuses to let the audience look away from the transaction or romanticize it.

In the bathtub that night, the bottle of sunscreen speaks. A mouth forms in the orange plastic — slightly cartoonish, slightly wrong. It tells Mally she doesn’t even use it. She says she’s saving it. "For what?" "For when I need you." The bottle mocks her gently, but it also listens. Mally tells it about buying the sunscreen in August: "I thought, if I buy sunscreen, then I’m somebody who’s going to need sunscreen. Somebody who’s going somewhere with the sun." The bottle asks where they’re going. South. Like another life. The bottle describes the sound of the ocean: "Like breathing. In and out. Like the whole planet is sleeping." Mally says she’s going to get there. The bottle says she said that last month. She sets it back on the tub’s edge. It tilts toward her, barely perceptibly. Or maybe it’s the steam.

At The Furnace, Champ plays a set with Raygun that’s better than the room deserves. Thirty people, half paying attention. He sings like something is tearing. Mally stands by the door with her arms crossed, not sure she’s staying. Their eyes meet. Neither smiles. After the set, Champ lingers backstage. The door marked "OFFICE" is ajar. He hears Slayer pitching Care Bear on the deal: forty keys from Cleveland, sixty-thousand-dollar buy-in, Slayer short twenty-eight grand. Care Bear agrees to front it at thirty percent, with a threat: if anything goes wrong, the conversation changes. Slayer leaves the office, wiping her palms, and doesn’t see Champ pressed against the wall behind a stack of gear cases.

That night, in the motel room, Champ tells Mally everything. He lays out the deal, the shortfall, the borrowed money, and the idea: steal the cocaine after the buy and sell it to Luciano Deluca, a Baltimore dealer Champ met during a gig in Fells Point. Mally’s first response is refusal. Her second is calculation. Champ presses the question: if they do nothing, what happens? The motel. The corners. The faucet. Nothing changes. Mally takes control. She forbids Champ from contacting Luciano. She tells him she’ll handle the plan, and he’ll know his part when it’s time. "You just told me his full name, his address, and what’s in his kitchen, Champ. In under a minute." He closes his mouth.

The second act is the construction of the heist, and the film builds it with the unglamorous realism of people who have never done anything like this before. Mally rides along with Slayer on her weekly route — four or five stops, houses where she goes in and comes out with bags — and quietly maps the operation from the passenger seat. She notes the warehouse on Smallman Street with the green door. She notes that Slayer slows twice as it passes. Kezia, in the back seat, mentions that Slayer came back from an errand last week with a brand-new padlock key. Mally files this. She buys a burner phone and calls Luciano herself. He’s willing to look at the product. He gives her an address on Fait Avenue. Not his apartment — somewhere else. Side door. Text when you’re outside.

Mally scouts the Smallman Street warehouse on foot — the padlock on the green door, the side door with no padlock, the fire escape with the ladder latched eight feet up, the back door with no handle. She sits in a bodega across the street and watches for half an hour. A gaunt man — Winthrop — steps out the side door, smokes a cigarette with shaking hands, and goes back inside. Mally notes him and returns to the motel, where she finds Champ Googling the warehouse on the motel Wi-Fi. She makes him close the laptop, clears his browser history, and tells him to make music and wait. "You’re the reason I don’t tell you everything."

The Nihel Colbert sequence operates as a tonal departure that deepens Mally’s world and provides the geographical key to the third act. Mally and Kezia arrive at Colbert’s Tudor estate in Sewickley Heights. He opens the door naked, holding wine, and walks away without a word. They spend three hours eating expensive cheese, watching reality television, and existing in the same space as a man who has paid a thousand dollars for the sound of other people nearby. Above the fireplace: a watercolor of a beach that doesn’t belong with the oil portraits. When a nature documentary plays footage of whales in blue water, Nihel speaks for the first time. He tells Mally about the beach house on Fenwick Island. Blue house. Beachcomber Lane. Key under the porch light. Nobody uses it. The offer is made without expectation. It enters Mally’s plan like a key entering a lock.

Mally secures a 2009 Toyota Camry from Kezia’s cousin Art for eleven hundred dollars cash in a parking lot behind his apartment building. The negotiation is petty, human-sized, and funny — Art raises the price twice, Kezia curses him out, Mally ends it by counting cash. Mally tells Kezia to disappear after Thursday. Don’t answer Slayer’s calls. Don’t be anywhere she expects. She promises to send the bus money. Kezia asks if it’s dangerous. "Not for you. Not if you do what I’m telling you." At the diner, Slayer tells Mally to take Thursday night off. She’s got business. There is a vulnerability to Slayer in this moment — she mentions a dead sister, a saying about one good day — that the film holds without commentary. Mally says she hopes Thursday is a good day. She means it. She is also going to rob her.

Wednesday night. The room is dark. The Camry key is on the nightstand. Champ holds the Stratocaster he’s had since he was fourteen — the one he busked with, played his first show with, recorded every song on — and understands he has to leave it behind. Mally watches him. She doesn’t tell him to hurry. Champ pulls out the Smith & Wesson from his gig bag — blued steel, five rounds, bought cash from a guy in Braddock two years ago. Mally checks it. Opens the cylinder. Closes it. They are not shooting anybody. But the gun comes.

Thursday night. One in the morning. The Camry is parked two blocks from The Furnace, with the engine off and the lights off. Mally and Champ sit in the cold, watching the parking lot. An Escalade with Ohio plates arrives and later departs. Care Bear leaves in a Lincoln. Slayer emerges carrying three heavy duffel bags. She loads the LeSabre’s trunk, drives to Smallman Street, and unloads the product into the warehouse behind the green door. She stands with her hand on the padlock like she’s making sure it’s real. The LeSabre pulls away. Mally insists they wait a full hour.

At 3:23 a.m., Mally cuts the padlock with bolt cutters and enters the warehouse alone. She drags the first bag to the Camry. On her second trip, she hears footsteps from upstairs. Winthrop descends in his underwear and flannel, squinting, confused, calling out for Slayer. Mally holds the gun on him. He is terrified. He tries to back up the stairs. His foot slips. He falls forward. Mally fires. The bullet hits his chest. He lands on the concrete and looks at her with quiet confusion — not anger, not fear, just the bewilderment of a man who doesn’t understand how he arrived at the floor. Then his eyes stop. Mally stands in the warehouse with the gun and the body of a man she didn’t mean to kill. She finishes loading the bags.

The highway south is five hours of reckoning. Champ wants to turn back, call the police, and dump the drugs. Mally dismantles every alternative: there is no going back. They are two people with forty kilos of cocaine in the trunk, a dead man behind them, and eighty dollars between them. Their only path is forward. She tells Champ about the man’s eyes. The confusion. She knows she will see it every time she closes her eyes. He reaches for her hand across the center console. She lets him take it. The radio plays something old and slow. Maryland opens up ahead of them.

They arrive at Luciano’s row house on Fait Avenue at dawn. Blue Archer, Luciano’s associate, lets them in. The back room is aggressively clean — a folding table, a triple-beam scale, a reagent kit, and a clamp light pointed straight down like an operating theater. Luciano tests the product from each bag. Blue. Blue. Blue. It’s real. He offers a hundred thousand. Mally negotiates to one-ten. He pays in banded stacks from a JanSport backpack. A hundred and ten thousand dollars on a folding table. Before they leave, Luciano tells them to never call again. "Whatever happened between Pittsburgh and here — it stays between Pittsburgh and here." He tells Champ he should keep playing guitar.

Mally directs Champ to Fenwick Island. They find the blue house on Beachcomber Lane. The key is under the porch light. Inside: dust on every surface, white sheets over the furniture, a bookshelf of paperbacks swollen from salt air. Mally opens the back door and sees the ocean. She walks down the path through the sea grass, takes off her sneakers, and wades into the freezing winter water up to her knees. She stands there, shaking, lips blue, and whispers: "I made it." Champ watches from the top of the path. He doesn’t come down. That evening, he boils pasta in the kitchen. For one night, they have something that resembles a life.

Back in Pittsburgh, the plan’s structural weakness activates. Slayer discovers the warehouse — the cut padlock, the empty floor, Winthrop’s body. She makes an animal, involuntary sound. She crouches because her legs won’t hold her. She dials Mally. Voicemail. Kezia. Voicemail. She drives to the motel: room cleared, key on the bed. She drives to Kezia’s apartment. The interrogation is not violent but surgical — Slayer catches the slip in Kezia’s phrasing, the distinction between not knowing where Mally is and not being told where she went, and cracks her open. Kezia gives up Fenwick Island. The blue house. Beachcomber Lane. "She said you’d have bigger problems than me." "Yeah. She was right about that."

Saturday morning. Mally drives to a store for groceries. While she is gone, a burgundy LeSabre crawls past the blue house, stops, and backs up. Slayer gets out. She looks bad — dark circles, a crooked wig. She enters through the unlocked kitchen door and finds the backpack of cash on a chair. Then she hears the couch creak. Champ stumbles into the kitchen expecting Mally. He sees Slayer. The moment stretches. He turns and lunges for the living room, for his gig bag, for the pocket where the Smith & Wesson has always been. He tears the Velcro open. Empty. His fingers feel nothing. Mally moved the gun to the glove compartment of the Camry. She was protecting him. Slayer is standing in the doorway with the .38. She tells him he ruined her. The money is right there, he says. Take it. "You think this is about the money?" She fires. Champ falls against the wall, knocking the guitar off the armchair. It hits the floor with a dissonant chord that rings and fades. He slides to the floor and does not get up.

Mally returns. She sees the LeSabre. She opens the glove box. The Smith & Wesson is there. She walks into the house. She finds Champ on the living room floor, his guitar facedown beside him, his t-shirt soaked through. She does not scream. She makes a small sound and stops. In the kitchen, Slayer sits at the table, the .38 in front of her. The two women face each other. Slayer tells Mally she’s dead either way — Care Bear will come. Mally raises the gun. Slayer begins the sentence from the film’s opening: "You don’t have the ball—" Mally fires. The flash-forward completes itself. Slayer hits the table, slides off the chair, and is still. The .38 skids across the surface and drops off the edge.

Mally sets the gun on the counter. She walks to the living room. She kneels beside Champ. She touches his face. She lifts the guitar off the floor and sets it carefully against the wall. She sits beside him, her back against the wall, her hand on his chest, blood soaking into her jeans. She does not cry. The ocean sounds through the walls. In and out. In and out.

In the final image, Mally walks down the path from the house, through the sea grass, onto the sand. She is carrying the backpack on her shoulder. She stands at the water’s edge. The tide is coming in. The waves reach her sneakers. She looks at the ocean — gray and flat and endless.