But who had the gun, king shit? Who acted fast?

He knocked them down in his mind, knocked them down again, then swore as the flame bit down to his fingers.

"Goddamnit," he said, aloud. He lit another match, lit the cigarette.

Letty West,he thought, waving the match out. Up there in the night, with nobody but her mama.

AFTER LUCAS AND Del dropped her at her house, Letty changed clothes and then went out to the highway and hitched a ride into Armstrong. She wasn't stupid about it. She always waited until she recognized the truck before she put her thumb out. In that part of the county, she recognized one in twenty, and they always stopped for her.

At the library, she got a computer and went online, called up the Google search engine, entered how to with TV reporter and got some strange websites.

Three boys from her class came in, two of them wearing Vikings sweatshirts and the third wearing a sweatshirt that said Scouts, which was the high school nickname. One of the Vikings boys was named Don, and Letty considered him somewhat desirable. She felt a pressure from them, almost like a pressure on her face. They got on computers, two of them facing her, and they all clicked along through the net.

Two hours later, disturbed by what she'd read on the websites, and carrying fifty pages of printout, she hitched back home with an eighty-three-year-old drunk who'd spent the evening with a lady friend, and couldn't keep his truck straight on the street. She flagged him down, and he let her drive. She dropped him at his house, halfway up to Broderick, and told him she'd come over in the morning with the truck, when he was sober.

As she went through Broderick, she stopped at the store and bought a bottle of milk and a box of cereal. The house was dark when she got back. She lit it up, turned down the heat, ate a quick bowl of cereal, and then went back into her mother's bedroom, to look at herself in the mirror.

She wasn't bad-looking, she decided. Actually, she was quite attractive. But she would need to soften up her face. She looked good now, but if she kept making grim lines, she could wind up looking like a crocodile. She had no makeup skills at all, but the women at the hair salon could fix that. They had a whole library of books and magazines, and an ocean of experience. Letty had never spent a dime on makeup. She'd start now.

The web sites had stressed that journalism wasn't very important, but skills were. That was her next assignment: print out everything she could find on TV schools.

Then she thought: School. Homework. Social studies. She climbed the stairs, found her textbook, and looked up the questions she was supposed to answer. Then she thought, They can't hold it against me if I'm helping Lucas and Del…

She dumped the book, went back downstairs, turned on the TV, watched for a while, reading the printouts, and every half hour or so went to look at herself in the mirror some more. She hardly ever did that-this was not a matter of vanity, but a matter of technique. Of skills. She found that if she used her mother's compact, she could hold it next to her eye and get a good right-angle profile in the dresser mirror.

One of the web sites had said that you had to look like TV. The site said that every female host of the Today show had been chosen because she looked like she'd be good at fellatio.

She'd carefully written fellatio on a piece of paper and carried it over to the library's New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and looked the word up: "Sucking or licking of a sexual partner's penis."

She thought, Huh, and, a second later, Every one of them? Then she'd ripped the piece of paper into a hundred bits, in case one of the boys from her class might see it, thrown the tiny bits of paper into the wastebasket, and changed pages in the dictionary.

SHE WAS WATCHING an old Letterman rerun, and critiquing technique, when headlights swept through the yard. After a moment, they died, and she walked out to the front door. Boots clunked across the porch, the door rattled, and her mother stepped inside.

Martha West was moderately loaded-bars weren't open on Sunday so, like the old man, she'd also done her drinking privately. "Hi, honey. Whose truck is that?"

"Reese Culver. He was drinking and asked me to drive him. I'm gonna take it back in the morning."

"Okay. You got traps out?"

"Yeah, down at the dump."

"You better get upstairs, then, get to bed. It's after eleven o'clock," Martha said. Letty would have to get up at five o'clock to make it out to the dump. "You had something to eat?"

"Had some Honey Bunches of Oats," Letty said. She stood up and stretched. "There's some left, and I got a bottle of milk."

Martha yawned. "Okay. Get to bed."

Letty took the social studies book up the stairs with her, closed her bedroom door, dug a notebook out of her school pack, sprawled on the bed, and started working through the questions. If Lucas and Del didn't come through, she'd need the answers. Besides, with Reese's truck outside, she could sleep an extra forty-five minutes in the morning, and take the truck up to the dump before she returned it.

THE PROBLEM WITH Broderick, Singleton thought, was that there weren't any back roads to the place. If you wanted to go there, you went on Highway 36, or you didn't go. He took the.380. He'd have to get rid of it, he thought, and the thought pained him. He'd paid $350 for it at a gun show in Fargo, and he hated to lose it. It'd worked just fine with the Sorrells. Couldn't ask for more, not for $350, not in this world.

At eleven o'clock, with the sky black with the daily overcast, he went on the air to tell the sleepy dispatcher that he'd take a quick run down south, to show the flag-the sheriff emphasized that when nothing was going on, he wanted his deputies out to be seen. The dispatcher said okay and went away. He turned north.

Broderick showed scattered speckles of light when he crept into the south side of town. He pulled in behind Calb's shop and got out, let the wind bite at him for a moment, listening. Then, satisfied that he was alone, he pulled his parka up around his head, hunched his shoulders, and started off. He'd brought a penlight, and used it in quick flicks to guide himself along the back of the building, then past the old power transfer station, through an empty lot behind the darkened convenience store, and finally out on the open highway.

The West house was maybe six hundred yards down the road, a quarter-mile to a half-mile. Not far. Once or twice around the track at Custer High. He might have been walking into a coal pit, for as much as he could see. Not a single vehicle passed in either direction. The only sound was the wind, the scuffle of his feet on the road, and his own breathing.

When he reached the West house, he found that it was not entirely dark. Light glowed through a shade on a north-facing window on the second floor, and a variety of small lights-a TV power light, a bathroom night light, a green light that might have been on a telephone, a small row of red lights that looked like a power supply-actually gave his dilated eyes enough light to navigate.

Moving slowly, he felt with his feet for the track that crossed the culvert into the driveway. When he got close, he sensed a bulk to his right. Martha's Jeep? Too big. Pickup. Goddammit. Who was here? He moved around behind it, looked for any movement in the house, then squirted the penlight at the back of the truck.

He recognized it, all right. The dented corner panels, where old Reese Culver tended to back into solid objects, like phone poles. What was the old man doing here, with virtually all the lights out? There'd been rumors, off-and-on, that Martha West might fuck for money, but nobody paid them much attention. It was generally taken as wishful thinking in a town that needed somebody who fucked for money. But Reese Culver? If he was staying the night, the old fart, he had to be paying.