She came and stood beside Tyler’s chair. Tyler didn’t move. Beth spoke. Words inaudible. She reached for Tyler’s huge hand and took it in her own. She put his hand on her blouse, on her breast, and moved against it in a way that seemed to Joey brutally obscene.

Joey took his pistol out of his belt and hurried to the front of the house.

Once it was obvious why Beth had come, Tyler felt in control of the situation.

She wasn’t much different from the hundreds of such women Tyler had hired at various times in his life, and there was nothing very surprising, he thought, about her presence tonight. Apparently he had inherited more than a gavel from the deposed Matt Wheeler.

She put his hand against her blouse and he felt the shape of her breast, the hard nugget of the nipple. He admired the sight of his hand there, the creviced skin against the flimsy cloth.

He stood up and pressed her against him. She wasn’t very tall. Her head was tilted back, her eyes half-closed, expecting a kiss. Tyler didn’t kiss—it was a dirty habit. Instead, he tangled his right hand in her hair and pulled.

Her eyes widened. He warned her not to speak, not to say anything. He didn’t like women who talked.

He pressed his hips against her, put his left hand under her blouse and explored. He pulled her head back until her throat was exposed in a fine white curve. She wasn’t sure what to make of the pain, seemed to hover between arousal and fear.

Her blue jeans were closed with a row of buttons. Tyler had opened two of them when Joey kicked open the door.

Colonel Tyler had never been wounded in combat—he had never experienced combat firsthand—and he was surprised when the bullet hit him.

There was pain and anger but first of all, above all else, an enormous surprise, as if it were an act of God, a causeless momentum that tumbled him backward.

He caught himself against the recliner with his right hand. The left hand, his left arm, in fact, wouldn’t answer to the helm. It felt as if someone had cut off the arm and replaced it with a fleshy, useless slab of rubber. There was blood all over his shoulder.

Beth was still standing, though the shot must have come very near her head. Tyler realized that she was screaming, that the sound was exterior to him.

“Move away,” Joey was telling her—the Colonel recognized Joey’s petulant whine. “Get out of the way.”

Tyler braced his hip against the recliner and reached for his own pistol.

He had loaded it earlier tonight. He had meant only to touch its cold steel against his forehead, perhaps taste the barrel with his tongue, as was his habit. Never to pull the trigger. Sissy always talked him out of that. But now someone else had pulled a trigger, someone else had shot him. Joey had shot him.

He grasped the pistol and swiveled around.

One foot slid against the polished oak floor and Tyler bumped to a sitting position with his back against the recliner. Joey must have tracked this motion as a fall, or ignored it altogether; his attention was still on Beth. To the Colonel’s eyes Joey looked grotesque, inflated with jealousy to bullfrog proportions.

“Move aside,” Joey repeated, and Beth seemed finally to understand; she took two steps toward the window and turned to look for Tyler. Perhaps she saw the blood for the first time; her eyes widened and Tyler wondered if she would scream again. Beth looked a little ridiculous, too, with her smooth belly showing through the gap of her unbuttoned pants.

Joey looked at the Colonel and the Colonel shot him in the head.

There was no precision or elegance in the act, only the raising of the pistol and the pulling of the trigger and Joey falling down and convulsing for a horrible thirty or forty seconds before he died.

Beth went to Joey and knelt above him and made a choked sound at the sight of his injury. Her hand rested on the pistol Joey had dropped beside him. Colonel Tyler watched that hand. Watch that hand, Sissy instructed him. Sissy was a sudden, nebulous presence hovering near the ceiling of the room, but Tyler didn’t look for her, merely followed her advice, watched Beth’s hand on the pistol.

She took up the pistol and turned it toward Tyler.

Was she offering it? Threatening him with it? The expression on her face was unreadable, opaque with grief. There was no way to calculate the danger.

So Colonel Tyler shot her, too.

At the sound of the third gunshot, Matt ran to his trailer and collected his Gladstone bag.

Kindle tried to restrain him at the door. “It’s stupid to go in there, Matthew. We don’t know what happened. Matthew! Just wait, for Christ’s sake!”

Matt ignored him, ran past him to the Connor house in its patch of moonlight, and inside, where it was dark.

Chapter 36

Prophylaxis

The girl was a mistake, Sissy said.

Colonel Tyler, weak with blood loss, climbed from the floor into the recliner and gave his mother’s ghost a weary look.

It was unusual for Sissy to be out after dark. But she was not merely present tonight, she was almost tangible. Her layered skirts billowed around her large body; her skin was fish-white and her eyes were crazed and attentive. If I walked over to that corner of the room, Tyler thought, I bet I could touch her.

You shouldn’t have shot the girl. You might have been able to explain about the boy. You might have gotten away with that. But not the girl. “You told me to watch her hand.” Nor to shoot her. “She picked up the gun!” She wouldn’t have used it.

Tyler began an answer but stopped as the door opened.

Matthew Wheeler stood there with his Gladstone bag and a dazed expression, obviously struggling to sort out what had happened. His eyes flickered from body to body—Joey, Beth, Tyler.

Tyler raised his pistol, an action that was almost reflexive, and aimed it at the doctor.

Now listen to me, Sissy said. If you don’t do this exactly right, everyone will come in here. Everyone will come nosing into this room to see what you did. They’ll know what you are. And we’ll be lost. So listen to me. Listen.

“Colonel Tyler,” the doctor said, “I can’t treat anyone if you’re pointing a gun at me. Let me come in.”

But his attention was obviously on Beth. The girl’s breathing was wet and loud in the room. It reminded Tyler of the sound bathwater made as it ran down the drain.

Tyler held the pistol firmly and listened to Sissy’s urgent whispers. Then he answered the doctor.

“Come in. Close the door behind you.”

“I’ll come in if you put down the gun.”

“You’ll come in or I’ll shoot you, Dr. Wheeler. It’s as simple as that.” Wheeler hesitated, but he entered the room after another long look at Beth.

“Now close the door,” Tyler said.

Wheeler did so. He moved to lean over the girl, was fumbling with his bag, but Tyler said, “No—not yet.”

The doctor’s irritation was obvious. “She needs attention. She’s badly injured.”

“Of course she is. I shot her. Now go to the window.” Wheeler looked skeptically at the pistol.

“I won’t hesitate to use this. Does it look like I would? We have two corpses here already.”

“One corpse,” Wheeler said. “She’s still alive.”

Tyler nodded impatiently and took more silent advice from Sissy: He leaned forward, though it hurt his bad arm, and trained the pistol on the girl. “So she is. I guess you want to keep it that way. Now go to the fucking window.”

Wheeler stood erect, finally, and did as he was told. “Pull up those blinds. All the way. Good. Now open the window. Good. And turn off the lamp.”