Jimmy Dale always told others that if you’re a rodeo man, “you ride it to the buzzer.” But in truth he had never ridden it to the buzzer and had set himself up to fail. One lesson you learned quickly in prison: Once inside, time stopped, and you didn’t have to make comparisons. Outside the walls or the fences topped with coils of razor wire, you had to keep score. Inside the system, the reflection you saw in a mirror was no problem. Everybody around you was a loser. The big score of the day was to get high on pruno or nutmeg and black coffee or have a punk free of AIDS delivered to your cell.

Jimmy Dale could feel tears welling in his eyes. Screw Troyce Nix, he thought. I cain’t shoot the guy in the middle of town. It ain’t supposed to happen. I give it my best and I’m out and that’s it.

He fired up his stolen car, a gush of oily smoke bursting from the exhaust pipe, and waited for a tractor-trailer to clear the diesel pumps so he could pull back on the two-lane. Then he saw Troyce Nix and his girlfriend emerge from their motel room and walk toward their pickup truck, chatting with each other, the sunlight warm on their faces.

You gonna do Nix or let him do you? What’s it gonna be, waddie? a voice inside him said.

Jimmy Dale hit his fist on the steering wheel. When Nix was in the traffic, Jimmy Dale pulled onto the two-lane, three cars behind Nix, hating all the forces that had made him the driven man he was.

TROYCE AND CANDACE bought camping supplies and warmer clothes at Bob Wards, and groceries and gasoline at Costco, then drove through an underpass into North Missoula and parked their truck at a recreation area in a poor neighborhood where a chapter of Narcotics Anonymous was holding a five-fifteen meeting and a potluck supper.

Troyce didn’t understand why Candace wasted her time with a bunch of addicts, since she didn’t use dope anymore or have any of the dependent characteristics that he associated with junkies. But live and let live, he thought, and carried a paper plate of fried chicken and potato salad to a lone table among maple trees behind the baseball diamond backstop. Through the wire screen, he could see the whole panorama of the park: worn base paths, the patches of yellow grass in the outfield, an empty swing set in the distance, houses along the street that had no fences between them, and gardens where vegetables grew rather than flowers.

Most poor neighborhoods didn’t have fences, he thought. The porches had gliders on them and sometimes stuffed couches. On one corner there was a small grocery store with a neon bread ad in the window. An ancient brick firehouse, painted lead-gray, stood on another corner. Unlike in subdivision neighborhoods, sidewalks connected the houses. A kid was flying a kite emblazoned with the image of the comic-book hero Captain America, the kite stiffening in the wind, rising higher and higher into a perfect blue sky.

How had he, Troyce Nix, ended up in both the Abu Ghraib prison and this working-class neighborhood in the northern Rockies? He was the same man and had the same hair, skin, eyes, bone, and sinew that had defined him in the mirror many years ago. How had he gone from the winter-green palm-dotted alluvial floodplains of the Rio Grande Valley to an Iraqi prison whose floors during the regime of Saddam Hussein had been stained by fluids that had become part of the stone and could not be scrubbed out? And from there to a contract jail where, in many ways, he had stacked time inside the machinations and perversity he had helped create and to which he had given legitimacy?

Now, on a breezy, warm afternoon in a town that was ringed by mountains and traversed by three rivers, he was eating by himself at a picnic table carved with names and initials and hearts and arrows, like petroglyphs left by ancient people on a cave wall, while one hundred feet away a woman he had come to love sat among junkies, ex-prostitutes, and petty boosters, waving at him, her face full of joy and expectation, her faith and belief in him like that of a child.

Beyond the baseball diamond, a gas-guzzler was parked in the shade, its paint pocked with blisters. Had he seen the same vehicle at Bob Wards or at Costco? There were shadows on the windshield, and Troyce could not tell if anyone was behind the steering wheel. A city groundskeeper was driving a mower along the swale, the discharge from the blades firing sideways against the parked vehicle, pinging the metal with chopped-up pinecones, blowing a cloud of dust and grass cuttings through the open window.

Troyce bit into a drumstick and turned his attention back to the dancing kite emblazoned with the shield and winged helmet and masked face of Captain America. For some reason, backdropped by a blue sky, it seemed the most beautiful piece of art he had ever seen.

THE GRINDING AND pinging sounds of the mower were like slivers of glass in Jimmy Dale’s ears. He waited until the driver had threaded his machine around a couple of trees and had turned onto the swale on the park’s far side, then he got into the backseat and slid the Remington pump from the duffel bag.

Now he was in a perfect shooter’s position. His vehicle was inside dark shade, the rifle easily concealed below the level of the passenger window, his target lit by spangled sunlight on the other side of the ball diamond. By propping the rifle over the right front seat, he could fire at an angle out the passenger window, hiding the muzzle flash, perhaps even muffling the report. He could probably get off two shots before anyone realized what had happened.

He pumped a round into the Remington’s chamber and sighted on Troyce Nix’s yellow-tinted aviator glasses. Even if he missed, the round would strike the side of a parked truck, so he was not endangering an innocent person. There was no excuse for not taking Nix out. He’d be doing Nix a favor, pocking one right through the lens, following it up for good measure with a second one in the forehead, putting him out of his perverted misery, maybe saving somebody else from being raped at another contract prison.

Then a kid pulling a kite string ran across Jimmy Dale’s line of vision. The wind had dropped, and the kite was dipping precariously close to the tops of the maple trees that bordered the park. Jimmy Dale lowered the rifle, easing the hammer down on the firing pin with his thumb, and watched the kid coiling up his string, running backward, lifting the kite’s tail across the top branches of a maple. Jimmy Dale let out his breath and felt his heart slow and his pulse stop jumping in his neck, as though someone had declared a temporary truce in his war with Troyce Nix, just so everyone could watch a young boy save his kite from crashing into a treetop.

Then the wind gusted across the baseball diamond, blowing a cloud of fine dust from the base paths, and the kite rattled against its stick frame again and rose steadily into the sky. Now the kid and his kite were safely out of the way, and Jimmy Dale’s view of his target was unobstructed, his choices clear. He raised the rifle, thumbed back the hammer, and sighted on Troyce Nix’s face, his pulse beating in his throat.

The mowing machine was headed down the swale toward Jimmy Dale’s vehicle, the engine roaring louder and louder, rocks splintering sideways off the blades. Jimmy Dale looked through the back window, the rifle balanced across the top of the passenger seat. The groundskeeper was turning the mower around, cutting a clean swath through blue fescue back toward the far curb. Jimmy Dale threw the rifle stock to his shoulder, put Nix’s mouth squarely in the steel notch on the rifle barrel, and slowly tightened his index finger on the trigger.

I’m gonna blow your cranberries, Cap. This is for every guy you sodomized back at the joint. Hope you find a shady spot in the flames.