One night she was sitting in a gravel parking lot casing a bar that was housed in a giant converted barn with a neon sign that said, WALLY’S SKY CLUB. She supposed the name had to do with the fact that it was at the top of a mountain. As she watched, four couples walked from the dimly lit gravel parking lot into the barn-like wooden structure. Leah considered that a good omen, because the more pairs and single women were in a bar, the less likely the men had nothing to do but fight. She heard the sound of a violin being tuned, a burst of applause, and then a live country band began to play. The door opened and stayed open as the couples streamed inside, and Leah watched men and women in jeans, cowboy hats, and boots form themselves into ranks and begin doing a line dance.

Leah stayed outside. A tall woman like her coming in alone attracted a certain amount of notice, and the right amount of notice tonight was none. The new couples formed their own row in the back and did a boot scoot with the others. After a few minutes, the band didn’t stop, but just moved on into a new song, and the crowd started an electric slide. Leah spotted a pretty woman with long black hair wearing a crushed straw cowboy hat, a white lace top, and skin-tight jeans who seemed to be acting as the dance leader. Whatever she was doing, the rest of the people did too. It occurred to Leah that maybe she was paid by the bar or the band. When the song ended, the woman went off for a drink, so the crowd began to dance on their own, most of them doing a two-step, cruising around the floor on random courses.

She scanned the faces of the men she could see through the open door, but none of them looked like the men she was hunting for. She turned her attention to people coming and going in the parking lot. Wolf, Mann, and Leonard might not be dancers, and they probably wouldn’t dare go out to pick up strange women this soon after the raid on Weldonville, but they probably didn’t mind having a drink. She sat through the band’s second set, and then saw some of the patrons going outside.

Some of them had come out to cool off, as though Wally’s air-conditioning wasn’t sufficiently powerful to make up for the dancing. Some lit cigarettes, and she could see the tiny orange tips and then the strands of smoke curling and folding in on themselves and rising to catch the light from fixtures mounted above the barn door.