“He’s gone,” she said, her voice a croak, escaping her downturned mouth as she worked her way across a mound of earth. “He must have found a way.”

Bender came crashing down the hillside and stopped at the creek. He went to one knee and aimed. “Drop the weapon and get on the ground!” he bellowed again.

“Mrs. Golly, please. Stop exactly where you are. Talk to me. He found a way to do what? Tell me. Do what?”

As if she seemed to hear this finally, the ragged woman paused, her head and shoulders swaying side to side, the rifle moving with her. Her words came out as cries of pain.

“Jim thinks it’s his call to save us all.”

“From what?”

“He was calling people, warning them. No one believed. He must have found a way,” she repeated.

“To do what, Mrs. Golly?”

“The newspaperman said bring the world to him.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning I’m free,” she wrenched out.

“Mrs. Golly, put the rifle down.”

“Free,” she repeated.

She took another step and Bender shot her.

The impact spun the woman and dropped her onto her face. The birdsong stopped. As the woman convulsed and tried to crawl, Sheriff Kick lunged and picked up her rifle. It was unloaded, she saw, its chamber struck hollow by the first rays of light to touch the bottom of Jim Golly’s abruptly silent abyss.

CHAPTER 43

More glass shatters. To the wail of a fourth alarm, she drags him inside a bowling alley, where they swill soda and roll bowling balls. It seems like she has never used a straw before, doesn’t understand until he plunges one into her icy Coke and fits the other end between her lips.

“Never hamburger,” she tells him for some reason. “Many hurt. Bad men. Never hamburger.”

She doesn’t know which fingers to put inside the bowling ball until he shows her. She rolls with startling strength, claps her rough hands when she hits anything.

But she moves from one thing to another in a hurry. After half a dozen rolls, she ignores her returning ball and takes his ball away and drops it and walks him to the red vinyl seating. There she kisses him. She moves her shotgun off the cushion, sits him down, and places his hands upon the pins that close her dress.

“Love.”

He turns toward police sirens.

“Love me,” she commands.

He pulls six straight pins and the dress falls.

“Love me beautiful.”

As she fumbles with his filthy shorts he has an uneasy memory of how this went with Cassie, back when, awkwardly in the dark, high on the same bunchgrass hillside that later caught fire and swept down.