As she reached Second Street, a voice behind her said, “Where do you want me, Sheriff?”

She turned to see Deputy Lyndsey Luck in uniform stepping from the battered gold minivan that served as Farmstead’s only cab. Deputy Luck looked wan and weak, a shell of her sturdy self. Somehow her duty boots must have gotten misplaced in the hospital, because the cuffs of her uniform trousers sat atop light blue terry-cloth slippers. But here she was. The sheriff exhaled and steadied herself. It was a small thing, maybe, but the rookie’s toughness calmed her.

“You can move people back and set a perimeter at two hundred feet. Nobody but police and fire inside that.”

She scanned the swelling crowd for the Rickreiners. The jackass who wanted her job had his firearm unholstered again and was asking for volunteers to rush the newspaper office, citing posse comitatus.

She called her rookie back and pointed.

“We can’t let him escalate. Give him ten seconds to lock that thing inside his vehicle. Over there, that red El Camino. He takes you to eleven, Taser him, cuff him, and take him away.”

“My pleasure,” Deputy Luck said.

Now here came Grammy Belle and Harley.

“Just the way I heard it,” her mother-in-law was saying, “she’s doing nothing.”

“Ma, stop.”

“Don’t tell me to stop.”

Belle was red-faced, sweat-lathered, in full voice around a half-smoked cigarette.

“That’s my grandbaby in there. Do not tell me to stop. I’m going in to get him.”

“Stop, Mom.” Harley yanked her back. “Heidi, why is everybody just standing around?”

She could hardly croak her terrible answer. Her decision was not up for examination or discussion, not even by Taylor’s daddy or his grandma. “Please don’t bother me. I’m working.”

“Working? That’s our boy. You’re his mother.”

“Harley, let me do my job.”

“Ma!” Again Harley had to catch Belle by the arm, stop her from charging the newspaper office in her bikini top. The jolt sent her cigarette flying. Harley stepped on it. “Mother,” he said.

“I’m not just going to stand here.”

“Yes, you are. Heidi, what’s going on? What’s the plan?”

She managed to get a breath to the bottom of her lungs. She had to be right. “You’re looking at the plan. Wait. Watch.”

“She’s letting him just sit in there with a monster!”

Just then she heard the fire trucks shrieking away from the public safety building a half mile north of town. They would arrive in sixty seconds and she needed to direct them.

“Go away, Harley. Now. Take Mom with you.”

Two minutes later, she had positioned the fire trucks so that TV vans could get around them onto Second Street. Golly hauled Taylor forward and squinted out until he found her.

“Sheriff, be a doll,” he called, “and leave the hoses on the trucks.”