She hesitated. Taylor’s cheeks gleamed. Golly raised the hammer. “I mean that.”

She gave the order and Golly retreated, towing Taylor into the shadows of the office. Then she heard him exclaim happily, “Aha!” She didn’t know what he had found until Grape Fanta’s antique rock music began to swirl out and set an eerily festive mood.

The sun burned down for the ten longest minutes of her life. The TV vans arrived and set up. A dozen or so Bad Axers held up smartphones, recording. She prayed that she was right. There was no need to hurt her child. A chilling reverence had set in. Then it began.

First, Golly emerged from the shadows of the office behind Taylor dangling from his fist, the hammer re-cocked as a weapon over her little boy’s precious skull. Next step, at the end of Golly’s grip, it was Taylor who picked up the waiting gas can. Now Taylor and the can dangled as Golly awkwardly backed up and then went sideways into the frame of the broken window. From there, he reached back and spun Fanta’s old wheeled wooden desk chair until he had positioned it behind himself. He toppled back into it, keeping Taylor in front. He said something to Taylor. Taylor screwed the nozzle off the gas can.

His intent appeared: he wanted Taylor to douse him. But it was difficult. Hefting the heavy can, Taylor missed broadly twice, splashing himself and the floor. Then Golly found the answer was to push Taylor to arm’s length, bend forward in the chair as far as his bloated body would allow, and have Taylor empty the can over his neck and head like man getting a bath in a bucket. Taylor splashed more gas on himself in the process.

Then Golly pulled Taylor onto his lap and showed the cameras that he had a lighter.

Sheriff Kick expected him to give a speech now. France. Monk. Vietnam. Look at me. Look at us. Noon is our new midnight. The urgency of our war against ourselves, to save the planet.

Instead he seemed to lose himself in emotion. His head dropped, his gasoline-soaked robe slipped, and for one long minute his warty shoulders shook with what appeared to be grief. He recovered, and as he began to speak, her heart felt as if it would be crushed between her sudden fear that she had been wrong, and her desperate hope that she had guessed right.

“You may pretend to be astonished, to wonder why,” Jim Golly began. “But you have the facts. I’ve shared them many times with all of you. Not that you didn’t already have them. Not that you don’t live them. You are the facts. You know why.”