“C’mere,” Belle commanded her heartily, “hug your little hero.”

She and Taylor were just reaching for each other when Barry Rickreiner squawked, “Get away from me!”

She looked over her shoulder. He had been marching toward his El Camino, running his mouth, but now he found his way blocked, first one direction, then the other, defiantly, by the barefoot kid in the filthy cargo shorts. Just as Taylor grasped her hands, she stiffened. Paired with the action of harassing Rickreiner, the kid’s face made sense.

Patience Goodgolly!

The sheriff pulled away and sprinted.

“What is this shit?” BARRY HER squawked. “Get away from me!”

Now the backpack dropped to show the sawed-off shotgun. Then the girl showed its purpose. He recoiled, stumbling on a fire hose as she trained her weapon on him at point-blank range.

“Who the fuck are you?”

She held the shotgun steady. He backpedaled toward empty space, starting his El Camino remotely with a key. She stalked, culling him from the innocent.

“Patience.”

“The fuck?”

“Patience,” she was telling him a second time when he turned and ran for his vehicle. Her gun barrel followed, aimed from the hip. Coming at a cross angle, Sheriff Kick launched herself and dove, twisting through the shotgun’s path, ducking her head as she tackled BARRY HER out from under the blast, feeling shot rip through her hip and lower ribs in the same instant when the El Camino exploded.

Except for steam hissing high into the air from the Broadcaster building, there followed a ringing, sweltering silence. Sheriff Kick half rolled and tried to rise. But Deputy Luck had corralled Patience, who was not resisting.

She fell back. As BARRY HER struggled beneath her, this was what she stared at: black ash and white vapor climbing in a harsh blue sky.

EPILOGUE

The miscarriage occurred in her surgical recovery room at 4:47 the next morning while she was alone watching cable news on mute, specifically during a commercial for a device that allowed you to pedal your feet in tiny circles from a sitting position while you watched TV.

The surprise event began as a swoon that she thought was exasperation with human weakness, but then it took her deeper than that, into a full minute of synesthetic heartburn that tasted like coyotes howling.

She thought, Uh-oh.

Heidi, your wires are crossing big-time.

She turned off the TV while experiencing a cramp that bit just like a menstrual cramp except it hung on.

Then she felt a deep inner spasm, followed by a slow, trailing wetness that when she looked—incompletely able to bend over her shattered rib and repaired skin—had carried out of her a blurrily shaped magenta clot the size of a soybean.

She wept until just after sunrise, when a nurse came to bring her crackers and apple juice for breakfast, then cleaned her thighs, changed her underpants, gown, and sheet, fixed her with a pad, and took her baby away.