“So there you go,” Shelby said. “And you didn’t even need me to help you.”

Jess pushed back from the table. “We should go,” she told Burke.

“You know how to find this place?” he said.

“No,” she replied, “but I guess I’m going to have to remember.”

She pushed her chair in, heard Lucy scramble to her feet under Shelby’s table. Burke was already turning to reach for the door handle. Then a car’s headlights raked through the living room window. An engine cut out, doors slammed shut. Men’s voices.

Lucy whined.

*  *  *

“Damn it,” Mason said, peering out from the window’s edge at Shelby Walker’s front yard. Beyond, on the street, a Makah County cruiser and a black SUV sat parked at the curb. Four men stood talking, gesturing up at the house, and Mason could see they were armed.

“They’re here,” he said, turning back to where Jess and Shelby stood in the kitchen.

“Who, Kirby and his boyfriends?” Shelby scoffed. “Let them come. What are they going to do, arrest me?”

“They burned down my house,” Jess told her. “Killed my husband and tried to kill me and Burke. I think we’re a little past the right to remain silent.”

Mason crossed the living room quickly. “We have to go,” he said. “All of us.”

Jess already had the back door open. Lucy slipped through, ears perked. She disappeared into darkness, Jess’s hand on her lead the only thing keeping her from finding another chunk of Kirby Harwood’s ass to lay her teeth into.

Shelby Walker was still standing by the kitchen table, though. She hadn’t moved. “What, and leave my mama behind?” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Jess appeared in the doorway. “Why aren’t we doing this?”

“Her mama,” Mason explained.

“She’s bedridden; I told you,” Shelby said. She gestured to the open door. “You all go. I won’t tell Kirby what she told us, I promise.”

Jess stared at her. “Those men will kill you if you don’t, Shelby. They’ll do whatever it takes. This isn’t some game to them.”

Shelby turned fast, surprising them all. “I know damn well this isn’t a game,” she said, and she went into the living room and came back holding a rifle. “My dad’s old thirty-aught,” she said. “About the only thing of value he ever gave to me.”

“And what are you going to do with that? Kill them all?”

Shelby fixed her with that look of hers, defiance and pride. Made sure Mason saw too. “I’m defending what’s mine,” she said. “You all run if you want to, but it’ll take more than a pack of limp-dick deputies to clear me out of this place.”

Boots on the porch. A knock at the front door. Harwood’s voice. “Shelby? You in there?”