Ed bent over and felt at the neck of one, then of the other.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “They’re both dead, but how?”

Stone helped him and they pulled the twins apart. One had a bullet wound in his back at the base of his neck, the other a wound in the chest.

“How many shots did you fire?” Rawls asked.

“Two, I think, but I don’t think one of them hit anything. I couldn’t see very well.”

“Give me a hand,” Rawls said, taking an arm and hoisting. Stone helped, and he and Rawls lifted the body. “There,” Rawls said. “You killed them both with one round.”

Rawls let the body go, took out his hunting knife and walked to the wooden support and dug into it with the blade. A moment later, he had a slug in his hand. “What are you firing?”

“Nine millimeter,” Stone replied.

“See if the one with the slug in his chest has an exit wound.”

Stone rolled him over. “No,” he said.

“Well, at the shooting range, that shot would have won you a big, fuzzy, pink rabbit.”

Then Primmy was standing next to Stone, still naked, dabbing at his scalp with a cloth soaked in vodka. “Here,” she said, taking his empty hand and pressing it to his head, “hold that in place while I get another cloth.”

Rawls shouted up at the porch. “Carly!” he yelled. “Throw me down a couple of blankets.”

“Will beach towels do?”

“Yes!”

She dropped the towels over the railing, and Rawls began the job of wrapping up the bodies and securing them with duct tape from his bag.

“I saw some leaf bags in the barn,” Rawls said to her. “Get me four of them, will you?”

Carly disappeared.

Primmy came back, wearing clothes now, with another towel and some big Band-Aids and cleaned up Stone, while Ed and Carly got the bodies into the double leaf bags.

“There’s not much cleaning up to do,” Rawls said. “They both died instantly, so they didn’t bleed much.” He kicked dirt over what was on the ground.

“Stone, let’s get these into your car and down to my boat,” Rawls said. “The sun will be setting in half an hour. You ladies clean up the inside of the house and the porch. Tomorrow, I’ll come by and patch that bullet hole in the porch support, and we’ll be clear.”

Stone and Rawls got the bagged corpses into the back of the MG and moved them over to Rawls’s dock, where they loaded them into the boat.

“You’re going to need some help dumping them,” Stone said.

“No, I’ve got enough iron and chain around here to handle it. You make sure our crime scene is in order, and then get the girls home. I’ll take care of everything here. Oh, and give me your gun.”