But Bloom McCourt didn’t drink, not anymore, and the sliding glass door in her hotel room didn’t lock, and Jack knows what he smelled on Beth’s hands. He didn’t dream that. His father sent Beth to visit Bloom as a sympathetic friend, to find out who she might’ve told about the explosive materials in the barn. Once Beth made sure Bloom hadn’t told anyone, she smashed his mother’s head in, and watched her drown, and planted the empty bottles of gin. Jack might suffer from night terrors, but not idiocy, and the facts have been in front of him for some time now.

Jack hurries after his father. As Hank crosses the porch, he grabs the clapper in the old rusted dinner bell and gongs it, once, twice, a third time: the signal for a raid.

His father crosses the dirt apron in front of the farmhouse, angling toward the barn. He doesn’t seem to notice that Jack has moved the F-150. As Hank reaches the big double swinging doors, Jack sees Connor coming up the road, moving in a jerky, hopping stride, his eyes wild and his shirt unbuttoned, a hunting rifle in both hands.

“What . . . ?” Connor cries.

“They’re here,” Jack’s father says. “It’s happening. They’ve got Beth, so she’s out of it. We move quick enough, we can cut through them like a knife through butter, shoot our way through their line and get to the east side of Long Field. The old Jeep is parked in the corn shed. We could be in Iowa by lunch. There’s plenty of men in the movement who will hide us. But we need the guns buried under the tractor.”

“Fuck!” Connor says, and staggers into the darkness of the barn.

His father yanks himself up into the John Deere. Connor hurries to the air compressor, flips it on, and grabs the big post-hole digger. They can have their fully automatic machine guns in five minutes if they work quickly. Jack watches from the open double doors long enough to be sure they’re both occupied, and then he walks to the pile of ammonium nitrate against the wall. There’s a box of kitchen matches on the worktable, next to an oil lamp. Jack lights the fuse on his improvised pipe bomb, constructed just exactly the way Connor taught him.

Jack walks back to the big double doors of the barn like a sleepwalker, but he isn’t sleepwalking—he’s got his eyes wide open, and the morning is bright and blue and clear. He swings the doors shut and locks them with the big Yale padlock. The two men won’t be able to get out the side door either. He has already backed his father’s Ford F-150 against it, so it can’t be forced open.