What was there to complain about? The view from the rocker was superb, prairie meadows giving way in the distance to the mountains, snowcapped (as was he) and remote (as was he), been there forever (as had he). He owned everything he could see except for the mountains (ownership: God). The late-spring climate temperate, the sun not so strong, the breeze mild. Children successful. Wife content, as much as any wife could be. He just kept getting richer, not of his own volition but by the working of certain mechanisms. Health fine, even superb. The new hip (number three) felt great, his ticker still ticked. Horses—too many, all sinewy beasts with plenty of go in them. His guns? Some new ones, in fascinating calibers, maybe a new sniper round to test out, called 6.5 Creedmoor, which promised lots of amusement of the dry, technical sort he so enjoyed. Friends—more than he deserved, and in places he never thought he’d go, from NRA celebs to old snipers to a few journalists, to a lot of big-animal vets across seven states, plus dozens of former marine NCOs, as salty a crew as could be imagined. Pickup trucks? Could only drive one at a time, so what was the point in having any more?

I have everything, he thought.

His late self-education was progressing in his leisure. He was on to Crimea now, trying to imagine battles under gunpowder clouds so vast and brutal that no one could see their limits, the wounds nasty and greenish, headed into gangrene, toward, ultimately, amputation without anesthetic save whiskey. As a man whose life had been saved several times—and he had the scars to prove it—by modern emergency medicine, this fact alone sent a tremor of dread down his straight old spine. Everything was fine.

He knew it couldn’t last.

It didn’t.

It was the lowest category of rental car, in a shade of Day-Glo otherwise found no place on earth, pulling up the long road in from Idaho 82. It had to mean some sort of trouble, because friends never came without a call first, and not one of them would travel under such brightness. No mailbox shouted SWAGGER to the world at the otherwise unmarked gate, and the size and beauty of the house was not manifest from the highway: the road could have just as easily led to a broken-down trailer or a complex of heavily armed religious zealots or some other monstrosity that had taken root in Idaho’s free soil.

He touched the .38 Super Commander holstered under the tail of his T-shirt, found it secure yet accessible in a second, though that was mere habit, as the arrival of a nuclear airburst fuchsia Tempo or Prism hardly presaged a gunfight. Actually, he would have preferred a gunfight.