Now the lights themselves, three of them, swung into view, forty or fifty feet away. Merrill brought both automatics forward and set them on the ground in front of him. Twenty-eight shots before reloading amounted to a field of fire of his own. Then the hand grenade. Not three men in all, but four. One had a hand-held radio up to his ear.

Merrill started shooting. The men scattered. He was blinded by the muzzle-flashes and deafened by the noise. He dropped the guns and picked up the grenade. Chino’s guns were firing overhead and Merrill could see muzzle flashes in front of him. Young trees were crashing down everywhere. Merrill pulled the pin and threw the grenade up through the opening in the canopy. He picked up the guns, and as he buried his face in the dirt, started shooting again. The explosion bounced him in the air as if the earth itself had become a trampoline and he came down so hard on his belly he cried out as the wind was knocked from him.

Merrill’s ears hurt. Distantly he could hear men screaming. He gathered up the bag and the guns and scrambled low away from the wall. No one was shooting. Apparently he had taken even Chino by surprise. He was around the corner of the wall, in the path he had taken earlier, when someone fired a shot, and the others followed suit. The shooting was in the other direction, away from him. They didn’t know what they were doing.

Amy raised her eyes as Gregory swept into the bar, eyes beaming. His pants below the knees were soiled — stained. He moved close to the bar. When Chino had said “chained,” he hadn’t been kidding: a bright chrome chain led from a padlocked belt around her waist to a ring that seemed bolted to the bar for the purpose. “Consider yourself lucky,” Chino had said as he fastened the belt, “if we were in a more playful mood, this could have been a dog collar.” The chain was long enough to allow her to stand, but not enough to allow her to take a step in any direction. Chino had left it to Gregory to attend the amenities, so Gregory had left all the stools on the other side of the bar so she would have to stand — and the chips out of reach so she would have to go hungry.

Then the shooting had started — by the sound of it, from the front of the house. Then from the rear, more of it, louder, growing in intensity. Amy could identify some rifles by their reports, but not the handguns. Sam was a lousy shot, but at least he knew it, and he had the cover of a moonlit night. The explosion had made her scream.