The man smiled at him. Took his hands down from their winged-up stance and rubbed his face. “As long as it took you to wake up.”

“I’m awake right now.”

“That right?”

“You Pompelli?”

The man laughed. Then looked up into the darkness of the overhead haymows and studied them. Back at Jamie. “You only think you’re awake.”

What happened then he thought as it was happening that later he would look back and see he’d missed something. The softlight footsteps onto the mowfloor chaff. A pivot turning in one of the men’s eyes. Some sense of something coming behind. All this ballooned in his brain the instant the hard round double end of a shotgun struck into the nape of his neck, the base of his skull. And from behind she said, “Toss it off. Toss it off, shithead.”

And in that moment between when she spoke and he understood, she did not wait but pulled the shotgun back away from his head and drove it forward again so the barrel ends struck him hard this time, knocking him forward and off balance even as her message came through and he let go of his gun, throwing it into the thick layer of last year’s chaff before the mounds of new hay. His head a bright brute flare of orange and clear-white pain. Then he was down on the floorboards, the rough uneven planks of the mow. Jeeter said, “There’s Mother now.”

The three men gathered Jamie up off the floor, all with little guns out like Jamie’s that one collected from the chaff and put in a pocket. His head a continual echo of pain. Amy Carrick in a housedress and open sweater holding across her front a shotgun more as one would hold a broom. One of the men went to her and lifted the shotgun away from her and she let him take it. Jamie could not see Carrick, he was behind where they made their group on the barnfloor but Jamie held no hope for Jeeter’s help anyway. That much he’d known before he tossed out that last cigarette and drove on in here.

They lashed his wrists behind him with a piece of lead-rope. He stood for this without moving or speaking. The one who’d first spoken was the leader of the three, not in some way overt but by inclination, the sweep of personality. Perhaps he was the most calm of the three. When they were done tying him the first man said to Jamie, “Like I said, you been expected. You want to see Mister Pompelli, do you? Well now, nothing so bad as he’s wanting to see you.”

Jamie said nothing to this.

The man stood regarding him a moment and then did a very odd thing: reached out and with one open hand lightly stroked Jamie’s cheek.

Then he turned and spoke to the Carricks. “You two follow us. Bring his car too. I don’t want it sitting here. Drop it off in Franconia, one of the hotel lots, and then follow on.”