After an hour, Helen’s face and neck gleamed with sweat, and her shoulders ached. She had completed three circuits and counted only a handful of misses. Despite wearing plugs, her ears still rang with the sound of the gunfire, but like always, she felt better. More in control of herself and her emotions.

When she was a young girl and only child, her father had taken her dove hunting every fall and deer hunting in the winters. By the time she was thirteen years old, she was a crack shot with a twelve gauge and not bad with a rifle. John Paul “J. P.” Lewis had been a lieutenant in the Pulaski Police Department, and he worked six days a week. Since he was always working or sleeping, the only quality time Helen ever had with him was in a field or a deer stand. Though her mother abhorred the hunting excursions, thinking they made her daughter “too rough” and hurt her chances to compete in beauty pageants, Helen loved every minute of them. For her sixteenth birthday, her dad took her to a range and showed her how to shoot handguns. Then let her ride patrol with him that night, and she saw him arrest a drunk driver. J. P. Lewis wasn’t a sophisticated man by any stretch, but he was a good man and had an important job that had helped keep the town safe.

What would Daddy have thought about what I did in law school? she wondered, cringing as she stuffed the snub-nose revolver in her pocket and headed for the door.

She turned off the lights to the warehouse and locked up. Then she walked toward her car—a government-issued black Crown Victoria. She’d stopped at home to change clothes after work and now wore faded jeans, a gray sweater, and a black cap with an orange T on the front. She had replaced the high heels with dark brown cowboy boots—“shitkickers,” as her daddy would have called them.

As she started the vehicle and gazed out at the hilly landscape of Highway 64, which was lit by a full moon, she wished she could call Tom; if there was anyone in the world she could talk to about her current predicament, Tom McMurtrie would have been that person.

But cancer had taken Tom last year. Helen had no one she could speak with about her problem, so she did what she always did when she was under extreme stress. She didn’t talk to anyone. She didn’t pray. She didn’t go for a long walk or run.

She’d fired her powerful revolver over and over again at the paper targets, and as the sound and smell of gunfire filled her eardrums and nostrils, she eventually realized there was only one fail-safe solution to her current situation.