“I will give you one last chance, Sid.” Gareth extricated himself from Sidney’s embrace. “Listen good. . . . There’s a passageway through the basement where we can go. It leads to the old rendering sheds. We can hide in them if you’ll go with me . . . Then we can light out together. . . . Are you listening? See, Sid . . . Quit holding him like that. Let go of him . . . You never held me like that . . . You love that filthy son of a bitch, don’t you? Tell me you do, for I can see it. You love him like you never loved me. I see it, I see it!”

Gareth walked to the far corner of the room as he spoke, fingering his rifle again cautiously, barely holding it as though it were fragile or might vanish from his grasp.

“Like you never loved me,” he kept repeating. “You four-flusher. Liar, murderer . . . So all this while you have lied to me about how you hated the son of the renderer and he hated you.”

“I always knew he loved me, Gareth. Never said he didn’t . . .” As he spoke, Sidney looked only in the direction of Roy Sturtevant, whose one hand he held in his.

“You can’t love white trash like him, Sid.”

Sidney’s head fell over on the scissors-­grinder’s chest.

Another bullet, also meant probably as a warning, went through the window pane, but it struck Sidney glancingly on the arm, bringing such a gush of blood. But again neither Sidney nor Gareth nor Roy paid any mind to this. One would have thought a film was being made, and all that occurred was foreseen and practiced and therefore merely observed and tolerated, if not indeed almost ignored.

Gareth drew closer to the two men.

“Get your mouth off that carcass, Sid, and come out with me.

“I cain’t, Garey . . . I couldn’t even if I wanted to. I cain’t run no more. I’m bushed and winded and busted from deep down. I belong with the one I have run from so long. I see that.”

“Do you know what, Sid . . . ? You . . .”

A staccato of bullets hit the house now from all sides. A man’s voice warned them deafeningly through a bullhorn.

“I’ll give you just five seconds to tell me you love me the most, Sid, that you will leave that dirty motherfucker you’re holding to your chest, and you come with me . . . Sid, you come with me, or else!”

“Else what? I’m not budgin’. I told you I have run enough . . . I won’t no more.”

Gareth raised his rifle.

“Then you double-­crossing corpse-­hunter, go join Brian and this cruddy blighter you’re so stuck on . . .”