“He shot her twice but not before she pushed the button letting us know there was a robbery. We got here when he was trying to get into the register. We put him down. You were out cold through the entire thing.”

“Good lord,” said Owen, and at first didn’t realize there were tears streaming down his face. He wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket.

“I’m gonna get a paramedic over here. Don’t try to stand up. Don’t move at all. We’ll get you checked out and off to the hospital.”

The paramedic turned out to be another kid Owen recognized from the library. He remembered first shaking hands with the boy beneath the scene of Sleeping Beauty years earlier, and recalled his name was Caleb. The young fellow took his blood pressure, shined a flashlight in his eyes, and performed a dozen other tests. Owen worked to collect himself. When the blue dots cleared from his eyes, he noticed the paramedic was trembling.

“Did you know Helen?” They were the same age and the town was so small.

Caleb didn’t answer. Instead, bottom lip quivering and pale as an empty page, he said, “OK. Do you have any intense pain in your back or legs? How about chest or shoulders?”

“No.”

“They’re bringing in the stretcher.”

A few minutes later, he was hoisted onto a bed with wheels. He requested that they put the head of the bed up, as he had a phobia about lying flat on his back. He’d suffered attacks of sleep paralysis in his early teens, and would freak out if he found himself in that position. After adjusting the bed, the second paramedic pumped the hydraulics of the conveyance, and Owen rose to see the scene clearly for the first time. He went lightheaded—yellow police tape, the bullet-riddled front window that should have shattered, six-packs of bottled soda stacked near the register for a quick sale, leaking from their wounds onto the linoleum.

They rolled him slowly toward the front door. The sunlight shining in made him squint and turn his head. When he did, he found he was facing the counter. Behind it he caught a glimpse of Helen—right eye, a burnt, bloody socket, left, glazed and staring, and a gaping flesh and blood blossom of a hole in her throat. Lying across her legs on his back was the gunman, none of his own wounds visible but a pool of blood beneath. Eyes closed, he appeared to simply be asleep, save for the froth on his lips and the fly on his forehead he wasn’t swatting away. Just before being blocked from the horrible sight by the second paramedic, Owen noticed a small black tattoo of a circle with a cross inside it on the gunman’s left wrist. At first, he’d thought it a second fly.