“It might be robbers, Myra,” I pointed out. “Wouldn’t be a bit surprised if that’s who it was. I hear they do their robbin’ late at night when decent folks is in bed.”

“You fool! You stupid, spineless, cowardly slob! Are you the sheriff of this county or not?” Myra yelled.

“Well,” I said, “I guess you could say that.”

“And isn’t it the sheriff’s job to take care of criminals? Isn’t it? Answer me, you—you—!”

“Well, I guess you could say that, too,” I said. “I ain’t thought much about it, but it sounds reasonable.”

“You—you get down there!” Myra spluttered. “Doggone you, you get right down there this minute, or I’ll—I’ll—’’

“But I ain’t got no clothes on,” I said. “Nothin’ but my long-handled drawers. Wouldn’t hardly seem right goin’ to the door without no clothes on.”

Myra’s voice dropped so low that I could hardly hear it, but her eyes flashed fire. “Nick,” she said, “this is the last time I’m going to tell you. You go to the door right this minute, or you’ll wish you had! You’ll really wish you had!”

The pounding was getting a lot louder by now, and someone was shouting my name, someone that sounded an awful lot like Ken Lacey. So, what with Myra carrying on like she was, I figured maybe I’d better go to the door.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed, and pulled on my boots. I studied ‘em a minute, wetting my finger with spit and rubbing down a little scuffed place. I yawned and stretched, and scratched under my armpits.

Myra let out a groan. She snatched up my britches and flung ‘em at me, so that the legs wrapped around my neck like a scarf.

“You ain’t mad about somethin’, are you honey?” I said, getting the britches untangled and starting to draw ‘em on. “I sure hope I ain’t annoyed you no way.”

She didn’t say anything. Just started to swell up like she was about to explode.

“I got a trade-last for you,” I said. “A fella was saying to me the other day, he said, ‘Nick, you got the prettiest mother in town.’ So I asked him who he meant, naturally, because my mama’s been dead for years. And he said, ‘Why, that lady you call Myra. You mean to tell me she ain’t your mother?’ That’s just what he said, honey. So now you got to tell me something nice that someone said about me.”

She still didn’t say anything. She just leaped at me, sort of meowing like a cat, her hands clawed to scratch my eyes out.

She didn’t do it, because I’d been kind of expecting something like that. All the time I was talking to her, I was easing back toward the door. So instead of landing on me, she came up against the wall, clawing the heck out of it a-fore she could come to her senses.

Meantime, I went on downstairs and opened the door.