“Jesus, you’re getting all philosophical on me.” She squeezed again. Blam. Ting! A can flew off the fence. “I did it! I don’t believe it!”

“Yes!” Eldon said, giving her a hug. “Awesome!”

It didn’t take long until she could hit a can about half the time. Not bad, Eldon said, considering how small the can was and how far away she was standing. “If it was a moose,” he said, “you’d have no problem. And really, how often do you see a little can walking through the woods, anyway?”

She went to hand him the gun when they were finished, but he said, “No, it’s yours. I got it for you. You keep it. You know how to use it now. It’s small. It’ll fit in your handbag.”

Well, she didn’t want to carry it in her handbag. She was too frightened by what it could do. She couldn’t imagine using it on anything but a tin can. And there was the baby. It wasn’t safe, having guns around with a baby in the house.

But she didn’t tell him all that. She kissed him and thanked him. He wanted to do the right thing for her. He just wanted her to be safe. Things had been kind of crazy the last few months, and he wanted her to have some protection. But he was her protection. She didn’t want to have to carry a gun around in her purse.

There was a war on, and Eldon was feeling pretty tense. Not just because of the skirmishes between the Slots, who owned the Kickstart and were led by Gary, and the Comets from across town. The battle over hookers and drugs would have been enough to keep someone awake at night. But Eldon was troubled by how ineffective a leader Gary was. Gary needed to take bold action. He needed to make it clear to the Comets, once and for all, that the Slots were in charge.

But Gary wasn’t a planner. He was ruled by impulses, often reckless ones. A Molotov cocktail had been tossed through the window of the Kickstart, starting a small fire. Luckily, it was after hours, no one got killed. But Eldon couldn’t stop thinking about what might have happened if Candace had been there. If the fire had spread upstairs, to the office, where she often worked late into the night adding up the receipts, doing the books.

She could have been killed, those motherfuckers.

The Comets were sending a warning, that they were moving in. They had to send a message back.

Eldon, who’d been content up to now to let Zane and Eldridge and Payne handle the more violent stuff, pressed Gary to take a stand. Run a tractor-trailer through their clubhouse, he said. Find their homes and blow them up. Go nuclear on them.