Carl, naked and holding a handgun, grinned at him. “How goes, it, Sheriff?”

“Damn it!” Brad dropped the papers as he fumbled for his own weapon. Behind him, he could hear Hank doing the same.

“We don’t want no trouble, Carl,” the deputy said.

“That’s right,” Brad assured him. “Your beef is with the bank, not us. We’re just doing our job. So put the gun down, we’ll forget this ever happened, and you get yourself a good lawyer and settle things with the bank.” He had gotten into the stance and was aiming his weapon at the man on the porch, whose own gun was pointed downward, loosely grasped in his dangling hand.

Carl’s smile suddenly disappeared, replaced by an expression of rage. “Get a lawyer?” he screamed. “Get a lawyer? I can’t even make the monthly payments on this shithole!” With one swift movement, his hand was raised, the gun pointed at his temple.

“No!” Brad shouted.

And Carl pulled the trigger.

2

When Coy Stinson was ten, his parents took him and his full piggy bank to the Valley National Bank, where a nice old lady helped him count all of his pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. He had been entranced by the way each type of coin was carefully packed into a brown paper tube, all of them making hard solid rolls when they were filled: four groups of different-sized cylinders lined up in a neat row on top of the teller’s countertop. He had then been given his very own passbook to keep track of his money, and a free calculator just for opening an account.

If it had been up to him, he would have gone back to the bank each time he found a penny on the ground or a dime in the coin return of a vending machine, handing his passbook to the teller so she could stamp the date and write in the amount he had deposited. But his parents had frowned on that idea and made him wait until his piggy bank was full.

The bank, to him, had seemed a wonderful place. Calm, quiet, warm in the winter and cool in the summer, the people nice and polite, adults addressing him as “sir.”

The view from the inside was not as rosy.

He had worked at the Montgomery Community Bank since graduating from high school. Supplementing his work experience with classes taken at the community college, Coy had risen to the rank of loan officer and then senior loan officer. He liked being able to help people realize their dreams and improve their lives: get that new car, buy that new house, build that addition, purchase that adjacent lot. What he didn’t like was turning people down, shattering their dreams, condemning them to the hardscrabble lives they were already living.

Foreclosures were the worst.

But that, luckily, was not his department. He issued loans. What happened after that was the responsibility of Cal and Maggie, who processed the payments. Theoretically, he had the hopeful, positive end of the transaction, the most optimistic part of the process, particularly since the bank had such a generous lending policy. But Montgomery Community was small, and when his clients went under, he knew about it, even though he wasn’t directly involved, and a lot of times it broke his heart. Coy remembered a newlywed couple whom he’d helped to buy a condo in that new development on the east end of town. The husband had just been hired as a salesman by Apache Toyota-Chevrolet, and the wife worked part-time as a pharmacist’s assistant at Walgreen’s. Every time he’d see them at the grocery store, he’d always ask how they were doing, and they’d always gush about how they loved living in Montgomery and how they loved their home. Unfortunately, the recession hit, the man lost his job and, unable to keep up with the payments using just the wife’s part-time salary, they walked away from the condo, leaving town without telling anyone where they were going.