Mary Beth watched Tom stagger into the field. He stopped ten feet away from the window. “You fucking bitch! You get yourself ready. We’ll be back.” He glanced down and crouched out of view for a moment. He stood up again, holding a rock the size of a large orange in his good hand. He flung it through the bars. Mary Beth stumbled backward as it sailed into the room, missing her by a scant foot. She sank onto the couch, sobbing.

As they walked toward the woods she heard Tom call again, “Get yourself ready!”

They were at Harris Tomel’s house, a nice five-bedroom colonial on a good-sized cut of grass the man’d never done a lick of work to. Tomel’s idea of lawn decorations was parking his F-250 in the front yard and his Suburban in the back.

He did this because, being the sort-of college boy of the trio and owning more sweaters than plaid shirts, Tomel had to try a little harder to seem like a shit-kicker. Oh, sure, he’d done fed time but it was for some crappy scam in Raleigh where he sold stocks and bonds in companies whose only problem was that they didn’t exist. He could shoot good as a sniper but Culbeau’d never known him to whale on anybody by himself, skin on skin, at least nobody who wasn’t tied up. Tomel also thought about things too much, spent too much time on his clothes, asked for call liquor, even at Eddie’s.

So unlike Culbeau, who worked hard on his own split-level, and unlike O’Sarian, who worked hard picking up waitresses who’d keep his trailer nice, Harris Tomel just let the house and yard go. Hoping, Culbeau assumed, that it’d goose the impression that he was a mean fuck.

But that was Tomel’s business and the three men weren’t at the house with its scruffy yard and Detroit lawn ornaments to discuss landscaping; they were here for one reason only. Because Tomel had inherited the gun collection to end all gun collections when his father went into Spivy Pond ice fishing on New Year’s Eve a few years ago and didn’t surface till the next tax day.

They stood in the man’s paneled den, looking over the gun cases the same way Culbeau and O’Sarian had stood at the penny candy rack in Peterson’s Drugs on Maple Street twenty years ago, deciding what to steal.

O’Sarian picked the black Colt AR-15, the civvy version of the M-16, because he was always yammering on and on about Vietnam and watched every war movie he could find.