I rolled away, grabbed the gun, sprang to my feet, hurried back to the small man. He lay there, immobile, and I felt under his filth-encrusted jaw, got a slow steady pulse. The hand I’d stomped looked like a dead crab, and when I lifted his eyelids all I saw was white.

A few feet away, what had once been Nacho Vargas was an exhibit for the forensic pathology texts.

Aimee said, “Careful.” Talking to Bill, not me. She was behind the chair, now, had removed his watch cap, was stroking his head.

Bert was on his feet, tottering, holding Vargas’s weapon with two hands. Staring at it with revulsion. His color made me unsure if the chest pains had been a total ruse.

I kept the silver gun trained on the unconscious man, heartbeat racing way beyond optimal, muscles pumped, head boiling.

Up close, he looked barely twenty.

Give it to that kid of yours to play with.

A young man with one kid, maybe a new father. Would he have helped Vargas dispatch all of us, then gone home and played with Junior?

He moaned, and my fingers tightened around the trigger. Another moan, but he didn’t move. I trained the gun on him, had to work at releasing the pressure in my fingers. Slowing my breathing, struggling to think clearly, sort things out.

The clearing around the house deepened to a sickening, syrupy gray. Bill sat there in the chair, the shotgun across his lap. Aimee and Bert stood by, silently. The small man didn’t move. Silence settled around us. From somewhere off in the forest, a bird peeped.

A plan: I’d tie up the unconscious man, put him and the wheelchair in the trunk of the Seville, drive us all to some safe place—I’d figure out where along the way—no, first I’d call Milo from the house—I had to get them all in the house—the bloody gravel, the corpse with its yield of shredded body parts, would be dealt with later.

“Do you have any rope?” I asked Bill.

His mirrored glasses were off, and Aimee was dabbing at the gray hollows with a corner of the top blanket. Unmindful of the porridge that splotched her clothing and her face.

He said, “No. Sorry.”

“Nothing to tie him with?”

“Sorry . . . the other one’s alive?”

“Out cold but alive. I thought with that arsenal—”

“The arsenal was my . . . baggage . . . never really thought I’d use it . . .”

The shotgun had been clean, freshly oiled.

He must’ve read my mind, said, “I taught my Aimee how to take care of it.”

Aimee recited: “Ream the barrel, wipe it down, oil it up.”

“But no rope,” said Bill. “Ain’t that a hoot. Maybe we can shred some clothing.” Tired. One hand caressed the truncated shotgun.

Aimee mumbled.

“What’s that, sugar?”

“There is rope. Kind of.”

“There is?” he said.