A man wearing waders and carrying a Ruger carbine walked up to Colette and smiled, showing two huge incisors, a hole rotted out between them the size of a cigarette burn. “Bébé, you wanna bet you ain’t gonna win?”

“I don’t bet unless the odds are good,” she said, looking away from his brown eyes, in one of which a cast floated like a fingernail clipping.

He snorted. “You want odds? Ten to one you don’t win,” he said.

“Here’s my ten,” she said, waving a bill at him.

“Easy money,” he leered.

The bartender, hearing the exchange, went in for another ten dollars, as did a freshly slicked-back Partian who had just come in the door. Two others bet before she ran out of money.

The bartender yelled that the match was going to start and that the shooters would fire from two double windows in the rear of the building at a target rail set up above the L-shaped wharf. Only .22s could be used, no scopes allowed. Men began thumbing rounds into clips, filling tubes, checking their sights. Colette looked to the wharf, a narrow rotting structure running out into the shallow swamp. A dozen pirogues were tied up on the left, away from the target area. The shooters would be given a series of progressively harder targets. Each shooter would have to knock down ten small tomato juice cans out of ten to qualify. Colette judged the distance to be seventy-five feet. No problem. Just a heat to get the drunks out of the way. She turned to Paul. “I was hoping there would be more time for everybody to drink before things started.”

“You better spit on your sights,” he said. “There’re a couple good rifles here.”

“I’ve got a good rifle, too,” she snapped. “You want to bet against me, go ahead.” She gave him a mean look.

“Not me,” he said. “I’ve seen you shoot the gnats off a rat’s ass.”

“That’s a little better,” she said, still scowling. Just then the crack of a rifle broke through the barroom and the sweet, dusty smell of gunpowder blew back through the window. The match had begun.