Peter had no shot, Helene was too close. Roy bounced away and stumbled out of his corner, but the gun kept rising, and Helene kept after him. Peter still had no shot.

With a scream of animal rage and pain, she grabbed Roy’s arm with both hands. Even with two bullets in him, he was still too strong for her to really control him. All she could do was pull herself close, her pregnant belly hard against him as she trapped his wrist and gun hand at her side, under her armpit.

He tried to pull away, but she didn’t let him, only held him tighter. They staggered in a circle, Roy backward, Helene forward, as if in a reversal of some ancient dance. Helene’s scream rose higher as Roy pulled the trigger, again and again.

As they turned, bullets flew outward, uncontrolled, like droplets of water from a slow-motion sprinkler.

Peter flattened himself to the floor. Round after wild round sprayed across the room. Plaster cracked from the walls, feathers flew from couch cushions, the television screen shattered, it went on and on and on. Until, finally, the gun was silent.

Peter looked and saw Helene holding Roy upright. It seemed impossible, because he was so much larger than her and his knees had begun to buckle. But she held him on his feet anyway, perhaps by force of will alone. Roy’s eyes sagged and his head dipped and he spoke into her ear. Just a few words, his fading voice too soft for Peter to hear.

Then she let him go, or maybe she pushed him, because he fell backward from his heels like a poorly planted tombstone. Dead, he hit the floor hard enough to rattle the dishes in the china cabinet.

The chest and shoulders of Helene’s zip sweatshirt were smeared with his blood. On the round dome of her belly was a bright red handprint. She was breathing hard, as if at the end of a long, hard, race. Then she began to cry.

In the leather chair, the fat man with the dark mustache stared at her, but he didn’t share his thoughts with the room.

He was too busy bleeding out from the bullet holes in his neck and stomach.

72

Waiting for the Montana state troopers, Bobbie and June clustered with Helene in the kitchen, out of sight of the dead. Peter and Lewis, temporarily unwelcome because of their gender, sat on the porch drinking Bogaloosa’s instant coffee and watching the light gather in the east.

After photographs and initial statements, with reassurance from Agent Campbell’s Montana counterparts, the troopers had escorted Peter and Helene to the hospital in Glasgow, where Peter got a cast on his forearm for his broken ulna and a referral to a knee specialist in Rochester, Minnesota.