Chris had just finished up his call with Garrison when Mel came into their bedroom to find three guns laid out on their bed.

The first was the twelve-gauge Remington Versa Max shotgun they got last Christmas to keep permanently around the house. It was still new; Chris had barely had the chance to put many rounds through it, and Mel had not shot it at all. It was a big gun, with a twenty-six-inch barrel, and it looked even bigger propped up on their pillows.

The second was the Browning A5 Mel had bought for Chris, the one she’d had cut down and modified to make it easier for him to carry right after he’d been shot. He’d recovered well enough that he could use the full-size Remington, but still carried the A5 with him whenever he was on duty. She’d had the barrel and stock engraved and etched with the mountains and sun of the Big Bend, an expense she was still paying off, but the gun was beautiful, if you could say that about such a thing.

Chris had shot John Wesley Earl with the A5. He hadn’t died, not then, but had only been paralyzed from the waist down. He was murdered, while under federal protection at a prison hospital, by a suspected member of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas.

The last was Chris’s first gun, his duty pistol: his Colt M1911. Colt had been the preferred weapon of the Big Bend Sheriff’s Department since Chris first put on the badge, but he’d given his deputies the latitude to carry whatever make and model of handgun they preferred. He was carrying the Colt when he nearly died here at the Far Six; he’d killed three men—sicarios—with it. Still, it was unnerving to see the Colt naked and exposed like this, since it was normally tucked away in his holster. He hadn’t drawn it in her presence in years.

“This is supposed to make me feel better?” she asked, staring at the guns on their bed and shutting the door behind her. She’d tied Rocky up out back so he wouldn’t go crazy with the house full of strangers, and Jack was still asleep in his nursery.

Everyone else was standing in her kitchen.

Chris looked up, guilty. “I want you to take something with you when you go to Javy’s.”

“Chris, that’s foolish and it’s a lie. Javy’s probably got three times as many guns. He’s an actual hunter. You got those out for you.”

Chris ignored her. “Amé’s here?”

“Yes, they’re all here, including Danny, all waiting for you. But you’re trying to avoid telling me what Joe Garrison said. Why did he call, Chris? You don’t hear from him for months at a time, and now he’s visiting and calling twice in a week? He knows, doesn’t he?”