Xavier started walking forward again, talking fast, blocking Chris’s clear sight of the woman standing beside the Aerostar, who was on the side opposite Danny, so he wouldn’t have a good look at her, either. The setting sun and the coiled shadows didn’t help, so the only one who could see her was Amé, who’d appeared on the porch with Chris’s Remington centered on the van’s windshield, and her own AR-15 slung over her shoulder.

But she was the farthest away, calling out “Mama?” over and over again, across the scrub.

Xavier was still talking to Fox Uno, talking about this Martino, someone who clearly was not in the van, as Danny started talking rapidly—urgently—to Chris, too, his voice suddenly way too loud over the radio in Chris’s ear. Danny was saying something Chris couldn’t make out, his attention split between Fox Uno and Xavier with his satchel and America at his back.

And the woman with the gray hair—the only one not talking, not saying anything—standing silently on the darkened side of the Aerostar.

Silently . . . not responding to her daughter.

I know that van.

They were all now about fifteen feet apart.

Amé’s mother still not saying a word . . .

. . . because Chris could now see the duct tape across her mouth, her eyes crazy with fear.

I know that van.

But before Chris could react, Amé called out, “Sheriff, no,” and then Fox Uno turned to him and very clearly, quietly, said, “Corre. Ahora.” Run. Now.

Chris grabbed at him hard, pulling him backward fast. Stumbling, trying to retreat. He was yelling at Amé, too. “Get the hell back to the house!”

And in that space where Fox Uno had been only a heartbeat before, something passed through the air. Chris felt it, imagined he saw it, before he heard the shot itself.

One shot. Two. Maybe a third.

Maybe more.

They echoed over the scrub with voices all their own.

He had no idea where that first shot had come from, but one more step—one more moment—the old man would have taken it in the face.

It was pure luck Chris had grabbed him when he did.

Chris had been shot at before. He’d even been ambushed right here in the Far Six, somehow surviving only because of another moment of that rare, impossible luck, so he knew what was coming for them next: a breathless chaos, time both speeding up and slowing down, the whole world and everything in it reduced to mere heartbeats.

Absolute, heart-stopping terror after that.

He also knew there was no way he had any more lucky moments saved up. He’d used his last one, maybe the last one for any of them, on Fox Uno.

Amé was still calling out to him:

“That’s not my mama!”

Now his young deputy was running forward, not backward, raising the Remington, yelling something about La Tienda.