She and Danny could shoot holes into that door, the same as someone outside could shoot through it.

Danny held up a fist over his gun hand’s wrist, counting out three silent fingers one by one, and then reached over and unlocked the door.

He pulled it open in one smooth motion and rolled clear.

—

AMÉ CAME OUT OF HER CROUCH FAST, surprised, holding up a hand to Danny and raising and decocking her Colt with the other. Danny turned into the breach, and saw—despite only one working eye—what had startled her. There wasn’t a man there, but a girl, a very young Hispanic girl, with long dark hair all twisted and knotted by the wind.

Amé said “Shit” in English, and then something else in Spanish that he didn’t catch.

“What the fuck?” Danny said, getting to his feet and aiming his gun away from the girl at the door.

It was everything he’d ever worried about in Nuristan; the sort of dreams he’d had before, that he’d thought were over and done with but had returned. He’d pointed a loaded weapon into the face of a child.

Again.

“¿Quién eres, niña?” Amé asked, slipping her own gun behind her back into her jeans, out of sight, and kneeling to the girl’s height. Danny had no idea how old she was. She was wearing dusty jeans and dirty tennis shoes and a T-shirt with some cartoon character on it, and then another unbuttoned flannel shirt over that. He’d seen a hundred little girls like her on the outskirts of Murfee.

Amé was still talking to her: “Está bien, niña, no vamos a hacer daño. Nos asustaste, eso es todo. ¿No es gracioso?”

Danny put his own gun into his jeans. The girl had to be lost, or someone had sent her specifically for Amé, someone who wanted a Spanish-speaking sheriff’s deputy and didn’t trust anyone else. It had happened before, but never at Amé’s home.

Amé was just reaching out to touch the girl, to pull her through the door, when Danny’s bad eye kicked back on. It flickered—once, twice—and he could finally see clearly.

A man.

Standing at the bottom of the steps far behind the girl, hidden near the trunk of the juniper by the long curved branches and the night itself.

Danny went for his gun again.

It was still warm to the touch from where he’d been holding it.

“Amé . . . hold up, there’s someone else,” Danny had time to say, pointing down the steps with his Colt. She looked over the girl’s dark hair, hand resting on her small, narrow shoulder, and saw the man, too.

The man called up to them, “No quiero hacerle daño.” But his hands were still down at his sides, lost in the blackness pooled around him.