Bardem lifts the rifle. He levels and shoots.

Rifleshot rolls across the field. Branches shudder, and snow sifts from trees. Air abruptly frays in two. In the distance, the deer falls and lands in the snow, jerking. Ava’s heart feels as if it has stopped in her chest, but she doesn’t make a sound. She clamps her eyes shut.

He squats by her. “Take the rifle.”

She shakes her head.

“Take it. Do as I say.”

“No.”

He takes her hands and puts the rifle in them. “Look through the scope. Look through.”

She is going to cry. Longing to run. To get away. To wash her hands, to be okay. Something black and something empty is about to swallow her up.

“Look,” he says again.

She looks wordlessly. Through the eye of the scope. The deer is lying with the snow all around her stained pink. Bright. Like a snow cone.

“What you put in that circle is yours to take,” he says. “You just have to take it. Do you understand?”

She nods.

“Say it.”

“I understand.”

“Good.”

He takes the rifle and pulls her into his arms and holds her. Rocking slightly back and forth. He sweeps her tangled hair behind her ear.

“There, there,” he says. “My little bird. It’s okay.”

XXXIII

People try to create order. Discipline. Rules. It gives them peace. A sense of regulation. Of strength. It makes them feel in control.

But life is chaos, reader. The sooner you learn this, the better.

Stay with me.

It’s just a little while now.

When Matty stopped crying and began to breathe steadily, Jack laid him down on the bed and pulled the blankets around him. He got up and went to the window. The moonlight was slanting over the motel, and the parking lot was cloaked in shadow. The vapor lamps not yet lit. Somewhere Red lay broken on a metal slab. Jack went to the bathroom and twisted the handle of the tub faucet and squeezed shampoo into the water to make bubbles. The best thing to do was ignore this feeling of lead in the heart and get the mind to think. Rely on the head. What to do? He turned and walked to the bed. Matty lay there, watching him. “Come on,” he said. “This will be the best bath you ever had.”

Matty went to the bathtub and got undressed and stepped into the water and sat. Pale and skinny and naked. Holding his hands over his privates. Jack passed Batman to him. “What do you think?”

“This is the life.”

“This is the life?”

“Yeah.”

“Where did you hear that?”

Matty shrugged, bashful.

“Is it hot enough?”

He nodded.