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She picked up a pillow from a stuffed chair.
”You need to get rid of the black man,“ she said.
I rose to my feet. She backed against the front wall, the pillow folded across the top of the Ruger. Her mouth was parted slightly, as th
ough she used air only in teaspoons. I stood in the door and called through the screen: ”I'll be down at the dock later, Batist.“
”The air pump gone out on the shiner tank,“ he said.
I hesitated, opened and closed my hands at my sides, felt the trees, the yard, the fractured blue of the sky almost pulling me through the screen. The woman named Terry raised the Ruger level with the side of my head, whispered dryly: ”He won't make three steps after I do you.“
”Give me a few minutes,“ I called.
”One of us got to go in town.“
”I know that, podna.“
”Long as you know,“ he said, and walked back down the slope.
I could hear the wood in the floor creak under my feet, the wind scudding leaves across the gallery.
”Back away from the door,“ the woman said.
”We've still got the original manuscript,“ I said.
”Nobody else cares about it. Back away from the door and sit in the stuffed chair.“
”Fuck you, Terry, or whatever your name is.“
Her face was as opaque as plaster. She closed the ends of the pillow around the Ruger, brought the barrel's tip upward until it was aimed at my throat.
I felt my eyes water and go out of focus.
Outside, Tripod raced on his chain up and down the clothesline. Her face jerked at the sound, then she shifted her weight, glanced quickly at the side window, an incisor tooth biting down on her lip, inadvertently moved the barrel's aim two inches to the side of my throat.
Bootsie fired from the hallway, the Beretta pointed in front of her with both hands.
The first round hit the woman high up in the right arm. Her blouse jumped and colored as though a small rose had been painted in the cloth by an invisible brush. But she swallowed the sound that tried to rise from her throat, and turned toward the hallway with the Ruger still in her hand.
Bootsie fired again, and the second round snapped a brittle hole through the left lens of the black-tinted sunglasses worn by the woman named Terry. Her fingers splayed stiffly at odd angles from one another as though all of her nerve connections had been severed; then her face seemed to melt like wax held to a flame as she slipped down between the wall and the stuffed chair, a vertical red line streaking the wallpaper.
My hands were shaking when I set the safety on the Beretta and removed it from Bootsie's grasp, pulled the magazine and ejected the round from the chamber.
I squeezed her against me, rubbed my hands over her hair and back, kissed her eyes and the sweat on her neck.”
She started toward the woman on the floor.
“No,” I said, and turned her toward the kitchen, the light pouring through the western windows, the trees outside swelling with wind.
“We have to go back,” she said.
“No.”
“Maybe she's still .. . Maybe she needs .. .”
“No.”
I made her sit down on the redwood picnic bench while I walked to the garden by the coulee and found the portable phone where she had dropped it in the grass, the transmission button still on. But before I could punch in 9111 heard sirens in the distance and saw Batist come out the back door with a dogleg twenty-gauge in his hand.
