It had been Bode's idea to shoot one of the turtles.

Give him credit, Chub thought, for figuring out the woman's weakness.

Grabbing a baby turtle from the tank, setting it at JoLayne's feet, chuckling in anticipation as it started marching toward her bare toes.

And Chub, firing a round into the center of the turtle's shell, sending it skidding like a tiny green hockey puck across the floor, bouncing off walls and corners.

That's when the woman broke down and told them where she'd hidden the Lotto stub. Inside the piano, of all places! What a racket they'd made, getting it out of there.

But they'd done it. Now here they were, parked in the amber glow of a streetlight; taking turns with the rearview, checking how badly the nigger girl had messed them up.

Chub's multiple lacerations gave a striped effect to his long sunken face. The softest breeze stung like hot acid. He said, "I reckon I need stitches."

Bode Gazzer, shaking his head: "No doctors till we git home." Then he got a good look at Chub's seeping cuts and, recognizing a threat to his new truck's gorgeous upholstery, announced, "Band-Aids. That's what we'll get."

He made a U-turn on the highway and drove back to town at high speed. His destination was the Grab N'Go, where they would purchase first-aid supplies and also settle a piece of militia business.

Shiner's teenage years had been tolerable until his mother had gotten religion. Before then, she'd allowed him to play football without a helmet, shoot his .22 inside the city limits, go bass fishing with cherry bombs, smoke cigarets, bother the girls and skip school at least twice a week.

One night Shiner had returned home late from a Whitesnake concert in Tampa to find his mother waiting in the kitchen. She was wearing plastic thong sandals, a shortie nightgown and her ex-husband's mustard blazer, left over from his days at Century 21 – for Shiner, a jarring apparition. Wordlessly his mother had taken his hand and led him out the front door. In the moonlight they'd traipsed half a mile to the intersection where Sebring Street meets the highway. There Shiner's mother had dropped to her knees and begun to pray. Not polite praying, either; moans and wails that fractured the peacefulness of the night.

Shiner had been further dumbfounded and embarrassed to watch his mother crawl into the road and nuzzle her cheek to the grimy pavement.

"Ma," he'd said. "Cut it out."

"Don't you see Him?"

"See who? You're gonna get runned over."

"Shiner, don't you see Him?" She'd bounced to her feet. "Son, it's Jesus. Look there! Our Lord and Savior! Don't you see His face in the road ?"

Shiner had walked to the spot and peered intently. "It's just an oil stain, Ma. Or maybe brake fluid."

"No! It's the face of Jesus Christ."

"OK, I'm outta here."

"Shiner!"

He'd figured the Jesus thing would blow over once she'd sobered up, but he was wrong. His mother had spent the whole next day praying at the edge of the road, and the day after as well. Some vacationing Christians gave her an ice-blue parasol and a Styrofoam cooler full of soda pop. The following Saturday, a reporter from a TV station in Orlando came to town with a camera crew. Soon the Road-Stain Jesus was regionally famous, as was Shiner's mother. Nothing much went right for him after that.

One day he came home to find her burning his collection of heavy-metal CDs, which she had taken to calling "devil wafers." She forbade him to drink beer or smoke cigarets, and threatened to withhold his five-dollar weekly allowance if he didn't stay home Friday nights and sing hymns. To get out of the house (and far away from the pilgrims who came regularly to snap his mother's picture) Shiner joined the army. In less than a month he washed out of basic training, and returned to Grange twenty pounds lighter but infinitely more sullen than when he'd left. To a depressed job market Shiner brought neither an adequate education nor practical work skills, so he wound up working the graveyard shift at the Grab N'Go, doubles on Saturday. Not much happened except for the stickups, which occurred every second or third weekend. Some nights barely a half dozen customers came through the door, leaving Shiner loads of free time to paw through the latest Hustleror Swank.He was always careful to sneak the nudie magazines back to the frozen-food aisle, the only place in the store that was blocked from the fish-eye gaze of the security camera. Shiner would dissect the magazines and arrange his favorite snatch shots across the Plexiglas lid of the ice-cream freezer – it was colder than a frog's balls back there, but he couldn't risk getting caught at the front of the store. His mother would be ruined if her only son got fired for whacking off on the job, especially on videotape. Even though Shiner was mad at his Ma, he didn't want to hurt her feelings.

At 2 a.m. on the morning of November 27, he was hunched feverishly over a Best of Jugswhen he heard the jingle of the cat bell that was fastened to the store's front door. He tucked himself in and hurried up toward the register. It took him a moment to recognize the two customers as the same men who'd stopped by earlier in the evening for jerky and Quick Picks. Clearly they'd been in an awesome bar fight.

"The hell happened to you boys?" Shiner asked.

The short one, dressed in camo, asked for Band-Aids. The one with the ponytail requested malt liquor. Shiner obliged – finally, some excitement! He helped the men clean and bind their multiple wounds. The camouflaged one introduced himself as Bodean Gazzer, Bode for short. He said his friend was called Chub.

"Pleased to meetcha," said Shiner.

"Son, we need your help."

"OK."

Bode said, "You believe in God and family?"

Shiner hesitated. Not this again – more pilgrims! But then Chub said, "You believe in guns?"

"The right to bear arms," Bode Gazzer clarified. "It's in the Constitution."

"Sure," said Shiner.

"You got a gun?"

"Course," Shiner answered.

"Excellent. And the white man – you believe in the white man?"

"Goddamn right!"

"Good," Bode Gazzer said.

He told Shiner to take a hard look at himself. Look at where he'd ended up, behind the counter of a miserable motherfucking convenience store, waiting on Cubans and Negroes and Jews and probably even a few Indians.

Chub said, "How old are you, boy?"

"Nineteen."

"And this is your grand plan for life?" Chub sneered as he waved a hand around the store. "This is your, whatchamacallit, your birthright?"

"Hell, no." Shiner found it difficult to meet Chub's gaze; the split eyelid was distracting and creepy. The closed portion hung pale and unblinking, a torn drape behind which the yolky bloodshot eyeball would intermittently disappear.

"I bet you didn't know," Bode Gazzer said, "your hard-earned tax dollars are payin' for a crack NATO army to invade the U.S.A."

Shiner had no clue what the camouflaged man was talking about, though he didn't let on. He'd never heard of NATO and in his entire life hadn't paid enough in income taxes to finance a box of bullets, much less a whole invasion.

Headlights in the parking lot caught his attention: a Dodge Caravan full of tourists, pulling up to the gas pumps.

Chub frowned. "Tell 'em you're closed."

"What?"

"Now!" Bode barked.

The clerk did as he was told. When he came back in the store, he found the men whispering to each other.

The one called Chub said, "We's just sayin' you'd make a fine recruit."

"For what?" Shiner asked.

Bode lowered his voice. "You got any interest in saving America from certain doom?"

"I guess. Sure." Then, after thinking about it: "Would I have to quit my job?"

Bode Gazzer nodded portentously. "Soon," he said.