“I-”

“We will get through this. It’s the only way, and you may even get your picture in the paper and a date with Mary Sue.”

He’d passed through town, turned right up 167, and by now it was full dark, and he was winding up in the hills, scooting by the odd little house here and there, otherwise alone on the road except for the headlights of his pursuers a couple hundred yards back.

“I just put the gun on the counter,” said the young man.

“We will get through this.”

“Oh, this is too good,” said Carmody. “He’s going back to that grocery store he stopped at earlier.”

“Maybe he’s going to visit the Reverend again.”

“Maybe. But he’ll stop there I’m betting and he thinks he can get something else out of that dumb clerk. Oh, this is too good. This is just what the doctor ordered.”

Carmody was driving, of course, so he reached into his belt and touched the piece he always carried, just to make sure it was there. It was a SIG P229 in.40, with thirteen fast-moving, husky hollow-points tucked into the magazine and another in the chamber.

Meanwhile, B.J. was rummaging around in the glove compartment, where he came up with two balaclava hats, which could be peeled down to make face masks, either for cross-country skiing or armed robbery, depending on the Grumley mood. He got them, then drew his own weapon from his shoulder holster, a stainless steel Springfield.45. He took the safety down, performed a chamber check to make certain there was a 230-grainer nested just where it should be, put the safety back on, and reholstered the gun.

“We goin’ kick some ass,” he said, the blood rushing to his extremes, and his breathing grew harder and shorter.

“Yes, we are, we are for sure,” said Carmody.

Bob pulled into the parking lot.

They think they’re hunting me; I’m hunting them. It felt familiar and now, from somewhere, his battle brain took over. Even as he walked to the store, past the pumps, up two steps, he felt things slowing down yet at the same time enriching in color and texture, as if his vision were mutating to something beyond excellence. His muscles were turning to flexible iron, his breathing was growing nutritious, his hearing super-attuned, so that every sound was crisply isolated in the universe.

He walked down the wide main aisle to where the boy stood, awash in fear, his body rooted stiffly, his eyes too big, his lips covered in white chalk. Bob could see the gun, made it out to be an old Colt New Service and guessed that it had to be either a.45 Colt or a.44-40. It was like a gun out of an old movie, from an old America, huge, blue and gray where the finish had been eroded or spotted off by exposure to blood. It was a humpbacked thing, big for the big men who lived big American lives in the generations before, and unusually heavy for its size, possessed of an almost magic density which in turn gave it a density of purpose. He took it up, felt the checked wood grips worn flat, almost smooth, ticked open the cylinder lock and spilled out that tube to see it sustained six brass circles, glowing in the fluorescent light. Each circle wore a smaller circle in its center, the primer, and around each was inscribed.45 COLT. He snapped the cylinder shut, not hard and flashy like the fools in the movies did, but with a soft, almost gentle touch. For a revolver, even a big old boy like this one, was a gentle mesh of the strong and the delicate, an intricate, frail system of pins and levers and springs and arms that had to work in perfect synchronicity, in a very nineteenth-century sense of mission, for it was a relic of that far century. He felt it and its solidity immediately reached out and embraced him. For Bob Lee Swagger, it was like reentering a cathedral; this is where he was raised to a faith and it had never let him down and he would not let it down.

He heard the door opening, he saw the boy’s eyes widening, which told him what he needed to know, that indeed, masked, armed men rushed at them.

He turned, the gun came up fast in both hands, and if he noticed a large man in black, with a blackened, hooded, furious face and a black gun coming up, he didn’t have time to mark it. For in the next nanosecond he pressed the big old Colt’s trigger twice, and with each crank, felt the gun’s complexities occurring. All the systems were in perfect mesh, as the trigger came back under the muscular pressure of his finger, the cylinder rotated under the same spring-conveyed pressure, the hammer drew back, exactly as Sam Colt or some forgotten, genius engineer working for him had planned it back in Hartford under the big gold dome and the dancing pony at the turn of the century. As the sight blade rose and became all there was in the universe, the hammer fell, and in three tenths of a second he sent two 230-grain lead fatboys on their way to somebody’s low, center chest, where they tore, an inch apart, through skin, muscle, and rib and blew out large, atomized chunks of heart tissue that spewed crazily throughout the chest cavity.

That one went down with a thump to the floor that sounded comic against the huge reverberation of the two powerful revolver blasts in the closed-in space before he got his own gun up.

The second guy was not dumb and, even as he knew his partner was hit fatally and that they had been the victims of, not the perpetrators of, surprise, he moved laterally, disappearing behind the rank of shelved can goods before Bob could get a fatboy into him. Bob moved back, using the shelf island exactly as his opponent did, as a shield between them, aware it was not cover but only concealment, and suddenly red spray and diamonds filled the air-everybody’s ears had switched off so there was no noise-as the gunman fired three times on the oblique, guessing where Bob would be and hoping that blind shots would bring him down.

Bob was not where the fellow guessed, as he’d moved to his own left and meant to come around hard left, hunched over and just showing a little flesh along with the big piece of Hartford iron. The gunman saw his mistake and turned to correct it, when he was hit in the face with a large can of Crisco that arrived in a tight spiral and smacked him hard. He lost a step, then bent to fire, but Bob was too far ahead on the trigger curve, firing another controlled pair that sounded like one, these a little more widely spaced, one emptying quarts of coffee, Coke, and fried eggs as it tore through his stomach, exiting against the instant coffee in a puff of brown dust, the other blowing out even more lung tissue and spinal fluid as it took him on a dead central angle. He went to his knees, dropped his silver 1911, vomited blood copiously, and fell forward, his butt up in the air, in a comic kick-me pose, and in that frozen joke settled and died.

“Jesus Christ,” said the boy.

“Good throw,” said Bob.

“I never hit anything I threw at before in my whole life.”

“Well for one second, you were Peyton Manning. Thank God it was the right second.”

“I have to sit down.”

“Don’t have time. You listen to me. I have stood and fought with many brave men in my time, which includes three tours in Vietnam and a whole lot of other crazed stuff. You can fight with me any time and you belong with those brave friends.”

“I-I-We did it.”

“Yes, we did. Now quick, you take this gun, and fire the last two shots out the door.”

The boy took the gun, it seemed heavy for him, and tremblingly, he struggled with the heavy trigger and finally managed to get one, and then another shot off.

“Good work. Now you have powder residue on your hands and the police will take note of that. You see how it happened. They came in, guns out, but you drew and fired, hit the first one twice out of your first three shots, then the other one fired from behind the shelf, missed, you scooted to your left and fired three more times. Then you called the police. You got that?”