'I don't think that's true,' Jack said.

'Go ask Bunny Vogel. He's the little Judas Iscariot hepped Darl do it.'

Jack blew out his breath.

'This isn't the place for it. Come to my office,' he said.

'I know you for the type man you are, Jack Vanzandt. That man next to you is a goddamn criminal,' Vernon said.

'Hey! This is a private club here. You watch your language,' Sammy Mace said.

'Get up, Jack,' Vernon said.

The man with the ponytail put his hand on top of Jack's forearm. 'It's all right. I'll walk this guy to his truck. Is that your truck there, big man?' he said.

'No,' Jack said. 'Listen, Vernon. Kids get into trouble. It doesn't make it any better if the parents fight. Now-'

Vernon reached out and, with the flat of his hand, popped Jack on one cheek.

'You ain't no war hero. You just a rich man bought all the right people,' he said.

'Jack, put an end to this,' Emma said.

But Bunny Vogel had already called the sheriff's department, and Mary Beth's cruiser had been only two hundred yards from the skeet club when the dispatcher's voice came over her radio.

She turned off the highway and drove onto the grass almost to the pavilion, got out of her cruiser and slipped her baton through the ring on her belt.

She went straight for the source of the problem, Vernon Smothers.

'You're trespassing, sir… No, there won't be any debate about it. You get in your truck and drive back on the highway,' she said.

'Hey, we got the marines here,' Sammy Mace said.

'You shut up,' Mary Beth said.

'What?' Sammy said.

'In your truck, Mr Smothers,' Mary Beth said.

'Hey, what'd you just say to me?' Sammy Mace asked.

'I said you stay out of this unless you want to go to jail,' she replied.

Sammy opened his hands and made a shocked expression to the man in the ponytail.

'You believe this broad?' he asked.

'Last chance,' Mary Beth said.

'You got no right to be impolite. We're not the offending parties here,' the man in the ponytail said.

'We're out of here, Jack. Right now,' Emma said.

Mary Beth cupped her hand around Vernon's arm.

'Walk with me, sir,' she said.

But she knew it was unraveling now, in the way that dreams take you in high-speed cars over the edges of canyons and cliffs.

Sammy Mace walked up behind her and punched her with one finger between the shoulder blades.

'No cunt talks to me like that. Hey, did you hear me? I'm talking here. Turn around and look at me,' Sammy said, and punched her again with his finger.

She slipped her baton from its ring and whipped it across Sammy's left arm. Even from ten yards away, Bunny Vogel said he heard the bone break.

Sammy's face went white with pain and shock. He cradled his arm against his chest, his mouth trembling. Then he extended his right hand, like an inverted claw, toward the man in the ponytail.

'Give it to me!' he said.

Mary Beth pushed Vernon Smothers away from her.

'Down on the ground, on your face! Do it, both of you, now!' she said to Sammy and the man in the ponytail.

Then she saw Sammy lunge toward his friend and try to pull a.25-caliber automatic from a small holster inside the friend's coat. She swung the baton again, this time across the side of Sammy's face, and shattered his jaw. It hung locked in place, lopsided, blood that was absolutely scarlet issuing off his tongue. His glasses lay broken on the grass.

Sammy collapsed to his knees, then grabbed at her legs and at the nine-millimeter on her hip, while the man in the ponytail at first pushed her, then watched stupidly as his.25 automatic fell from its holster into Sammy's lap.

The man in the ponytail tried to disentangle himself and back away while Sammy pulled the trigger impotently on the automatic and fought to get the safety off.

Mary Beth gripped her nine-millimeter with both hands but fired high with the first shot at Sammy Mace and hit the man in the ponytail in the groin. He stumbled away, his face rearing into the sky, his hands clutched to the wound as though he wanted to relieve himself.

Her second round entered Sammy's eye socket and blew the back of his head out on the grass.

Suddenly there was no sound in the skeet club except the wind fluttering an American flag on top of the pavilion.

It was hot that night, and still hot at false dawn, as though the air had been baked, then released again on the new day. I got a handful of molasses balls from the tack room and fed them to Beau in the lot, then turned him out and walked down to the river and watched the darkness go out of the sky. The current was dark green and swirling with froth from dead cottonwood trees that were snagged along the shore, and I could hear bream popping the surface where the riffle channeled under the tree trunks.

I tried to think clearly but I couldn't. I had stayed with Mary Beth until eleven last night. The man with the ponytail had lived three hours and died on the operating table. His name was Sixto Dominque, and his sheet showed only one felony conviction, for extortion in Florida, for which he had received a gubernatorial pardon. His wallet contained a permit for the.25-caliber automatic.

'They thought they were in Dog Patch. They got what they deserved,' I told her.

'I should have hooked up Vernon Smothers and taken him to the cruiser and called for backup,' she said.

'Listen, Mary Beth, you're an officer of the law. When a lowlife puts his hand on your person during the performance of your duty, you bounce him off the hardest object in his environment.'

'I blew it.'

I offered to stay with her.

'Thanks, anyway. I've got to spend some serious time on the phone tonight,' she said. In the electric lighting of her apartment the color seemed washed out of her face, her freckles unnatural, as though they were painted on her skin.

'Don't drink booze or coffee. Don't pay attention to the thoughts you have in the middle of the night,' I said.

'Was it this way with you?'

'Yeah, the first time it was.'

'The first time?' she said.

My stare broke, and I tried not to let her see me swallow.

Now, the next day, I squatted on my boot heels in the grass and tossed pebbles down into the water on top of the submerged car that had once contained the bodies of two members of the Karpis-Barker gang, nameless now, buried somewhere in a potter's field, men who thought they'd write their names into memory with a blowtorch.

What was it that really bothered me, that hid just around a corner in my mind?

The answer was not one I easily accepted.

I had made a career of living a half life. I had been a street cop, a Texas Ranger, a federal prosecutor, and now I was a small-town defense lawyer who didn't defend drug traffickers, as though somehow that self-imposed restriction gave a nobility to my practice that other attorneys didn't possess. I was neither father nor husband, and had grown to accept endings in my life in the way others anticipated beginnings, and I now knew, without being told, that another one was at hand.

The sun broke above the horizon and was warm on my back as I walked toward the house. Then my gaze steadied on the barn, the backyard, the drive, the porte cochere, and two black sedans that shouldn't have been there.

I walked through the back porch and kitchen into the main part of the house, which Brian Wilcox and five other Treasury people were tearing apart.

'What the hell do you think you're doing?' I asked.

Wilcox stood in the middle of my library. Splayed books were scattered across the floor.

'Give him the warrant,' he said to a second man, who threw the document at me, bouncing it off my chest.