Lillie steadied the weapon inside the clubhouse, the space smelling of stale cigarette smoke, urine, and vomit. The walls were adorned with pictures of girls in bikinis straddling Harleys and posters advertising beer. Above a makeshift bar was an old velvet painting of a black woman with enormous breasts lying sideways and smiling. It was a well-worn space that smelled and felt abandoned.

Lillie took the shot. And then three more.

“Ha!” she said, reloading.

“Hell is coming,” LeDoux said. “Hell is coming.”

Quinn twisted his shotgun to full choke. He had his Beretta 9 out on a beaten pool table, away from the windows, laying down an extra magazine from his pant pocket. Dave and Art had set themselves up by the other window, just two industrial-glass panes facing the front. Kenny was now on the cell with Mary Alice while Ike McCaslin checked a back door and barricaded it by pushing over an old cigarette machine on its side. Dawn had come on and hard yellow light filled the road, the bikers finding cover out in the trees, parking their Harleys in the middle of the road to discourage anyone coming in or out.

Lillie took another shot.

Quinn saddled up next to her. From the window, he could see two bodies in the road.

She reloaded the rifle with bullets from her pocket. She handed her weapon to Quinn and he used the scope to see a bald-headed man with tattoos crawling near the cruisers, carrying an AR-15 and aiming it toward the clubhouse.

“They’re coming up through the tree line,” Lillie said. “I’ve got six of them behind your truck.”

“How bad’s my truck?”

“Boom is an artist,” Lillie said, “but he’s no magician.”

Quinn yelled for Art and Dave to get down just as glass shattered and Dave was thrown back, writhing on the floor, smearing the concrete with blood. Quinn ran for the deputy, ripping off his jacket and pressing it to the shoulder wound, as Lillie lifted up her weapon and fired six times.

The automatic weapon was silenced.

Kenny crawled to where Quinn lay with Dave flat on his back, white-faced. Quinn pressed hard on the wound, Kenny now telling Mary Alice they had an officer down and they needed medical help to roll with the cops coming over from Pontotoc and Lee County.

“How many shots you got left?” Quinn asked.

“Don’t ask,” Lillie said, “unless you want to walk out to the truck for my tac bag.”

“They get an inch closer and shoot them,” Quinn said. “Art?”

Art had his Glock leveled out the broken window, the cold air battering the ragged blinds against the wall. Nearby, Confederate and Nazi flags fluttered from the ceiling. Dave was clenching his jaw, body convulsing, breathing slowed.

“They’re inching around,” Art said. “Lillie?”

Lillie fired just once.

“Nope,” Art said. “That shit’s stopped.”

Dave was conscious but in shock, Quinn’s jacket was a bright red and he wished like hell he’d brought some QuikClot. The pressure, depending on the wound, would only help for so long.

Someone was pushing against the back door and hitting the cigarette machine. Ike McCaslin fired into the open space. The pushing stopped.

“How’d they know?” Lillie said. “How’d they fucking know?”

LeDoux was still laughing where they’d left him. Lillie told him to shut the fuck up or she’d kick him right in the throat. The other two boys were silent, tossed together in a trash pile by the bar. “Y’all are dead,” he said. “Don’t you see it?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Lillie said, “or I’ll shoot your ass right now. You hear me?”

She turned the rifle on LeDoux to make her point. Quinn had made his way to the window, checking out the bikers hiding behind the county vehicles at the tree line. Dave was bleeding out on the floor while help from the other counties was a long time coming.

Quinn peered out again as four more shots cracked off, breaking out more glass.

He walked back to where Dave lay. Lillie exchanging more shots. Even if they could get most of them, it was a long walk back to Jericho. More wind whistled through the busted windows. The old clubhouse felt hollow.

“Sheriff!” a man yelled from out by his truck. “You hear me?”

Quinn looked back over to Lillie.

“They got you,” LeDoux said. “They fucking got you.”

Lillie walked up to LeDoux and kicked him hard in the side. He yelped but laughed at the same time.

Outside, beyond the vehicles, stood a muscular bald man with a tattooed face. He held an AR-15 aimed at the clubhouse. “Send out Chains,” he said, “and we won’t finish y’all off. Y’all got about sixty seconds.”

Quinn turned to Lillie and handed her the weapon. The pushing was starting again on the back door, the cigarette machine skidding on the dirty floor. The AR-15 scattered bullets across the front of the clubhouse. From the edge of the window, he could see four, five, eight men, at different vantage points.

God damn, everything was so quiet.

So quiet until they heard the revving of a big car engine rolling straight down dirt road. Quinn could just make out the early-morning light glimmering off the windshield as it barreled straight for the gauntlet of Harleys and the clubhouse. The engine gunned harder as it approached the bikes and ran right through them, scattering some and rolling over others. It was a big car, a black SUV. It skidded to a stop sideways and a figure in a black ski mask holding an automatic weapon similar to the bald man’s opened fire.

He shot several bikers, taking out the big man with the bald head first, the bald man firing off a couple shots before the bullets hit him in the center mass and left him sprawling. The other bikers behind the cruisers started to run instead of staying with their cover. More shots from the man in the mask and they were down, too.

Quinn ran to the back door to help Ike and Art move the cigarette machine. Lillie was now providing cover for the man in the ski mask, whoever he was, while Kenny kept the compress on Dave’s shoulder.

Art shot a skinny bearded man who raised a shotgun to them. As they rounded the corner of the clubhouse, there was a stillness on the lake. The shooter ran back toward the black Suburban and drove off just as fast he’d ridden in. The ducks and geese that had scattered at the gunshots landed back on Choctaw Lake. The birds started chirping again.

The bikers who were left walked from the woods with hands raised. Quinn could hear an ambulance siren.

I believe about everyone I know is pissed at me,” Quinn said five weeks later, sitting on the farmhouse porch with Ophelia Bundren. It was a warm morning, grass was turning green again, trees beginning to leaf, and out in the pasture three new calves had been born. They nudged up under their mothers, nursing, knee-deep in mud.

“I’m not pissed at you.”

“My momma won’t speak to me on account of me talking to my dad,” Quinn said. “Caddy and I have a strong difference of opinion on a great many things, most of all our dad. You know that’s why she moved out?”

“She moved out because she found a house to rent near The River,” Ophelia said, sitting on an old metal chair beside Quinn. “Y’all need your own lives. And privacy.”

They’d finished an early breakfast, blue and green Fiesta plates, cleaned of biscuits and country ham, sitting on top of an old whiskey barrel.

“I miss Jason.”

“I know you do,” Ophelia said, reaching out touching Quinn’s hand. “But he didn’t move to China. Y’all went fishing yesterday.”