Niceville

Hand that over too.”
    He pulled his Taurus out of his belt, held it out to her. She took it, turned it in the dim light.
    “What kind of a gun is this? Colt .45?”
    “It’s a Taurus. A nine-millimeter.”
    She frowned at it, and then shoved it into what looked like a canvas bag hanging from her shoulder.
    “Can you walk?”
    Merle gave it some thought, pushed himself free of the tree, did not immediately fall on his face.
    “I think so.”
    “I have a place up the valley. It’s about a quarter mile. Think you can walk that far?”
    “I can. You really think you can deal with a bullet wound?”
    She showed her teeth.
    “I board horses, sir. Breed ’em too. I guess if I can pull a breech foal live out of a dead mare, I can see to your bullet holes.”
    The thing seemed to be decided.
    Somehow Merle covered the ground, a long, unsteady walk up a generally rising slope covered in those soft pine needles, weaving his way without the girl’s help through a towering stand of old pines and beeches and live oaks, putting one foot in front of another with the woman always a few feet behind him. He could feel the muzzle of her rifle zeroed on his back and was wondering if he was being helped or taken prisoner. Probably both. At this point, he didn’t give a damn.
    He just wanted something for the pain and to get that goddam slug taken out of his back. If she did that, she could call the cops and collect the reward, whatever it was, and the hell with it. He’d get the needle for his part in the shooting of those cops but that was a long way off and therefore, at this point anyway, purely hypothetical.
    The woman seemed pretty calm, all things considered, but this was the South, and she was obviously country, not city, and he had observed that they grew a different kind of woman down here.
    During the last few hundred yards, Friday evening came down to full dark and the only light around was what looked like a big wood-frame white-painted farmhouse at the top of the rise.
    A string of large clear-glass electric bulbs, yellow and flickering, lit up the grounds like a used-car lot. There was a big rickety-looking barn beyond the house, with a rusted corrugated iron roof. He could smell horses, and hay, and fresh manure. No dogs around, which was odd, for a farmhouse. There was a
pockety-pockety
sound coming from the far side of the barn.
    It took him a moment to figure out it was some kind of gas-driven generator. The interior of the house was glowing with a warm yellow light, and a thin ribbon of smoke was rising straight up into the starry night.
    The woman stopped him at the gate, turning to look back down the long valley. There was a red glow in the east, and an acrid whiff of burning oil.
    “A fire, down by the Belfair Pike,” she said, turning around to look at him. “Looks like the Saddlery is going up. You and your partner have anything to do with that?”
    “I think my partner may have.”
    She shook her head, watching the glow light up shreds of cloud in the night sky.
    “Bad things happened there, a while ago. But it was too bad you had to burn it down. It was a useful place, in its time.”
    Merle felt a look of humble contrition was the safest response, so he gave her one. He could see her better now. In the harsh electric glare of the yard lights, her eyes were a pale shade of green and her skin was tanned that coffee-with-cream color Gaelic or Scottish people get if they’re out in the sun a lot. Her black hair was thick and long andMerle saw that she was not pretty—too strong-featured for that—but certainly very attractive.
    No makeup at all. Her hands on the rifle were rough and red and she had what looked like dried blood under her fingernails.
    She felt him looking at her hands and smiled. When she did, Merle raised her age from mid-twenties to maybe early thirties. Her teeth were uneven, with a slight gap between the two front ones.
    “I was killing chickens when I heard you crashing around down the valley. Strip down and come into the kitchen. I’ll see what we can do.”
    Merle hesitated.
    “Well, you’re not tracking all that blood and gore into the parlor, my friend.”
    She set the rifle and her khaki-colored canvas bag down by the door. In the light from the overhead bulbs Merle saw that the bag had some markings on the side, faded but still legible.
    1 ST INF DIV AEF
    She straightened up, looked at him for a time in the light of the porch, her expression puzzled.
    “What are