Niceville

you, anyway? You look French.”
    “My dad’s from Marseille,” said Merle. “My mother’s Irish, from Dublin, and I was born in Harrisburg, so I don’t know where that leaves me.”
    “Guess you’re an American,” she said, a half smile flitting across her careworn features.
    “Well, don’t be shy,” she said, indicating his shirt. “I’ve seen a naked man before.”
    With her help he was able to peel his bloody boots off. She used a skinning knife she had tucked into her belt to slice off whatever clothing wouldn’t come off any other way. She stepped back, looked him over with a cool, critical eye.
    “What the devil have you got on your neck there?” she said, indicating the dark purple flame scar that ran up from Zane’s left pec and wound itself around the left side of his neck.
    Zane reached up and touched the thing, something he had acquired after a long and drunken evening in Phuket, when he had stumbled onhis way up a staircase while following a whore and dropped the lantern he was carrying, setting the bamboo house on fire.
    Specifically, he got the burn itself when he went back into the flames to get the whore, who, once he had set her down safely outside, attacked him with her fingernails for setting her business on fire.
    “I got burned. In a fire,” he added redundantly. She shook her head, opened her mouth to say something, said nothing, and carried on with her cold-blooded assessment of his body.
    “You keep yourself up okay,” she said, giving him a slow up and down. “No fat on you. Good muscles. You got a rip in your shoulder there, looks like a grazing wound. He shot at you twice?”
    “More than twice.”
    “Did he? You manage to get any shots off while he was doing that?”
    “Fifteen rounds. I hit him at least once.”
    This seemed to please her.
    “Good for you. Although one hit in fifteen is pretty poor shooting. You need some practice, I guess.”
    “He was shooting back at me at the time. That tends to spoil your concentration.”
    “I guess it does. That’s a mean big hole in your back. Put your hands up on the wall there.”
    Merle did as he was told. Although he didn’t like the position—it reminded him of getting busted by those cops in Cocodrie or getting a cavity search from the yard bulls at Angola—he found he needed the support.
    She went inside and he heard the sound of a tap running. Over behind the barn the generator picked up speed, which meant that the water pump was electric and it was powered by that generator.
    He hadn’t seen any phone or power wires running into the house either. Or anything like a satellite dish on the roof.
    She came back out through the screen door carrying a large wooden bucket and some rough towels, which she dipped in the water and then used to wipe him down, as if he were a horse that had been rode hard and put away wet.
    The water was ice cold, as if it had been pumped up from glacier melt. She did the work without shyness, as brisk and thorough as an ER nurse, her expression turning grim as she studied the wound in his back, finally touching it with a fingertip, but gently.
    “Not a big slug, I guess. You’re lucky it didn’t nick your spine. Okay, you’ll do.”
    She straightened up, handing him a towel to dry off with. While he dabbed at himself she opened the door and stepped back to let him go through.
    The house looked as if nothing had been done to it since the Depression. It was sparsely furnished, mostly bare wood pieces, oval hooked rugs here and there, in rust and green and gold, one large brown leather couch in front of a big stone fireplace, a wood fire blazing on the hearth, a few framed photos set out along the top of the mantel.
    There was a four-slot gun rack above the fireplace, with two Winchesters, one carbine, and a long rifle with a tubular scope, both browned, with octagonal barrels, he noticed. Antiques, but in mint condition. Under that, one very old fowling piece, also cap-and-ball, resting on the bars.
    And on the top bar, a long angular and mean-looking weapon that Merle thought might be a BAR, a Browning automatic rifle, a 30.06 full-auto monster that hadn’t been used in the field since the end of World War II.
    The darker side of Merle’s nature figured he was looking at about fifty thousand dollars’ worth of antique weapons on that rack alone. He put the thought aside. He figured he was already in enough trouble.
    It looked like the eating got done in the kitchen, at the