Relentless

it felt as new and cumbersome to me as when I first held it on the beach, taking instruction from Penny. Shouldn’t think about how to hold it, thinking made the fingers stiff, just let the hand conform to the grip.
    “What’s this room on the left?” Booth asked, his voice close.
    “It’s like a den,” said Walbert.
    They must be just beyond the living-room archway.
    Oswald said, “Big old bear like you needs a den.”
    Shift my weight, a floorboard might betray me. No lights on in the living room, good, the hall light would throw my shadow behind me, not toward them. But I could hear my breathing, shallow and quick, a dog panting, not good, if they listened they would hear it too, as close as they were, the breath of life suddenly become the breath of death. Inhale and hold.
    “You open the door, go first,
Sheriff,”
Booth said, greasing the last word with a sneer.
    Once committed, keep moving, no hesitation. Breathless, pistol in both hands and arms extended, I stepped into the archway.
    Truman Walbert was at the den door, facing away from me. One of the men, probably Booth, held a gun to the sheriff’s head, and his back was toward me.
    Oswald stood behind Booth and Walbert, also presenting his back to me. He had a pistol in his right hand, a big damn thing, pointed at the floor.
    Two steps brought me to Oswald. Forgetting everything I knew about the Weaver stance and the Isosceles stance with its several variations, I said “Drop it” on an explosive exhale, as I jammed my gun to the back of his head.
    Oswald twitched and froze when the muzzle of the .45 Champion pressed cold against his skull.
    Booth looked over his shoulder. Shaved head, gaunt hard face, mouth as tight as a soldered seam, thin nose with more bone than flesh, eyes narrowed to coin slots: a death-vending machine.
    I thought we were stalemated, everyone would have to back off slowly, stand down from this impasse, but Booth believed otherwise. He shot Truman Walbert.
    Plinking vegetation at a distance doesn’t prepare you for the necessity of putting a bullet in a man’s head at point-blank range. As a theoretical target, even from only two steps away, Oswald was entirely plausible to me, but when I was standing so close to him that I could smell his cologne and see the mole on the back of his neck, he was not just an easy target but also a man, a man different from me in many respects but certain to be like me in some ways. I hesitated to do to him what Booth had done to Walbert.
    An obvious professional who read my inexperience in an instant, Booth swiveled toward me, pivoting like a dancer, his weapon coming around, even as the late sheriff went to his knees and began to topple sideways.
    Oswald failed to throw down his pistol, not as impressed by a gun to his head as I would have been in his position. My heart hammered, the rush of blood loud in my ears, and I knew Oswald was thinking faster about all of this than I could, plotting faster than any writer who had ever penned a page, just as Booth was moving with animal ruthlessness, with cold certainty. Oswald turned his head to the right, as if trying to see me, even though the muzzle of the .45 gouged his scalp.
    Booth had already rotated sideways to me, a narrow profile, his weapon rising into position. A fraction of a second before I would have been looking down the bore of the barrel, two shots thundered in the hallway, and bullets rocked him, neck and shoulder. He started his fall just as the sheriff fully landed.
    At the far end of the hall: a curl of smoke in the air and a thrusting .45 and Penny in the Isosceles stance.
    Oswald was bringing his pistol up not because he hoped to turn it back on me in some trick shot, but because he intended to bring down Penny, avenging Booth.
    I shot him in the head.
    Either Oswald pitched away from me or I shoved him in disgust, but as he went, he fired one shot reflexively before the gun dropped from his hand.
    The round missed Penny and shattered chunks of wood from the frame of the kitchen doorway.
    My ears were ringing, deafened by the gun blasts in the enclosed space, and I backed up against the wall next to the archway, needing something to lean against for a moment, keeping an eye on Booth, the only one who might still be alive, the other two with broken-melon heads.
    Another house full of bodies, twenty-eight years down the time stream from the first, one good man dead but also two very bad ones, nobody invisible to anyone else,