Shallow Graves

could go up a rose trellis and through the window. Come around from behind.
    Two of them, both armed, probably.
    A car pulled into the driveway and sped to the house, catching Pellam in its beams. It gave a long blare on the horn.
    From the house, fifty feet away, lights clicked on, blinding him.
    Keith parked and climbed out. “What’s going on?”
    Pellam called, “Stay there. Stay back.” He turned back to the house. The front door opened and one of the twins stepped out, holding a pistol on Pellam’s chest.
    So much, he thought, for surprise.

Chapter 24
    PELLAM SUPPOSED THAT he’d known all along it would come to this.
    Lifting his hands, he walked to the right, out of the glare, onto the driveway, gravel scrunching beneath the worn soles of his Noconas. He stopped and felt an odd sensation—growing into the drive, like roots going down, solid as the granite slabs the gravel used to be.
    “Hey, mister. Hey, Mr. Torrens.”
    “What the hell—”
    “Quiet,” Pellam ordered Keith. The man froze.
    This was definitely the ending of a film—not like one of his, though, in which viewers felt all that tension, then nothing happening, the principals moving vaguely off into the credits (boy, he took flak for those endings. Resolve it, John, resolve it. How the world hates the truth of ambiguity).
    But here it was. Pretty damn clear to him. A man slouching out onto the porch, holding in his hand an automatic pistol. Meg said she didn’t like handguns. They’re man-killing guns, she’d have been thinking, no other purpose for them.
    The man slouching.
    “You interrupted me,” the twin said. “Was justabout to sit down and watch some TV with a little friend in there.”
    And where’s the other one, Pellam wondered, his brother?
    Behind him?
    Behind me?
    Inside, with Sam?
    “Where’s Meg?” Pellam asked.
    “Whatcha doin’ here, mister?”
    “Which one’re you?”
    “Bobby. Hey, don’t you move there, Mr. Torrens. You do, I’ll have to kill you too.”
    “Both of you brothers, get the fuck out of here—”
    “Shut up, Keith,” the twin said, half-cheerfully.
    Pellam asked, “You the one who did it?”
    “Did what?” Bobby asked.
    “Killed my friend.”
    “S’pose you know if I tell you I’ll have to make sure that fact doesn’t go any further.”
    “That’s pretty much on the agenda anyway, isn’t it?” Pellam asked.
    “Heh.”
    “No!” Keith cried. “Please! Just leave.”
    “I just want to know if it was you killed Marty.”
    “Was a hell of a shot, I do say so myself.” Not smirking. Just mentioning the fact. “Whatcha got there?” Bobby asked. “In your belt?”
    “It’d be a Colt Peacemaker.”
    “No kidding. Reproduction?”
    “Nope. It’s the real thing.”
    “No kidding. Forty-four?”
    “Forty-five.”
    “Heh.”
    “Where’s your brother?”
    “Maybe he’s behind you.”
    “So you’ll die first,” Pellam said.
    “Heh.”
    “Please . . .” Keith was begging. “Where’s my son?”
    They both ignored him.
    There was no motion. Pellam stood on the wet gravel, his feet, in scuffed brown boots, slightly apart.
    There was no noise.
    There was nothing else in the world except a man standing in front of him with a gun in his hand. A tall Victorian house. With a woman and boy inside, her husband nearby. Under a canopy of a dry, clear fall night.
    Pellam had shot ducks and geese and a number of Gila monsters and rattlesnakes and hundreds of Heineken bottles.
    He’d never shot a man.
    The security lights poured into his eyes, making Bobby a silhouette. (Pellam recalled that, on various target ranges, he’d shot as many silhouette targets as Gila monsters and rattlesnakes combined.)
    No face, no motion, no sound.
    In the stillness, in this dense peace, a thought came to him. Something he remembered from researching a script about the Indians of the Great Plains. The Sioux, he believed. Waking up on a beautiful day, they wouldn’t think how good it was to be alive. What they’d say was, “It’s a good day to die.”
    Good, Pellam. Good thought.
    Well, Wild Bill himself hadn’t lived to see forty.
    Then, finally, motion intruded on the scene. It was a cliché—one that Pellam, if he were directing aWestern, wouldn’t have allowed the writer to use: He pulled his blue jean jacket open slightly wider to fully expose the grip of his pistol.
    THE WAY BOBBY saw it these were good odds. Pellam had glare in his eyes and he had a single-action gun so