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“How can I go through with it after what you’ve just said?” I lower my voice. “That the boss could be involved in a conspiracy?”

“You’ll have full backup. I’ll be there, Ana. I’ll be running the show.”

But deep uncertainty has hit me in the gut. Not just about them but about myself, too. My ability to pull the trigger. Already I am feeling queasy. I kick at a mound of sawdust at the base of a tree stump, chewed up by bugs. It takes a moment to refocus.

“Laumann. Okay.”

“You specified a Colt .45?”

“Stone’s gun, right.”

“Jason got this for you.”

Donnato fishes inside his pocket. A family with three little kids comes screaming toward the restrooms.

“How good a shot are you?” he asks, his voice clear despite their earsplitting shrieks. “Because the first bullet in the chamber will be live.”

He holds out his hand. I hold out mine. Our palms touch in slow motion, and the magazine for a Colt .45 is transferred. I slip it smoothly into my pocket.

Jason provided a magazine filled with blanks. When Dick Stone gives me his gun, I will switch magazines. But the gun will have already been loaded, one live bullet already ejected into the chamber, requiring my first shot to be precisely accurate. When I approach Herbert Laumann—on whatever darkened street, or maybe in the middle of the day—I must hit him squarely in the bulletproof vest.

The parking lot in the rest area seems filled with smoking vehicles, each exuding a black cloud of burned brake lining. The noise of the engines is raw. The tuna fish was bad; it’s making me sick. The sun is hot; it’s making me weak. My mind unhooks and ruminates on the detective I shot. The world fragments and he is everywhere. My heart pounds. The magazine of blanks in my pocket is heavy as the weight of original sin. Donnato is throwing the garbage away. I’m back in the spinning car, bloody and gruesome, looking at the detective’s unseeing eyes. The blind foal is nursing. Sirocco’s tail whips the flies and the pasture vibrates with bees. The cicadas are singing on the battlefield.

When young boys came home from the Civil War and lay at night in the safety of their featherbeds, their pulses would still race unaccountably. It was a condition doctors recognized, even way back then, as “soldier’s heart.”

No bad judgment.

No mistakes.

No cowgirl stuff.

Thirty-four

On his last day on earth as BLM deputy state director, before a radical animal rights activist named Darcy DeGuzman murders him in front of his own house, Herbert Laumann is still fighting the fight—not just the massive traffic over Portland’s Broadway Bridge but also call after call through the headset as the droning voice of his assistant bombards his brain with end-of-day problems at the office. Idling on the bridge at rush hour, trucks and buses blocking the river view, he must be wondering if the FBI, an agency he believes in, is leading him into an even worse predicament.

Can he trust anyone? He must be insane. Yes, that’s fine. Walk up and shoot me, whatever fits your bill. But he has no right to question. He has failed to protect his family. He is a hollow man in the wrong skin—his son’s skin—that has become a searing penance, night and day. It was the promise of world-class medical treatment for Alex that sealed the deal with the all-too-understanding FBI men. But they still won’t say which burn center he will be admitted to, in which part of the country. Or what type of new job Laumann will be given.

They keep promising a painless death and peaceful afterlife.

Maybe secretly he wishes the bullets would be real.

We, the assassins, follow.

Dick Stone, down to fighting weight and back on his meds, is a force of nature, like those glacial rivers roaring down from Canada. I never saw until today how the fragments come together—the loyalty that made him an FBI agent, and the demonic intelligence that opens the soul’s unwilling gate to murder.

Stone has never been more lucid. Even his skin looks baby soft