were lined up and ready to go, and then led the way out of town to I-90. “This is gonna be something I’ll tell my grandkids, when they grow up,” Schickel said. “There’s never been anything like this.” He turned to look at the line of cop cars and trucks coming behind him. “We got a posse.”

Virgil didn’t have much to say about that, because he was thinking about the man he’d shot in the back at the Rouse farm. He’d killed a man once before, and that had shaken him. He’d been in a couple of shoot-outs, and once had shot a woman in the foot. This was different: what was bothering him this time wasn’t so much the killing, but the way he’d done it without thinking.

Not that he’d been wrong, but that he’d internalized the problems of shooting and killing to the point where they’d become automatic, and there was something essentially wrong with that, he thought. Or maybe he felt bad because he wasn’t feeling worse. . . .

Schickel was going on, and finally wound up with some kind of question, and Virgil shook his head and said, “I’m sorry, I’m a little distracted.”

“I am, myself,” Schickel said. “We’ve been up too long. I was wondering, are you planning to go straight in, all of us? We could get ambushed going up his driveway.”

“Have to see what the situation is. I don’t think they’ll take us on, after what happened at the Rouse place.”

“I wasn’t too clear on that. Lee was in the bathtub with the Rouse girl . . . ?”

Virgil told him about it, and how he and Jenkins had cleared the house out with the M16s, and about the temporary high he’d felt after the fight, and the low that came on as the night continued. “You didn’t have any choice with what you did, Virgil,” Schickel said. “Any one shot could have killed Lee and the girl both. And the guy you shot, I mean, if you hadn’t done that, if you’d fired past him or something, just sure as anything, he’da shot one of yours as he was getting away.”

They rode along for a while, then Schickel said, “About feeling high after the fight . . . Sometimes I wonder if the people up in this country don’t just like war. Kind of like the southerners. My old man was in World War Two, he signed up when he was seventeen. He’d tell all these stories about it, how tough it was, but when you boiled it all down, I think it was probably the best time of his life. He liked it, that’s the only word I can come up with, for the way he acted. Same with a lot of his buddies. They’d get in the Legion Hall and the VFW and they talked about it forever, and when they died, they got sent off by a honor guard.”

“Doesn’t mean they liked it,” Virgil said. “It was big and important, but that’s not the same thing. My old man talks about Vietnam all the time, but he didn’t like it.”

“Well, sometime when you’re not doing anything, think about the difference between liking something and sitting around and talking about it all the time. You might come to the conclusion that there isn’t much difference. . . . I knew one guy in my life—my godfather, in fact—who was a submariner in the war, out in the Pacific. He never talked about it. Somebody’d be talking about the war, and he’d walk away. He couldn’t stand talking about it. That’s somebody who didn’t like it. That’s somebody who hated it.”

Virgil grinned into the dim light coming off the dash: “Are you saying I got some kind of gene that likes killing people?”

“Not exactly. But sort of over in that direction,” Schickel said.

“You gotta quit smoking that shit, man.”

“Yeah, I know. It makes my teeth all yellow.”

THEY WERE FLASHING along the interstate, a long rosary of cars linked by their headlights, then up an exit and down to the right, out on the grid of farm-to-market roads, straight north, straight west, straight north again, another jog to the west, and then Schickel said, “That’s it, off to the left.”

He got on the radio, called the other cars. They were coming in from a long way out, and anybody at Einstadt’s would see them coming and would know who they were.

“What do you think?” Schickel asked, when he got off the radio.

“I