the shotgun sideways, and then wrestled it away from her.

Too late for Einstadt: the shot had hit him in the stomach and lower chest, and though he was still alive, he wouldn’t be for long, with a hole that you could put a fist into.

Einstadt was trying to speak, but couldn’t, and Virgil yelled at the radio, “Get somebody in here, I’ve got the gun,” and at that instant, Jenkins burst in, and then stopped. “Holy shit.”

Alma leaned forward, putting her face in front of her father’s clouding eyes, and said, “You’re on your way to hell, Father. Maybe I’ll see you there sometime. I hope not, but maybe I will. In the meantime, I hope you burn like a sausage on a griddle.”

Einstadt might have heard some of it—his eyes flicked with the words—but he didn’t hear the griddle part, because at some point between “on your way to hell” and “sausage,” he died.

JENKINS SAID to Virgil, “We recorded it. Some of it was a little dim.” He picked up the taped radio and pulled the tape off, clicked it, and said, “Gene, keep most of the people out of here. We’ve got a crime scene.”

Schickel came back: “Copy that.”

Jenkins said to Alma, “Miz Flood, I’m sorry for your troubles. I truly am. And I gotta tell you, I would have pulled the trigger. If you want to call me up in court, I’ll tell them that. I think you did the right thing.”

She looked up at him and said, “So you don’t agree with Mr. Flowers, that it was about us? Me and the girls?”

“I have a different view of it,” Jenkins said. “If you’d seen that old sonofabitch living in prison, getting three meals a day and hanging out with his pals, you would have wondered where the justice was. Well, you know where it is now.” He put out a hand to her. “Come on along. I’ll take you and the girls into town.”

24

Virgil lay between Coakley’s long legs, with his head on her tummy, and she lazily scratched his scalp with her nails, and she said, “I keep thinking, one more day and it’ll be back to normal.”

Virgil said, “Yeah.”

“Oh, I know,” she said. “I had four more media interviews today, but I’m going to give them up. I’ll do People, but I’ll be damned if I’m going on National Outrage, or whatever it is.”

“Good decision,” Virgil said. He found his sex life tended to be enhanced if he let her ramble for a while; in the meantime, he observed, she had the most consistently clean belly button he’d ever encountered.

“The attorney general’s office is complaining about our record-keeping,” Coakley said. “Their lead attorney got really snarky about the evidence stream, and I said, ‘We had seven dead and nine wounded people and a hundred abused kids and nobody knows how many more from the past, and you’re worried that I didn’t use the right paper clips?’ She’s like twenty-nine.”

“Paper clips?” Virgil asked. He was now re-contemplating her laser job, and wondering why it had resulted in a pubic trapezoid (a four-sided polygon having exactly one pair of parallel sides, the parallel sides being referred to as the bases, or, in Coakley’s case, the top and bottom, and being composed of short reddish-blond hair; the sum of the angles being 360 degrees).

“Of course, the paper clips aren’t important now, but a year from now they might be, when all the trials get going,” Coakley said. “I’ve told the commission that I need to hire a couple of retired attorneys to come in and do the paperwork. The AG’s office will handle all the actual victim interviews, the regional public defender will take all the defense stuff, so what I need to do, is organize the arrest-level records. Starting now. Forget the interviews.”

“Sounds right.” The question being, Virgil thought, Why a trapezoid? Why not a regular triangle, say, or a rhombus? Or something baroque, with curves?

“But then,” Coakley asked, “how do you say no to the Today show?”

“Dunno,” Virgil muttered.

“You know what? I’m the one who put the M16 on the wall behind the desk. I had John do it, right before the interview,” she said. “I didn’t want any of this ‘Housewife-sheriff makes big fuss.’ That reporter from the Times kept wanting to talk about baking bread and raising children as a single working mother. I kept telling her, ‘Hey, I’m the sheriff. I carry a gun. I shoot at people.’ And she was like,