Lightning

cartridges. He removed his muffs, too, and ran to the target to check her accuracy.

The backstop consisted of hay bales piled seven feet high and four deep; it was fourteen feet wide. Behind it were acres of pine woods, her private land, so the need for an elaborate backstop was questionable, but she did not want to shoot anyone. At least not accidentally.

Chris lashed up a new target and returned to Laura with the old one. 'Four hits out of six, Mom. Two deaders, two good wounds, but looks like you're pulling off to the left a little.'

'Let's see if I can correct that.'

'You're just getting tired, that's all,' Chris said.

The grass around her was littered with over a hundred and fifty empty brass shell casings. Her wrists, arms, shoulders, and neck were beginning to ache from the cumulative recoil, but she wanted to get in another full cylinder before quitting for the day.

Back near the house, Thelma's car door slammed.

Chris put on his ear guards again and picked up the binoculars to watch the target while his mother fired.

Sorrow plucked at Laura as she paused to look at the boy, not merely because he was fatherless but because it seemed so unfair that a child two months short of his eighth birthday should already know how dangerous life was and should have to live in constant expectation of violence. She did her best to make sure there was as much fun in his life as possible: They still played with the Tommy Toad fantasy, though Chris no longer believed that Tommy was real; through a large personal library of children's classics, Laura also was showing him the pleasure and escape to be found in books; she even did her best to make target practice a game and thereby divert the focus from the deadly necessity of being able to protect themselves. Yet for the time being their lives were dominated by loss and danger, by a fear of the unknown. That reality could not be hidden from the boy, and it could not fail to have a profound and lasting effect on him.

Chris lowered the binoculars and looked at her to see why she was not shooting. She smiled at him. He smiled at her. He had such a sweet smile it almost broke her heart.

She turned to the target, raised the.38, gripped it with both hands, and squeezed off the first shot of the new series.

By the time Laura fired four rounds, Thelma stepped up beside her. She stood with her fingers in her ears, wincing.

Laura squeezed off the last two shots and removed her ear guards, and Chris retrieved the target. The roar of gunfire was still echoing through the mountains when she turned to Thelma and hugged her.

'What's all this gun stuff?' Thelma asked. 'Are you going to write new movies for Clint Eastwood? No, hey, better yet, write the female equal of Clint's role—Dirty Harriet. And I'm just the broad to play it — tough, cold, with a sneer that would make Bogart cringe.'

'I'll keep you in mind for the part,' Laura said, 'but what I'd really like to see is Clint play it in drag.'

'Hey, you've still got a sense of humor, Shane.'

'Did you think I wouldn't?'

Thelma frowned. 'I didn't know what to think when I saw you blasting away, looking mean as a snake with fang decay.'

'Self-defense,' Laura said. 'Every good girl should learn some.'

'You were plinking away like a pro.' Thelma noted the glitter of brass shell casings in the grass. 'How often do you do this?'

'Three times a week, a couple of hours each time.'

Chris returned with the target. 'Hi, Aunt Thelma. Mom, you got four deaders out of six that time, one good wound, and a miss.'

'Deaders?' Thelma said.

'Still pulling to-the left, do you think?' Laura asked the boy.

He showed her the target. 'Not so much as last time.'

Thelma said, 'Hey, Christopher Robin, is that all I get — just a lousy 'Hi, Aunt Thelma'?'

Chris put the target with the pile of others that he had taken down before it, went to Thelma, and gave her a big hug and a kiss. Noticing that she was no longer done up in punk style, he said, 'Gee, what happened to you, Aunt Thelma? You look normal.'

'I look normal? What is that — a compliment or an insult? Just you remember, kid, even if your old Aunt Thelma looks normal, she is no such a thing. She is a comic genius, a dazzling wit, a legend in her own scrapbook. Anyway, I decided punk was passe.'

They enlisted Thelma to help them collect empty shell casings.

'Mom's a terrific shot,' Chris said proudly.

'She better be terrific with all this practice. There's enough brass here to make balls for an entire army of Amazon warriors.'

To his mother, Chris said, 'What's that mean?'

'Ask me again in ten years,' Laura said.

When they went into the house, Laura locked the kitchen door. Two deadbolts. She closed the Levelor blinds over the windows so no one could see them.

Thelma watched these rituals with interest but said nothing.

Chris put Raiders of the Lost Ark on the VCR in the family room and settled in front of the television with a bag of cheese popcorn and a Coke. In the adjacent kitchen Laura and Thelma sat at the table and drank coffee while Laura disassembled and cleaned the.38 Chief's Special.

The kitchen was big but cozy with lots of dark oak, used brick on two walls, a copper range hood, copper pots hung on hooks, and a dark blue, ceramic-tile floor. It was the kind of kitchen in which TV sitcom families worked out their nonsensical crises and attained transcendental enlightenment (with heart) in thirty minutes each week, minus commercials. Even to Laura it seemed like an odd place to be cleaning a weapon designed primarily to kill other human beings.

'Are you really afraid?' Thelma asked.

'Bet on it.'

'But Danny was killed because you were unlucky enough to wander into the middle of a drug deal of some kind. Those people are long gone, right?'

'Maybe not.'

'Well, if they were afraid that you might be able to identify them, they'd have come to get you long before this.'

'I'm taking no chances.'

'You got to ease up, kid. You can't live the rest of your life expecting someone to jump at you from the bushes. All right, you can keep a gun around the house. That's probably wise. But aren't you ever going to go out into the world again? You can't tote a gun with you everywhere you go.'

'Yes, I can. I've got a permit.'

'A permit to carry that cannon?'

'I take it in my purse wherever we go.'

'Jesus, how'd you get a permit to carry?'

'My husband was killed under strange circumstances by persons unknown. Those killers tried to shoot my son and me — and they are still at large. On top of all that, I'm a rich and relatively famous woman. It'd be a little odd if I couldn't get a permit to carry.'

Thelma was silent for a minute, sipping her coffee, watching Laura clean the revolver. Finally she said, 'This is kind of spooky, Shane, seeing you so serious about this, so tense. I mean, it's seven months since… Danny died. But you're as skittish as if someone had shot at you yesterday. You can't maintain this level of tension or readiness or whatever you want to call it. That way lies madness. Paranoia. You've got to face the fact that you can't really be on guard the rest of your life, every minute.'

'I can, though, if I have to.'

'Oh, yeah? What about right now? Your gun's disassembled. What if some barbarian thug with tattoos on his tongue started kicking down the kitchen door?'

The kitchen chairs were on rubber casters, so when Laura suddenly shoved away from the table, she rolled