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light and drew a sharp breath.
When she didn't say anything, he pushed her aside.
    Myra was already backing away from the blood and trying to wipe
it from her feet at the same time. The goat's entrails were everywhere. She
glanced instinctively at the phone on the kitchen bar and saw that the Formica
surface of the bar was smeared with blood. Someone had sliced open the nanny
and dragged the bleeding carcass around her home, making sure that everything,
even the walls, was splattered with blood. And they had done it in the short
time that she and Cal had been outside.
    How? Her
horrified mind asked. Why?
    "Mom," Cal whispered. "Are there any rounds left in the pistol?"
    She
blinked. Of course. The person responsible could still be inside her house,
hiding somewhere.
    Sucking
the fresh blood on her lower lip, Myra stepped over the carnage on the floor and made her way
across the living room and through the kitchen to the hall. Cal came behind her,
holding the empty shotgun in front of him to swing like a club if necessary.
    The
bathroom and both bedrooms had been subjected to the same bloody treatment. Myra looked immediately
at the mirror above her dresser, half-expecting to see a message written there.
There was nothing but blood, blood, and more blood. While bending down to look
under her bed, nausea caught up with her. She stayed bent over for several
minutes, while Cal made sympathetic noises and held her hair away from her
face. When she was finished, he said, "I don't think anyone's here. If
you're going to be all right I'll start cleaning some of this up."
    "No," Myra said
quickly. "We can't stay here tonight, Cal . I can't stay here. We'll sleep in the big house and come
back in the morning."
    Cal nodded and wiped a line of perspiration from his forehead. Myra saw that
now he was taking this seriously, even more seriously than when his dog had
been killed.
    "Why,
Mom?" he asked. "Why are they doing this?"
    "I
don't know, Cal ,"
she said in a quiet voice. "But I've changed my mind about one thing.
Starting tomorrow, I think both of us should be armed at all times."
     
     

 
     
     
    CHAPTER 3
     
     
     
    It
appeared Nolan had been suckered after all, Vic thought, but not by him.
Sometime between last night and this morning Christa had managed to wrap the
grumbling bastard around her little finger. Nolan actually offered to pay for a
trip to Boot Hill and the other attractions before heading west. That had been
Vic's first clue, but the real evidence of Nolan's suckered state revealed
itself when he acted out a noisy shoot-em-up with the girls in front of the
Long Branch Saloon. When he offered to buy the girls cowboy hats, Vic had to
put his foot down. He owed his ex-partner too much as it was. The favors had to
stop somewhere.
    While
watching Nolan's comic gun slinging antics it occurred to Vic that beneath the
hard-muscled chest of the ex-college athlete beat the heart of a prankish,
fun-loving kid no older than Andy. It was difficult to reconcile that image of
Nolan with the stone-faced, brick-fisted cop Vic had worked with on the force.
Now, as he eyed the relaxed profile and the bandaged hands on the wheel of the
Buick, he wondered if it was the kid in Nolan—the one who played dead so
convincingly after Andy shot him at crotch level—that resisted commitment and
responsibility and enjoyed being an all around screw-up.
    Nolan
had a lot of fun, and there were times when Vic envied him his life, but more
often than not he couldn't understand it. Nolan seemed to enjoy being a lone
Wulf. He loved women, but he also loved to punish them. He was a prince until
they were in love with him then he either dumped them or screwed someone else
until they found out about it and dumped him. Vic had seen it happen a dozen
times. The only thing he wasn't sure of was whether Nolan's behavior was
conscious or unconscious. After Nolan shat on two of Connie's friends, she
refused to let Vic introduce him to any more of her