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hadn’t been time to cut off the lower part of the staircase before it got dark, so they’d put that off until the next day. Someone would have to stand watch at the top of the stairs all through the night. Ceyonne volunteered for the first shift, from sundown until midnight. Freddie would take the next four hours and then he’d wake up Jerry Haywood for the last stretch.
    Eventually, once the lower staircase was removed, Andy figured they could rely on the teenagers to be lookouts at night. But that brought up another problem—which, happily, she’d already foreseen.
    “You know what’s going to happen soon enough,” Latoya said to her, “we let teenagers stay up at night without supervision. It ain’t just gonna be my son and Ceyonne, neither.”
    Andy chuckled. “No shit. My fifteen-year-old grandson—he’ll be sixteen next month—is already eyeing both your daughter and Sam and you give it another month and he’ll be panting after Lucinda Rodriguez too.”
    “Jayden’s a good girl,” Latoya said, a little stiffly.
    “They’re all good girls. So was I and so were you, at that age—and I don’t know about you but I got my cherry popped when I was sixteen.”
    Latoya sniffed. “I was older. Seventeen.”
    “Right. There’s not going to be much to do up here and when winter comes along in a few months there’ll be even less to keep them busy.”
    They were standing near the edge of the roof—not right next it, though, since there was no railing—looking at the sun go down. Andy gestured with her head toward the tent she and Tom were sharing. “I got a big box in there full of rubbers. I cleaned out the whole condom section in Walgreen’s.” She cawed like a crow. “You should’ve seen the look I got from the cashier. She might as well have said out loud, what kinda old slut needs any rubbers at all, much less hundreds of ’em ?’”
    Latoya was by nature and upbringing a lot more straight-laced than Andy Kaminski, but she couldn’t help bursting into laughter. After the laughter passed, she admitted quietly, “I bought some too, for Eddie. Me and Jerry don’t need to worry about it because he got fixed after we had Jayden. ‘Two kids is enough,’ he said.” Her expression got a little stiff again. “And I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Ceyonne’s already making him use rubbers, whether he likes it or not. That girl’s…not exactly your best Christian.”
    Andy didn’t say anything in response. She and Tom had both lapsed from Catholicism long ago, and she had her own opinion as to what constituted “proper Christian behavior.”
    Whether or not Ceyonne Bennett was the world’s finest Christian young lady, Andy was glad she was with them. By now, they’d all heard about the shootings Ceyonne had done earlier that day.
    And now, another shot rang out from behind them. Andy recognized the sound, having heard it before. That was no pistol firing. That was Tom’s deer rifle, a Remington 700 .30-06.
    Turning around, they saw Tom Kaminski near the opposite edge of the tank roof. He had his shooting bench in position and was taking aim at something in the distance past the fence surrounding the tank farm.
    “You got ’im, Tom!” said Sam excitedly. She was bracing his wheelchair from behind and peering through a set of binoculars that Tom kept in a bag attached to it. “He’s down. And now the other one’s—”
    Tom fired again. The recoil jarred him back a little, but between his own size and the wheelchair being both locked and braced by the girl with him, he wasn’t thrown out of position. He worked the bolt and jacked another round into the chamber.
    “Call it, Sam,” he commanded. “Like I explained.”
    “That one’s down too. The third one’s still off a ways. I’d say two hundred and fifty yards, thereabouts, but it—well, she—is coming toward the fence. Uh…ten o’clock. Well, maybe nine thirty.”
    “I see her. Wheel me around a bit.” As Sam did so,