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for comfort.
    “Mrs. Church?”
    “Yes. Have we met somewhere?”
    Her malachite-green eyes searched my face, but they were only half-focused. They seemed to be looking through me or beyond me for something in the outside darkness, someone she feared or loved.
    “I’ve met your husband,” I said. “What’s all the shooting about?”
    “It’s only father. When something upsets him, he likes to go down in the basement and shoot at a target.”
    “I don’t have to ask you what upset him. In fact, I want to talk to him about the truck he lost.” I told her my name and occupation. “May I come in?”
    “If you like. I warn you, the house is a mess. I have my own house to look after, and I can’t do much for Father’s.I’ve tried to get him to have a woman in, but he won’t have a woman in the house.”
    She opened the door wider and stood to one side. Stepping in past her, I gave her a close look. If she had known how to groom herself, she could have been beautiful. But her thick hair was chopped off in girlish bangs, which made her face seem wide. Her dress was too young and it hung badly on her, parodying her figure.
    She backed away from my gaze like a shy child, turned quickly, and went to a door at the end of the hallway. She called down a lighted stairway:
    “Father, there’s someone to see you.”
    A rough bass answered: “Who is it?”—punctuated by a single shot.
    “He says that he’s a detective.”
    “Tell him to wait.”
    Five more shots sounded under the floor. I felt their vibration through the soles of my shoes. The woman’s body registered each one. When they had ceased she still lingered in the upslanting light from the basement stairway, as if the shots had been an overture to music I couldn’t hear. A strange wild music that rang in her head and echoed along her nerves and held her rapt.
    Heavy feet mounted the stairs. She backed away from the man who appeared in the light. There was something strange in her eyes, hatred or fear or the last of the silent music. He looked at her with a kind of puzzled contempt.
    “Yeah, I know, Hilda. You don’t like the sound of gunfire. You can always stuff cotton in your ears.”
    “I didn’t say anything, Father. This is Mr. Archer.”
    He faced me under a deerhead, a big old wreck of a man who had started to shrink in his skin. His shoulders were bowed and his chest caving under a wrinkled horse-hide jacket. White glinted in the reddish stubble on his cheeks and chin, and his eyes were rimmed with red. Theysmoldered in his head like the last vestiges of inextinguishable and ruinous passions.
    “What can I do for you, Mr. Archer?” His grooved, stubborn mouth denied his willingness to do anything for anybody.
    I told him I had stumbled into the case and wanted to stay in it. I didn’t tell him why. I didn’t know exactly why, though Kate Kerrigan had something to do with it. And perhaps the dark boy’s death had become a symbol of the senseless violence I had seen and heard about in the valley towns. Here was my chance to get to the bottom of it.
    “You mean you want me to hire you?” Meyer said.
    “I’m giving you the opportunity.”
    “Some opportunity. My daughter’s husband—he’s the sheriff—is out on the roads right now with thirty deputies. And don’t think I’m not paying them, in taxes. What have you got to sell that they can’t give me?”
    “Full-time attention to the case, my brains, and my guts.”
    “You think you’re pretty hot, eh?”
    “I have a reputation down south. Not a very pleasant one, but a good one in my line.”
    “I wouldn’t know about that.” He looked down at his grained hands, flexing the big-jointed fingers. I could smell the smokeless powder on them. “I
work
for my money, boy. I don’t lay none of it on the line unless I see value received first. What do I stand to gain? The truck’s insured, so’s the payload.”
    “What about your standing with the shippers? These things are hard