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Jim, had a good ‘core’. (Kylie’s mother was always talking about people’s ‘cores’.) One of the few things she remembered from her childhood was the priest reading his Bible to her in her own living room, like she was somebody special. She knew he didn’t go to the other girl’s houses. He read to her like she pretended her father used to read to her. Probably that was just more of Jim’s sick grooming. But the man on the front porch wasn’t the pervert Billy talked about. He wasn’t even the forbidden lover, who could touch her face so tenderly one time and another be pounding into her with his engorged, razor-nicked cock, his face all knotted up with pain and the filthy things he was saying. The man on the porch was a trigger, and if the trigger got pulled the last good feelings in Kylie’s world would blow up and be gone forever.
    “I’m going to open the door,” Billy said. “Talk to him. You wait in the kitchen and listen. If he gets too nutty go out the back door and run to your mother’s house, okay?”
    “Define ‘too nutty’.”
    “Kylie, will you please do what I tell you, just this one time?”
    “What are you going to do if he gets ‘too nutty’, shoot him with your gun?”
    “I won’t have to. He isn’t completely out of his mind. Guys get really sane when a gun is pointed at them. Trust me.”
    It was like a line someone would say in the cowboy movies Billy watched, not something Billy himself would say. He delivered the line without much conviction, Kylie thought.
    “Why don’t we both go out the back door right now,” she said. She could feel the big-ass God finger trembling on the trigger. Kylie wasn’t mad at Billy anymore; but with all her heart she didn’t want him to open that door. “If nobody’s home,” she said, “maybe he’ll go away.”
    “I’m not sneaking out the back door of my own damn house.”
    “Why not?”
    Somebody pounded on the front door. “Kylie, for Christ’s sake.”
    So Kylie stood in the kitchen. She heard Billy unlocking the front door, and she peered around the corner to see what happened next. Billy opened the door. Jim stood there, a big man framed in a doorway that seemed almost too small to admit him. He wore his usual overcoat and that floppy black hat. Like Billy, Father Jim suffered only the very early stages of the sickness.
    There was no talking. Father Jim made a sudden movement. Actually it had started as soon as Billy opened the door. The movement concluded with a downward swing, and Billy collapsed, never having reached for the toy automatic. Guns evidently only made guys sane if guys actually saw them.
    Ice water flooded Kylie’s bloodstream.
    She staggered out of the kitchen and pointed. “Leave him alone!” Her voice shook.
    “Girl,” Father Jim said. “You are not right.”
    He stepped over Billy’s body, grasping the Louisville slugger midway up in his big left hand. Kylie turned to run. He covered the distance between them in a few strides and caught her by the hair, hauling her back. She screamed, wrenched away from him, hair ripping from her scalp. Bright needles of pain lit her up. She bolted through the kitchen, hit the back door, struggled with the lock, got it open and threw herself outside.
    Kylie was eighteen years old. In junior high school she had run the 440. She could haul ass . If she wanted to get away from Father Jim she could certainly do it by sprinting across town to her mother’s house. But Kylie wasn’t interested in running away; she was interested in knocking Father Jim’s head off with a shovel. The trigger was pulled. Fuck his core. She kept seeing Billy crumple and Jim standing over him with his stupid bat, and she was furious. Furious .
    She ran to the garden shed and grabbed at wooden handles, discarding rakes, hoes, an edger, until she found the shovel. It had a handle almost as tall as she was and a square steel blade.
    She spun around with it, but the priest wasn’t there. She