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flopped over like a cotton dummy, on the wrong end of the punching. So far, they hadn’t looked my way.
    I blinked twice, not really believing what I was seeing.
    Today’s polo was the color of the Caribbean.
    What the hell was Jack Smith doing near my pickup truck? Staking me out? A self-centered reaction on my part, since he was the unfortunate man on the ground. I stepped back into the stairwell, ran partway up the next flight, and dialed 911.
    “Help,” I whispered. “Guy getting beat up. Third floor. Stockyards Station garage.”
    “Ma’am, did you say someone is getting beat up?” I could hear the click of her computer keys.
    I hung up.
    The logical thing would be to retreat down the stairs and outside into the sunshine. I wanted more than anything to leave Jack Smith to his own problems, especially because I half wondered if these two thugs were doing me a favor. But the thump of a hard boot hitting soft flesh reminded me of an old man in Ponder who used to kick his dog in public.
    One of the men continued to go at Jack; the other leaned against a car, arms crossed. Jack’s groans had stopped, his body’s reaction reflexive now instead of defensive. Not good.
    I grabbed my keys out of my purse, sucked in a breath, and, crouching, made an awkward, limping run for the passenger side of the pickup. I knelt down on the concrete to fit the key in the lock. I might as well have jabbed a pocketknife into my bleeding knee. It took every ounce of willpower not to cry out.
    I pulled open the door and gingerly stretched myself flat over the ripped Naugahyde bench seat. My hand groped for the gun tucked underneath the seat. I slid backward out of the pickup, peered around the bumper, and took aim.
    Daddy’s pistol in my purse wasn’t loaded.
    But the .45 under the driver’s seat of the pickup was. Unlike Daddy’s pistol, it felt as natural in my grip as a hairbrush or a tennis racket. My grandfather gave it to me on my twenty-first birthday after Mama had retired for the night. Lots happened while the women in our family slept.
    It was a big gun for a girl, my grandfather warned me, with a hell of a kickback if you didn’t know what you were doing.
    “But,” he added, “you’re going to know what you’re doing. It needs to be second nature or you have no business carrying.”
    Grip, stance, sight.
    Practice, practice, practice.
    It was a year before Grandaddy decided I had passed his training class and gave me permission to take the gun out on my own.
    The two men seemed to be arguing over whether to dump Jack into the back of a black Escalade.
    “OK!” I yelled, like an idiot, running straight at them with the outstretched .45. I imagined several generations of dead, experienced law-enforcing McClouds flinching from their bird’s-eye view in heaven. “Put your hands in the air!”
    “What the hell?” The biggest guy swung my way.
    I slipped behind a red mini-van, readjusting my aim over the hood to point at the guy’s left shirt pocket.
    “Bubba, I think we have a little girl with a gun.”
    Bubba? The last time I heard that name I was sixteen, and dating one. Now Bubba walked toward me, unmoved and unarmed, into a slash of light. Brute nose. Evil grin. A black beaver-felt Stetson that cost about five hundred bucks new. Ostrich boots.
    Not a pretender. A professional redneck.
    “This ain’t just any little girl, Rusty,” Bubba said, seemingly unconcerned that I might blast out his heart. “I think this is
our
girl.” He punched at the screen of his iPhone. “Lookie here, cutie,I’ve got your picture. I’m not going to hurt you.” He strode forward, holding out the phone.
    “I
will
shoot you,” I yelled. “Stop right there!”
    He grinned and kept on coming. Thirty feet away. Twenty.
    Grip, stance, sight. White noise roared in my head.
    “I’ve already called the police. And you don’t think I can shoot?” I took aim at a Jack in the Box ball grinning from the antenna of a white Volvo