Seeing her rising alarm, Broker put his hand on her shoulder. “It’s all right…”

Kit shook off his arm and fought a rush of tears, forced them back down, and shouted at him. “You said it was going to be normal. It was going to be Christmas. You lied. People are gonna die and go to hell!”

She ran from the kitchen. Broker let her go as reflex kicked in. Deal with it. He snapped the trigger lock back on the.45, removed the key, and jammed it in his pocket. Up the stairs, past the two tightly shut bedroom doors, into the den closet, back down again with the other guns in the house. Out the back door. He was loading the guns in the heavy diamond-plate toolbox in the back of his truck-to which he had the only key-when he saw Dooley come out of his apartment doorway.

Seeing the guns going in the lockbox, Dooley walked over, leaned against his rusty Civic, checked Broker with his quiet brown yardbird eyes, and asked, “This something I should know about?”

“Nah. Housecleaning,” Broker said evenly as he snapped the lock on the toolbox. Too calm. Hurricane-eye calm. Standing dead still, his insides struggled for balance. A palpable sensation churned in his chest that his life had uprooted and was starting to rotate around him.

“Uh-huh,” Dooley said.

Still smarting from Kit’s outburst, Broker stared at his tenant, standing there next to the Civic with the weathered Bush/Cheney sticker on the rear bumper. Dooley, a felon, couldn’t vote, but he flew the sticker to keep bleak faith with the Christian Man in the White House.

“One thing,” Broker said. “Go easy on the religion stuff with Kit, okay? You got her spooked about people dying and going to hell.”