“Give me your driver’s license.”

“I don’t think so.”

The man racked a fresh shell into the chamber, and the awful noise of the pump action set Jack’s heart racing.

“All right,” he said. He opened the center console, took out his wallet, spent ten seconds trying to slide his license out of the clear plastic sleeve. He handed it through the window, and the man took it and walked over to the trucks and the other men.

Dee whispered through tears, “Jack, look out your window at the other side of the road.”

Where the light from the trucks diffused into the barest strands of illumination, Jack saw a minivan parked in a vacant lot, and just a few feet from it, four pairs of shoes poking up through the tall, bending grass, the feet motionless and spread at forty-five degree angles, toes pointing toward the sky.

“They’re going to kill us, Jack.”

He reached under his seat, lifted the.45 into his lap.

The man coming back toward the Discovery now.

“Dee, kids,” Jack said as he shifted into reverse, “unbuckle your seatbelts right now and when I clear my throat, get down as low as you can into the floorboards and cover your heads.”

The man reached his window.

“Get out of the car. All of you except the boy.”

“Why?”

The shotgun barrel passed over the lip of the windowglass, stopping six inches from Jack’s left ear. So close he could feel the heat from recent use radiating off the steel.

“This is not the way you want to handle this, Mr. Colclough. Turn off the engine.”

The other men walked over.

Jack cleared his throat and jammed his foot into the gas pedal, the Land Rover lurching back, a winch punching through the rear window, glass spraying everywhere. He grabbed the smoldering barrel with one hand and shifted into drive with the other. The shotgun blast ruptured his eardrum and blew the glass out of a window, the recoil ripping the barrel out of his hand along with several layers of cauterized skin. He could hear only a distant ringing, like a symphony of old telephones buried deep underground. Muzzleflashes and the front passenger window exploded, shards of glass embedding themselves in the right side of his face as he pushed the gas pedal into the floor again and cranked the steering wheel to miss the branches of the downed oak tree.