In the top drawer he fished among his socks for a clip, popped it into his Browning 9mm, and slapped a shell into the chamber. On the neatly made bed was a fake leather briefcase he'd purchased at Wal-Mart. Using a handkerchief, he wiped the pistol as well as a can of Mace free of fingerprints before placing them both in the case.

In the tiny room, an iron bed sat on a plank floor, bare except for a small handwoven Navajo rug. Once a brilliant red, it was now faded nearly pink. On the walls were stark black-and-white landscape photographs in barn-board frames. A fragile antique chair sat wedged into the corner, its seat covered with a delicate lace doily. Sales took pride in the fact that, except for the color of the rug, the room hadn't changed in twenty years. When his wife died, he had made a pact with her spirit that their bedroom would remain sacrosanct, that it would always be their place, and so he had never shared it with another woman.

A hall ran through the middle of the cabin, and Sales stopped at the door to his daughter's bedroom. With his hand on the knob, he hesitated, then kept going, past the kitchen and on into the great room. The walls rose all the way to the pitched roof. They were crowded with trophy fish and the heads of wild animals. A walnut gun cabinet stood against the wall. Over the stone fireplace was a Comanche war ax.

The weapon had been given to him by his mother. It had belonged to the men in her family as far back as anyone could remember. She'd given it to him the day he enlisted for the war in Southeast Asia. Before that war, the Sales family had had great hopes for him. He would be the first to go to college. He would become a doctor or a lawyer; no one knew which, they just knew it would be one or the other. But then the army came to the high school and whipped up the young men about the need for patriotism, for saving their country. They would be drafted anyway, one officer forewarned. No one in Sales's family knew of or even talked about exemptions.