The kid flew off the seat of his bike, shoulders twisted, legs bent, hat flying off his head. The back of his tee-shirt was shredded, and Steve could see more than he wanted to-red blood and black, torn flesh. The kid’s throwing-hand had been cocked to his ear, and the folded paper tumbled behind him, into the dry gutter, as the kid hit the lawn of the small house on the corner in a boneless, graceless forward roll.

The van stopped in the middle of the street just short of the Poplar-Hyacinth intersection, engine idling.

Steve Ames sat behind the wheel of his rented truck, mouth open, as a small window set into the van’s right rear side slid down, like the power window of a Cadillac or a Lincoln.

I didn’t know they could do that, he thought, and then: What kind of van is that, anyway?

He became aware that someone had come out of the store-a girl in the sort of blue smock top that checkout people usually wore. She had one hand up to her forehead, shielding her eyes from the sun. He could see the young woman, but the paperboy’s body was temporarily gone, blocked by the van. He became aware that a double-barrelled shotgun was now poking out of the window which had just slid down.

And, last but not least, he became aware of the two children standing by their red wagon-out in the open, totally exposed-and looking in the direction from which the first shots had come.

Hannibal the German Shepherd saw one thing and one thing only: the rolled-up newspaper which fell from Cary Ripton’s hand as the shotgun blast pushed him off his bicycle seat and out of his life. Hannibal charged, barking happily.

“Hannibal, no!” Jim Reed shouted. He had no idea what was going on (he hadn’t grown up in Texas, and he had mistaken the first twin shotgun blast for thunder, not because it sounded like thunder but because he was unable to recognize it for what it really was, not in the context of a summer afternoon on Poplar Street), but he didn’t like it.