At the other end of my 9mm Glock, Louie Barnett stops drumming his fingertips on the green blotter with the brown triangle corners. Sweat slides down his pasty white cheek in small, saline globes like rain on a windowpane or a galaxy of nervous constellations in a blank sky. I jerk the barrel toward the still life of the hammer balanced on the edge of a rough-hewn, food-laden country table like it would fall any minute on a skull that laughed sideways below it. I thought that redundant. It’s disappointing, but you can only kill a man once.
