“Now we’d best be quiet,” he murmured, “for voices carry. They’d never hear us this far off, but the animals might. In fact ‘twill be the devil’s own trick getting past the hog lot without the beasts knowing it. Even if we’re dead quiet they’ll catch our scent, though how they can smell anything at all beyond their own raw stench is a great puzzle to me.”

And there were a few guinea fowl penned in with his hens, he said. Pretty creatures, that roosted in the trees and made a racket when you went near them. O’Gara liked having them, liked the way they looked, and assured him they were a delicacy and much prized on the fanciest table, but he found them stringier than chicken and not as tasty. They were splendid for raising an alarm, though, true watchdogs with wings, and there’d be a little noise from them, a little grunting from the hogs, no matter how carefully we got by them. But these were city boys we were coming after, and what would they make of a bit of cawing and oinking from the livestock?

We switched off our flashlights. There was enough moonlight for us to make our way over cleared ground. We walked slowly, picked up our feet deliberately and set them down softly. When we cleared the orchard I could see lights on in the farmhouse. The only sound I could hear was my own breathing.

We walked on. There was a graveled path but we kept to the side of it, where the grass and weeds made a quieter surface underfoot than the loose gravel. A lighted window in the farmhouse kept drawing my eyes. I could picture them in there, sitting around a table, eating and drinking things from the big old refrigerator, opening Ball jars and spooning out preserves that Mrs. O’Gara had put up. I didn’t want to imagine all this, I wanted to concentrate on what I was doing, but the images filled my head anyway.

He stopped in his tracks, caught my arm.

“Listen,” he whispered.

“To what?”

“That’s it,” he said. “As close as we are, we should hear them.”

“In the house?”

“The animals,” he said. “They can hear us. They should be stirring, and we should be hearing them.”

“I can’t hear them,” I whispered back, “but I can certainly smell them.”

He nodded and sniffed the air, sniffed it again. “I don’t care of it,” he said.

“Would anybody?”

He frowned. He was picking up something on the night air that I couldn’t make out. I guess he was used to smelling his hogs and chickens, and knew when something didn’t smell as it should.

He touched a finger to his lips, then led the way. The smell got stronger as we neared the fenced hogpen. He went right up next to the fence, leaned his forearms on the topmost rail. Not a sound came from within, and now I smelled it, too, a stale top note to the usual reek of the animals’ waste.

He switched on his flashlight, played it around the pen, stopped the beam when it lit up a dead hog. The animal lay on its side in its own blood, its great white flank stitched with bullet holes. He moved the light here and there, and I could make out others.

He switched off the light, nodded to himself, and started walking to the hen coop. It was the same story there, but a little more vivid, with blood and feathers everywhere. He stood there and looked at the carnage and breathed deeply, in and out, in and out. Then he switched off his light and turned on his heel and began walking back the way we’d come.

My first thought was that he was going to walk away from it, from all of it, that we’d go back across the stream and through the woods to where we’d left the Chevy. But I knew that couldn’t be, and realized he was heading for the little toolshed, the one that looked like an outhouse. I knew there was a shovel in there, and another inane thought came unbidden, that he was going to bury the slain animals. But that couldn’t be, either.

He said, “When a mink or a weasel gets into a henhouse, why, it will kill like that. You’ll find every hen dead and none of them eaten. Wanton savagery you’d call it, but, don’t you see, the weasel has a reason. It wants the blood. It drinks the blood from each of them, and leaves the flesh. So if you said it was bloodthirsty, why, you’d only be saying the simple truth. It’s thirsty for the blood.”

He turned to me. “What they wanted,” he said, “was target practice. A chance to test their guns and show off for each other. And the job of shooting the animal and watching it stagger around, blood spouting from it, and then shooting it again. And again.”

I thought about what he’d said. I nodded.

“In a way,” he said, “it makes it easier.”

“How do you mean?”

“I was trying to think how to get the O’Garas out of there. On the small chance that they were still alive. But I know now there’s no chance at all. Was it O’Gara answered the phone when you called?”

“I couldn’t swear to it. But I think it probably was, yes.”

“That’s what they kept him alive for,” he said. “Not for you to call, for they’d never have thought that might happen. But in case I called. I might have called before I came out, and they’d have had him there to answer, with a gun to his head and a gun to his wife’s, and no way for him to do anything but whatever they told him to do.”

“Couldn’t they still be alive?”

“No,” he said, “and you can blame me for that, if you’ve a mind to. ‘Twas Andy’s call that killed them. If I’d stopped him from going back to his house, he’d have had no chance to make that call. And they’d have kept O’Gara alive, him and his wife both, and they’d still be alive now. I thought of that, you see, but I thought of it too late. I thought of it when I called Andy’s number and got the busy signal. Now they’ll know we’re on our way, I thought, and then it struck me what the immediate consequences of knowing would be, and I saw my mistake.”

“You can’t blame yourself for that.”

“I could,” he said, “but I won’t waste a great lot of feeling on it. Call or no call, they might have killed them anyway by now. Out of boredom, for lack of anything else to kill. And even if they were alive now there’s little enough chance they’d still be breathing an hour from now. We’ve a hard enough task ahead of us without having to get two people out of that house alive.” He sighed. “It’s a blameless life they led, both of them. They got to heaven a few hours early, that’s all. They’re up there now, wouldn’t you say? While we’re down here in hell.”