Charlaine Harris - Sweet and Deadly aka Dead Dog

He kept running toward her.

He doesn’t think I can hit him, she thought, with an odd cold rush of amusement.

She took careful aim and fired again.

She killed him.

For a long second she didn’t understand the significance of the emptiness beyond the barrel of the gun. Then her arms fell to her sides. She straightened. For the moment of detachment she had remaining, she felt considerable pride in that shot. Her father would have been proud.

Then the detachment melted away forever, and she was Catherine Linton, shivering with cold in the oppressive heat of the summer night. The locusts were singing.

She walked toward the sprawled figure in the middle of the street. She stood over Carl Perkins’s body. The file, with its contents spilled out onto the pavement, lay forgotten behind her. She felt for a pulse she knew she would not feel.

Doors were opening down the street. There were shouts of alarm.

Then there was the sound of rapid light footsteps moving toward her. Molly Perkins was running down the street.

Catherine flinched away from the body, and took four rapid steps backward to stand under the streetlight. She turned away. She didn’t want to see Miss Molly’s face. She heard the sound of the woman kneeling by her husband’s body.

Then she looked. Molly Perkins was gazing at the face of her dead husband. She did not look up at Catherine. There was no indication of surprise in the woman’s posture; she had been waiting for her husband’s death for a long time. Maybe her grief was all spent.

A car pulled up behind Catherine. She didn’t move.

Running footsteps, heavier this time.

Randall held her to him fiercely.

She let out her breath in a light sigh. Her arms dangled uselessly at her sides, the gun still clutched in her right hand.

Then there were many voices, many footsteps. She kept her face buried against Randall’s chest. There was a siren, and Sherriff Galton’s voice. She didn’t move.

Her fingers relaxed, and the gun fell to the ground, slid across the pavement, and went into the ditch. Her arms went up, anchored around Randall’s waist.

In the noise and movement that disturbed the clear hot night, they stood joined under the bleak glare of the streetlight.

The locusts sang.

A few miles outside of Lowfield, up the highway that led to Memphis, a little boy cried over his supper because his dun-colored dog had been missing for four days.