the last book I ever read (T. C. Boyle's The Harder They Come, excerpt five)

from The Harder They Come by T. C. Boyle:

There would have been shell casings. And the bullets themselves, the ones they dug out of Carey’s dead flesh. That would have been something, at least. But what he wondered—and here he was, following a wide beaten path uphill through the bracken at the feet of the trees, the morning still, nothing moving and nothing sound off, not even birds—was just what caliber those casings and bullets had turned out to be. Were they from a handgun? A revolver? An old wood-grip .38 or .45 some scoop-faced son of a bitch kept tucked in his waistband like a Hollywood cliché? Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges. Or something else. Something else altogether.