The Dispatcher

FOUR

Ian is on the road before first light. He lay down last night after he was finished with Donald, after he had gotten what he needed from the man; he was exhausted and in pain and did not have any choice in the matter, it was lie down or fall down, but he set the alarm for four o’clock and is after Henry before the morning sun breaches the horizon.

After the first five minutes on the interstate, during which Bulls Mouth lies to his left like a pile of tangled Christmas lights, most of which are broken, the town is history and he sees little more than the gray strip of asphalt that is the road rolling out before him. The lights of the small town are replaced by a vast flat nowhere decorated occasionally by scatterings of trees that can barely be seen in the darkness. Fireflies dot the air here and there, and Ian drives through them. They splatter on his windshield, and his wipers leave glowing streaks smeared across the glass. He cannot see much of anything beyond the road. It is pleasant to drive that way. It shrinks your world to nothing but the road in front of you: everything there is is what your headlights splash across. Everything before you is comprehensible. The drone of the tires is pleasant: a song to send you to sleep. There are no other cars on the road.

He drives this way for some time, time itself nonexistent. Time means nothing when every moment is like the one that just passed. He stops for gas at a Citgo in Schulenburg at some point, but as soon as he’s back on the road, it’s as if it didn’t happen, like a dream after waking. Then, around six thirty, with the sunrise on the flat line of the horizon behind him splashing into his rearview mirror, something to signify that minutes and hours have gone by, he arrives in San Antonio, passing the Shady Acre Tavern, Lone Star Truck Equipment, Southern Tire Mart, and a couple dozen other businesses that skirt the city. He finds a Denny’s on Frederickburg and eats a Grand Slam Breakfast and drinks five cups of coffee. When he is done he tips his waitress, Doris, twenty percent.

By just past seven he is back on the road.

Maggie sits on the ground behind the house, Beatrice beside her. They silently watch Henry cover Flint and Naomi with dirt. It took him a long time to dig the hole into which he dumped them, grunting and levering out hard chunks of earth, but the filling of it goes quickly. His shirt is off and tucked into the back pocket of his Levis, and he’s covered with an oily layer of sweat and dripping with it. His face is red. He digs the shovel into his pile of dirt and dumps it over the bodies, one load of dirt after another.

Maggie feels sad. She could not bear to watch Henry dragging Flint and Naomi to the hole; to see how Flint’s arm flopped lifelessly as Henry rolled him into it; to see Naomi stare blankly with one eye, the other covered in blood from a knife wound in her forehead; to hear the potato-sack thud-thud of the bodies hitting the bottom of the hole. She has seen so much death lately. She never wants to see it again. And she liked Flint and Naomi. They helped when they didn’t have to. You don’t repay someone who helped you by killing them.

Henry told her if she kept her mouth shut they would not be killed, but she did keep her mouth shut and they were killed anyway. Henry lied.

He finishes covering the hole and pounds the dirt down with the flat of the shovel, and then throws his shovel into the bed of his Ford Ranger, which he drove around back of the house earlier this morning.

After that, but before digging the hole that would become Flint and Naomi’s grave, he removed the license plates from the Ford and threw them out into the field. Now he pulls open the door and takes out a pair of guns, and puts them into Flint’s Dodge Ram. He puts the long rifle behind the seats and tucks another smaller gun under the driver’s seat. Then he takes the boxes from the bed of his truck and puts them into the bed of the other.

When he’s done he takes his T-shirt from the back pocket of his Levis and wipes his sweaty face on it, and then slips back into it. It is covered with moisture and smeared with dirt.

Maggie wants to run-if she could just get away everything would be okay-but she feels certain Henry would catch her.

He caught Naomi. He caught Naomi and she was a grown up. He caught her and he stabbed her in the face and the neck and the chest, and he dragged her to the back of the house by her hair and dropped her and kicked her even though she was dead, and covered her with a blue tarp that he pulled from a stack of cordwood and dropped pieces of that wood onto the corners of the tarp to keep the wind from blowing it off the body. She watched him through a window, working in the circle of the back-porch light. There was blood on his hands when he was finished and he reached down and scooped up a handful of dirt and rolled his hands around in it before dusting himself off and coming inside. He pulled the steak knife from his back pocket and dropped it into the sink as if nothing had happened. As if the blood on it did not belong to a man and a woman who had never done anything but help them. As if nothing terrible had just happened at all.

It didn’t take him five minutes to return with Naomi after he ran out the back door. Not five minutes. When he left she was alive, when he returned she was dead. Maggie had tried to help save her. She had tried. Not for herself. It only occurred to her later, after Naomi was out the door and running, that if Naomi could get to help maybe that help would come here and rescue her. But when she did it, when she tripped Henry and yelled at her to go, it didn’t even cross her mind. She just wanted to help save the woman from Henry. But she did not save her.

Maggie wants to run, but she’s afraid of meeting the same fate.

She knew that if she tried to escape the Nightmare World Henry might kill her, but yesterday morning the idea of death was just that: an idea. She has seen death since, though, and she is not okay with it. She wants to live. She does not want the light inside her to go out.

And Henry is scared. She can see it in his face. He is scared of getting caught, and that makes him more likely to kill her if she causes too much trouble. Cornered animals lash out. Her daddy told her that once and she has never seen a reason to disbelieve it. Cornered animals are the most dangerous kind.

If she’s to run again she must pick her moment carefully; she must be certain of getting away. As certain as possible.

She nods to herself.

She’ll wait for her moment, then run.

Henry trudges over to them, wiping sweat from his brow. He blows his nose with his fingers, then shakes snot off his hand and wipes his hand off on his Levis. He squints at her and Beatrice sitting beside one another.

‘Well,’ he says, ‘let’s get the fuck out of here.’

Diego knocks on Ian’s front door. There’s a smear of burgundy on the white-painted wood by the brass doorknob and a bloody thumbprint on the knob itself. From Diego’s perspective the bloody thumbprint on the knob appears to have been smashed into the left cheek of his distorted reflection.

When Ian does not answer his door Diego knocks again.

‘Ian?’

Still only silence from the other side.

‘Ian?’

Diego grabs the knob and jiggles it. It is locked but not dead-bolted, and the door is loosely fitted. He turns the knob as far as the lock allows and jerks toward the hinges and presses his shoulder against the door. The first time it does not give, but the second time, with some minor cracking of the doorjamb, it swings open.

‘Ian?’

And still nothing, no response: a response in itself.

Earlier this morning when he called her Debbie would not tell him where Ian was. She said she didn’t know, but Diego did not believe her, nor does he now. And he is worried. Ian left the hospital last night, and Donald Dean did not show up at Bill’s Liquor this morning. Diego thinks Debbie knows something about the connection between those two events, but she isn’t talking, and he is unwilling to push it. The woman just lost her husband (wife-stealing asshole though Bill Finch was, may he rest in peace), and Maggie is as much her daughter as she is Ian’s. And Maggie’s reappearance may be harder on her in a way: she believed her daughter dead.

He steps into the apartment and closes the door behind him. He looks around.

Just to his left is a hat rack with a never-worn Stetson hanging upon it, as well as an Anaheim Angels cap that, as far as Diego knows, Ian wore only during the 2002 World Series (and for which he would have been taunted, except nobody in town really gave much of a shit about the Giants either). To his right, the kitchen: tile counter top, stainless-steel sink, small white refrigerator with a couple pictures of Maggie stuck to its door with magnets. Straight ahead, the living room: blue couch, coffee table on which a chess board and a few empty Guinness bottles sit, a television set.

There is a smear of blood on the arm of the couch.

‘Ian?’

Silence.

He walks down the bookshelf-lined hallway to the bedroom. The bed is made but looks as though it has been lain upon. The blankets are wrinkled and there is a dent in its middle. Within the dent is more blood. And on the floor between the bed and Diego a hospital gown in a pile.

A dresser drawer has been left open. A shirt hangs from it.

Blood. Signs that Ian was here but left in a hurry, and no sign of Ian himself.

And Donald is missing.

He has to go to the Dean place.

On his way he tries to call Ian’s cell phone for the third or fourth time this morning and, as happened before, the call goes to voicemail after five rings. He thumbs the button to end the call without bothering to leave a message, and then pockets his phone.

Rolling down the driveway is a surreal experience. All around are traces of what happened yesterday. Gravel stained red. Yellow tape cordoning off the house. A.22 casing missed by the county boys at the foot of the stairs, catching a glint of sunlight.

Diego drives past this to the single-wide mobile home behind the main house. It’s sitting on blocks, the axles and wheels long ago rusted, the tires rotted away and lying on the dead grass beneath like prehistoric serpents. Steps made of plywood and two-by-fours weathered to a pale gray, the dull copper of rusted nail heads dotting them.

The mobile home itself is a powder green, the metal siding dented in several places, tattered and torn window screens hanging from their frames like the flags of those who lost the war. An antenna juts above the asphalt shingles that line the roof.

He parks next to Donald’s El Camino and steps from his car.

‘All right, Diego,’ he says to himself, and unsnaps his holster with the twitch of a thumb. He walks up the steps-heel-toe, clunk-clunk-stopping at the narrow metal front door. He looks down. He is standing upon a welcome mat with Yosemite Sam on it, aiming a gun up at him from the ground. Hasn’t even announced himself yet and already there’s a gun pointed at his face.

‘Pow,’ he says, then presses the doorbell to the left of the door.

It ding-dongs inside. He waits. When, after several beats, he does not get an answer, he bangs on the hollow metal door. It rattles in its frame.

‘Donald, it’s Diego. Officer Peña. Open up.’

Donald does not open up.

Diego draws his SIG with his right hand and with his left grabs the doorknob. He turns it gently to see if it will give and it does. He pushes a bit. Waits, exhales, and shoves the door open with his back to the wall just left of it.

He looks in quickly, not long enough for someone to take aim, and pulls out again. The place is dark and hot. The curtains are drawn. Only one light is on, a dim lamp in the lazily spinning fan in the ceiling. The wood-paneled room feels sick and claustrophobic. Flies dot the ceiling.

‘Donald, it’s the police.’

No response.

After another breath he steps into the living room. At first he sees nothing out of the ordinary, but this is only because he does not see what’s on the other side of the open door. All he can see is what’s to the left of him and what’s to the left of him is a single man’s living quarters. A sagging chair, a sagging couch, a dinner tray, empty beer cans littering the floor, a nudie-magazine centerfold thumb-tacked to the wall.

But then he takes another step into the place, clearing the front door, and can see into the dining room. The first thing he sees is a dining table stacked with papers, a few loose socks, pens and pencils, a set of keys, a yellow legal pad smeared with bloody fingerprints. A single white candle made flaccid in the summer heat sits upon it, and a glass bowl filled with a soup of brown water and clumps of something wrapped in pieces of paper towel. Then he sees what is between him and the table, a wooden chair tipped on its side and a man within it. The man is Donald. He has no fingers or toes. It is strange how inhuman a hand looks with no fingers, just red stumps with bone-white cores. Flies crawl on his face. They crawl on his blank staring eyes. They crawl on the stumps where his digits once were, laying their eggs.

Diego swallows back sick. His friend did this. A man who has eaten dinner with him and his family. A man who has slept on his couch. A man who has played video games with Elias. It seems somehow unbelievable.

He walks to the glass bowl on the table and looks down into it. He swallows. After a brief hesitation he reaches into the brown soup and pulls out a wad of paper towel. It is heavier than he expected. He unwraps it and is soon looking at a grown man’s pinky finger. A white core surrounded by red meat and cased in wrinkled skin that reminds Diego of pickled pigs’ feet.

He drops the finger back into the brown soup.

His friend did this. Ian did this.

Ian came to get information that neither Diego nor the sheriff could manage to pry from Donald, and he worked hard for that information. He killed for it. What Diego can’t tell, what the room will not reveal to him, is whether Ian managed to get it. He worked for it, but that doesn’t prove anything. People work for things they don’t attain every day, and attain things they didn’t work for with equal frequency.

Diego arms sweat from his forehead.

He looks at the legal pad on the table smeared with bloody finger prints. Shouldn’t the bloody prints mean it was used during or after what happened here last night? He picks up a pencil and holds it sideways and brushes it gently across the page. As he does this he finds an address revealed in relief.

372 Conway StKaiser, CA 92241

He tears the top sheet from the legal pad, folds it into quarters, and pockets it. Then he glances at the glass bowl of brown soup just to his right, and then the body on the floor. He can’t help but feel this is partly his fault. If he had held on to Donald the man would be safe in a cell right now. Diego might even have managed to get the information out of him himself without resorting to. . what happened here. What happened here.

Diego is a fairly intelligent man, graduated high school with a good GPA and got his AA from the community college in Mencken without any trouble at all, spending most of his time falling madly into and out of love with various coeds, and what happened here would be obvious even to a very dumb man. What happened here was murder, plain and simple.

And after he was done killing Donald, Ian went home for a while, changed clothes, grabbed a gun maybe, and got into his car and headed west. Headed toward Kaiser, California, with a catheter threaded into his lung meat and a bullet hole punched clean through him. Headed toward, based on Henry’s shooting, what will almost certainly be his own death.

If Diego had just managed to get that information out of the son of a bitch Ian wouldn’t-

If Sheriff Sizemore hadn’t let him-

He needs to think this thing through. He’s got an address now. He knows where both Henry and Ian are headed. He could get the federal law involved. They’re almost certainly involved as it is. A kidnapped girl in the possession of a murderer on the run. Feds are probably at the Tonkawa County Sheriff’s Office in Mencken right now, getting whatever information Sizemore has and collecting his files to take back to the Houston field office. He could simply call them. That might be the smart thing to do. Except that Ian killed a man. Ian tortured a man for information and killed him, and though this is something that Diego could never have done himself, he knows that Ian did it out of desperation, and out of love, and he understands these things. The horror before him reveals just how ugly even the purest of emotions can be-but he understands them. Besides which, Ian is his friend. The man has slept on his couch, shared his meals, played videogames with Elias. He let Diego see him cry when Debbie kicked him out. He was drunk and probably doesn’t even remember it, and Diego would never mention it to him, never embarrass him with it, but it happened all the same. If he gets the FBI involved they’ll come poking around, and they will uncover what happened here last night.

But if he stays silent the FBI might not even come in here. Their focus will be on finding Henry. Field agents will be everywhere but here. Here is where they know he isn’t.

But what if he covered the scene up here and called them? Or made up a story and got them involved?

Goddamn it, Ian, why did you have to leave such a fucking mess behind?

But Diego knows why. Ian wasn’t, and isn’t, concerned about anything but getting his daughter back. Everything else is peripheral.

He can’t cover the scene up enough to ensure he doesn’t leave evidence behind-evidence that might incriminate him. And he doesn’t want the FBI questioning him about how he came upon the address in California. He understands why Ian did what he did, even if he could not do such a thing himself, and he’s not going to throw him to the wolves for doing it. Maybe he should, but he won’t.

He can’t cover up the scene and contact the FBI, but he can’t just leave it as it is either, can he? There’s a chance no one will come by for a long time, but there’s also a chance someone will come by tomorrow, and that someone would find what Diego found.

‘Goddamn it, Ian,’ he says.

He closes his eyes to think. Then opens them and gets to work.

He puts on gloves and untapes Donald from the chair. He drags him to his couch and lays him across it. He unwraps the digits cut from Donald, and lays them out so the corpse discovered will look whole (having to rush to the bathroom to be sick once). He washes the murder weapon and sets it by the door. He picks up the chair and puts it back into place. He walks through the mobile home, making sure all the windows are closed and locked.

Then he walks to the kitchen and puts oatmeal and water into a sauce pan, puts the pan on the stove, and turns on the gas. It is an old stove that does not self-light, but Diego does not light it either. The stove hisses, telling him to shhh.

He can hardly believe he is doing this, but doing it he is.

He walks back out to the living room. He thumbs a match to life and lights the flaccid candle sitting on the dining-room table. So long as no one digs through the ash too carefully this should do the job. He hopes so, anyway. It will look like Donald got up, put on some oatmeal and lay on the couch to wait for it to be ready when something happened. Something.

Diego blows out the candle and walks to the body. He moves it to a sitting position, puts a cigarette between its lips, and a lighter into its palm. Then he walks back to the candle and lights it once more. The smell of gas is strong now. He has to get out. He’s done what he could.

He thinks there might be hatchet marks on the bones that forensics people will eventually find, but this should buy Ian a few days. And with any luck there will be no evidence that Diego was here at all.

Diego heads out the front door, grabbing the hatchet on his way out, and closing and locking it behind him.

He walks to his car and gets into it, throwing the hatchet on the floor. He starts the engine and turns the car around. The tires crunch over gravel. As he drives away he glances into his rearview mirror, but the mobile home simply sits there, silent.

When he reaches Crouch Avenue, he turns left.

The explosion is loud and sudden and its force blows a wind through the surrounding trees and birds take flight. Diego’s heart pounds in his chest and his face feels hot. He looks out his window as he drives and sees smoke billowing behind the trees, a thick pillar of smoke holding up the sky.

When he reaches his house six minutes later the fire engines have still not left the station. Diego is glad. He wants the place to have a chance to burn.

Now to talk to Cordelia.

‘I wish you wouldn’t.’

‘He’s my friend, Cord.’

‘You have lots of friends.’

‘Ian doesn’t. I’ll be back in a few days.’

‘Shit.’

‘Don’t be like that, Cord.’

‘What if I told you don’t go?’

‘I wouldn’t go. Are you telling me that?’

Cordelia looks away for a long moment and then looks back. ‘Be safe.’

‘I will.’

Diego stops his car on the dirt shoulder of the road to allow two screaming fire engines to pass, and then he pulls back onto the asphalt and continues toward Interstate 10.

He looks at the smoke filling the sky and hopes he has made the right decision.

By the time he gets the fifth call from Diego, the one he decides to answer, Ian is about thirty minutes out of Comfort, Texas. The land on either side of him now is lined only with occasional feeder roads, private roads, lonesome-looking houses, and summer trees. But he likes the emptiness. He grew up in Los Angeles where his only escape from civilization was the sea, and he finds this unpeopled land beautiful.

He answers the phone. ‘I’ve decided you’re not gonna quit calling,’ he says.

‘You’ve decided right.’

‘Do I win a prize?’

‘Only if you guess where I am. You get one chance.’

‘Roberta’s.’

‘She don’t even open for another half hour.’

‘I bet she would for you. If you said please real nice and made puppy-dog eyes.’

‘I’m at a Shell station in Columbus,’ Diego says.

‘What the hell are you doing in Ohio?’

Despite the tone of their conversation, a cold feeling slides into Ian’s stomach like a blade. Diego knows where Ian is headed. He knows and he’s going to try to stop him before he can make Henry pay for what he’s done, before he can get Maggie back. He knows and he’s going to arrest him, have him arrested, for killing Donald Dean.

The FBI is probably already awaiting his arrival at a roadblock somewhere to the west.

He knew he should have cleaned Donald’s place up-he knew that-but by the time he was finished with him, he was simply finished. He had neither the mental nor the physical energy to dispose of Donald’s body. He did not know what to do with it, and even if he had, he’d just been shot: he barely managed to do what he’d gone there to do. And when he woke in the dark of morning he felt only a great urge to get on the road.

But that was a mistake. That Diego is calling him makes it obvious it was a mistake.

‘I’ve been to your apartment. And to Donald’s place.’

‘I know.’

He coughs into his open hand and tastes blood. He looks down at the catheter winding its way out from under his shirt and to the passenger-side floorboard where he put the satchel, and sees a knot of white liquid working its way down. He wonders what it means, this liquid in his lungs. He should have brought antibiotics with him. Grabbed some from his medicine cabinet. He had some left over from something or other. At least he got some pain meds stronger than Tylenol. They make him feel strange and drowsy, but he can function.

‘It’s not too late to straighten this out, Ian.’

‘I know,’ he says. ‘That’s what I’m trying to do. Straighten this out.’

‘I don’t think you’re going about this-’

‘Who else knows about Donald?’

A long pause, then: ‘No one.’

‘You didn’t report it?’

‘I’d be lying if I said that didn’t hurt my feelings. You’re my friend.’

‘I am, but-’

‘I’m loyal to my friends.’

‘Then turn around and go back to Bulls Mouth and let me finish this thing.’

‘I’m even loyal to my suicidal friends.’

‘What the hell does that mean?’

‘Henry will kill you.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘I do know that, and so do you.’

‘He has my daughter, Diego. He stole my life.’

‘Your life is what you made it.’

Ian doesn’t respond for a long time. He knows what Diego says is true. He is what he is and has done what he’s done and it produced the life he lives. These are just facts and there is no point in pretending otherwise.

‘Ian?’

‘I know,’ he says. ‘You’re right. That’s why I’m doing this.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You don’t need to.’

‘It doesn’t have to happen like this. I burned Donald’s trailer. They’ll think he had an accident with the stove. We’ll get the FBI or somebody involved, tell them what’s going on, and then we-’

‘You did what?’

‘Come home. The FBI has resources. They can-’

‘The sheriff had resources too. I appreciate what you’re doing, Diego, you don’t know how much, I know you put yourself on the line here, but I’m not stopping.’

‘Ian, goddamn it, would you just listen to-’

‘Go home to Cordelia, Diego, and leave me alone.’

‘If you-’

‘I’m throwing this phone out the window now. Give my best to Cord.’

‘You selfish son of a bitch, would you fucking-’

He rolls the window down, the summer heat blowing into the car at sixty-eight miles per hour. He turns his face to it a brief moment, then throws his phone out the window. It seems to hang in the air a second, and then flies backwards, flipping end over end. In the rearview mirror he watches it hit asphalt and disintegrate, twisting and throwing off pieces of itself until there are no more pieces to throw off and it is gone. He rolls the window back up and turns on the radio.

He knows Diego. The man will keep coming after him. Ian just hopes he’ll be able to stay ahead of him and take care of what needs taking care of before Diego catches up. He doesn’t want to put anyone else in danger. He doesn’t want what happened to Bill Finch and Chief Davis to happen to anyone else.

Nor does he want what happened to him to happen to anyone else.

Diego is a good man with a loving wife and a beautiful boy he is raising as his son. He should remain a good man with a loving wife and a beautiful boy he is raising as his son. For that to happen he needs to keep his distance. Which means Ian has to stay ahead of him and take care of Henry on his own.

When he decided how far he was willing to go with Donald-all the way-he knew it was a negation of things he had believed all his life, of things he still believes, but he did not care, nor does he now. His only want was for the information he knew Donald had and he was willing to do everything to get it. He knew the cost going in and he was willing to pay it. He knows there will be greater costs ahead. He will pay those too. He is getting Maggie back. He knows he won’t get his life back with her, but that doesn’t matter: it will make his life mean something again. And that does matter.

He looks out at the unpeopled land to his left and his right. He imagines his daughter in a yellow dress with the wind blowing through her golden hair. Just her and the landscape. She is beautiful. She is everything that ever meant anything in this entire fucked-up world, all of it within those green eyes. Everything his heart ever needed in four words from her lips: I love you, Daddy.

And that does matter.

Maggie sits between Henry and Beatrice in a gray Dodge Ram pickup truck, sweat trickling down her face. The cab smells of their sweat, a dense odor that makes Maggie’s eyes water. Henry will not turn on the air conditioner. He refuses to do so, saying it’ll ruin their gas mileage and he doesn’t want to be stopping to fill up every hundred miles.

They’re about an hour out of San Antonio now. Maggie thinks it’s been about an hour, anyway. She counted to four-thousand-two, four-thousand-three, four-thousand-four, and there are only three thousand six hundred seconds in an hour, so unless she was counting far too fast, it should have been just over an hour.

She thought that she might have a chance to escape while there, but she did not. They stopped and got fast-food sandwiches for breakfast, and ate them in the truck, Maggie the entire time squeezed between Henry and Beatrice.

Every time she took a bite she would think of the people Henry buried earlier this morning. They would never eat again. She doesn’t understand why Henry had to do that. He didn’t have to do that. He said he had to because he needed their truck, he said he didn’t have a choice, but Maggie thinks that is a lie. Maybe a lie he believes himself, but a lie nonetheless. There had to have been ways of getting a new vehicle without killing anybody. Maggie thinks that maybe Henry likes to-

‘I’ll be goddamned,’ Henry says.

‘What?’ Beatrice says.

‘Look.’ He points through the bug-spattered windshield.

‘A Volkswagen?’

‘No, just in front of it.’

Now Maggie sees it too: a 1965 Mustang. It could be Daddy’s. It almost has to be Daddy’s. It’s red except for the trunk, which is primer gray.

She remembers riding with Daddy in his Mustang. Sometimes he would let her shift the car if they were alone and no one else was on the road. He’d push down on the crutch-clutch, Mags, with an L-and she would move the shifter, jamming it into gear. It was fun and exciting: she could feel the whole car’s power in the black knob at the end of the shifter, and it vibrated into her body through the palm of her hand. That made it scary, too, but that was part of why she liked it, part of why it was fun. Sometimes he let her sit in his lap and steer. She would swerve all over the road, laughing and honking the horn, and when it was over Daddy would be covered in sweat and saying she was the bravest person he ever met or the craziest. And she would stick out her tongue and shake her head and make crazy noises and laugh.

‘Well,’ Daddy would say, ‘that answers that.’

Henry closes the distance between the Dodge pickup and the Mustang. He has to change lanes and pass the Volkswagen and then swing in front of it to do so, and the driver of the Volkswagen honks and Henry waves his middle finger at him through the truck’s rear window.

Maggie looks at the Mustang in front of them. It is Daddy. She can tell by the back of his head, the shape of it, the thin blond hair. It is him. She was afraid it might not be, she was afraid that he was dead and it couldn’t be him, but he isn’t dead and it is him. After yesterday, with all that blood, with the way he just lay on the gravel after Henry kicked him in the head, with the way his head fell limp and he just lay there, she was so afraid he was dead. She told herself he wasn’t, but she was afraid he was.

No: she knew he wasn’t dead.

‘That’s my dad.’

A slap across the back of the head.

‘Shut the fuck up.’

She looks at Henry and sees that he means it.

He looks from her to the windshield.

‘Fuck.’

She thought Daddy was dead but he is not dead. It makes her chest feel warm in its center. As if she had her own personal sun. A sun on the inside. She thinks maybe she does.

‘Daddy,’ she says, waving her arms, hoping he looks in his rearview mirror.

Another slap to the back of the head.

‘I fucking mean it, Sarah.’

‘I told you he was coming for me,’ she says. ‘I told you.’

Mouthy little bitch. Where does she get off talking to him like that? If it weren’t for Bee, he’d just get rid of her. Put her in the ground. She’s nothing but trouble at this point. All of this is because of her: his having to kill Chief Davis and that county boy Bill Finch, his having to kill Flint and Naomi, their being on the run, all of it. She brought this upon them. She brought this upon them and she deserves to pay for that betrayal.

If it weren’t for Bee, she would pay for it.

Unless a man wants to find hisself with a bloody feeding-hand some day, his daddy had told him once before getting out his.22 and putting it into Henry’s hands, it’s best to kill a bad pup before it gets to be a big dog. Now let’s take care of this. I’ll get the shovel.

If it weren’t for Bee, he’d take care of Sarah. She’s a bad pup if ever there was one. But women don’t understand facts. They just see something cute and want to cuddle it. They don’t understand that cute has nothing to do with whether something needs to be put down.

He can’t believe that son of a bitch Ian Hunt found them. Found out where they were heading, anyway. And must have managed to get in front of them while Henry was busy burying the previous owners of the truck he’s now driving. It occurs to him that there was only one person from whom Ian could have gotten that information. But Donald would never give him up. Henry practically raised him. After Dad had the stroke when Donald was seven Henry did raise him. Donald would never give him up. He would sit through any and all threats of imprisonment giving nothing but a dead pan to the cops and answering nothing.

Unless someone did something much worse than merely threaten him.

But Hunt is a cop.

Except he ain’t exactly acting like a cop right now, is he? Out here in his own car and no other cops in sight.

If the police knew where he and Bee were heading they’d be all over this stretch of road. He’d have seen them. Seen them and holed up someplace. Or else he wouldn’t have seen them but they’d have seen him. They’d have seen him and flashed their lights and he’d be in a high-speed chase or captured or escaped. Or there’d be roadblocks. Something would have happened. But nothing has. Which means the police don’t know where he’s heading, even if Ian Hunt does.

And there’s only one way Donald would have given Henry up.

And there’s only one reason Ian Hunt wouldn’t get the real police involved.

‘Motherfucker.’

‘Henry.’

‘Shut up, Bee.’

She looks at him a moment, then looks down at her lap. She flattens the fabric of her dress, rubs out the wrinkles, and stares down at the backs of her hands with an expression that suggests she doesn’t recognize them. Ever since last night she has not been acting herself. He’s never hidden what he is from her, but even so she has never seen the worst of what is in him. Not until last night. She has always loved him unconditionally, through drunken arrests and even through the times he lost his temper and maybe got too rough, but last night he thinks may have been too much for her. It happened right in front of her and she could not pretend she did not see it or did not understand it-and it might have been too much for her.

He sensed her troubled mind in the silent darkness last night after they went to bed, while they lay side by side, and he feels it now. He does not like the silence. It makes him nervous. Beatrice is not one to keep her thoughts to herself. But today she is almost without voice. What is she thinking? What’s going on in that head of hers? He’s going to have to make her understand that what he did last night was necessary. That he didn’t like it any better than she did, but it was necessary. Sometimes bloodletting is the only choice. All survivors know this.

The world is a hard place with lots of sharp corners, and sometimes to survive you have to put someone else between you and the worst of it. He doesn’t like it any more than she does. But he accepts it as the way things are.

He needed their truck. He needed their truck and Flint suspected something. From the very beginning Flint was suspicious of them. They simply couldn’t leave him alive. He would have called the police. With him dead, with him and his wife dead, they have a clean vehicle for the next two or three days. Long enough to get them to his older brother’s place in California.

Of course he’ll have to get rid of Ian Hunt at some point before they get there. He can do that. Maybe he can even do that today. He’ll just follow Hunt from a distance, hang back and follow. If he’s careful he can go unnoticed. The man doesn’t know he got in front of them. It might be difficult to remain unnoticed once traffic thins out and the land becomes more barren in West Texas, but even there it should be possible. He’ll follow Hunt, wait for the man to settle down for the night. Then he’ll make the fucker bleed.

He’ll make him sorry he didn’t die the first time.

And that’ll be the end of his troubles. After that they can lie low in California for a few months. Even if the police decide to nose around Ron’s house, there are places to hide. Ron has lots of places in which to wait out trouble. An underground bomb shelter with canned food and five hundred gallons of drinking water and a two-hundred-gallon gray-water tank. Abandoned buildings where he has stored supplies. According to his letters, once the iron mine dried up the town blew away with the dust and he’s one of only twenty or thirty residents left. And that was years ago. It could be he’s the last person in town. There will be plenty of shadows to hide in, even beneath the California sun. They’ll wait it out, wait till things cool off, and then head down to Mexico. Or maybe up to Canada. But probably Mexico.

It’ll be safer to cross the border in California than in Texas. And he’ll have a chance to get some money before they head down. He doesn’t want to be flat broke in Mexico. A different country will take some getting used to, but it’s better than the alternative. The important thing is staying out of prison, staying out of prison and staying together.

But first Ian Hunt has to die.

In the two hundred miles between Junction and Fort Stockton, Texas, the landscape changes. The trees give way to shrubbery and low yellow flowers. The yellow flowers stretch from dry earth or dead grass. Desert hills erupt from the flat earth like goiters, and Interstate 10 cuts through many of them, leaving dynamited and scraped cliffs butting up to the asphalt and stacked up beside you in multi-colored layers descending into the past. The moisture leaves the air, and cacti soak up the sun, their fat pads like the flippers of some lost exotic underwater creature waving at you from the side of the road. Ancient stripper-well pumpjacks like prehistoric birds peck at the ground in the Permian Basin oil fields, moving in slow, sleepy, repetitious motion. The traffic thins to nothing but the occasional Mack truck hauling a load from coast to coast, driver red eyed and tweaked out, or some other lonesome traveler. Occasional desert rabbits splatter the shoulders of the road, revealing their hearts to you. Past the halfway point between these two towns, somewhere around Bakersfield, great fields of windmills turn slowly in the distance like ceiling fans on a mild day. Everything seems to move slowly in this mean desert heat, even your vehicle with the needle past eighty. You drive and drive but never seem to get anywhere. Then you arrive in Fort Stockton and are greeted by a large statue of a roadrunner, the world’s largest, they say (every town needs a point of pride), standing behind a short brick wall faced with a sign welcoming you to town.

It’s two thirty when Hunt pulls off Interstate 10. Henry follows, glad to have a chance to step out of this hot fucking truck and stretch a bit. They’ve been on the road for hours, his back is killing him, and Bee’s complained of a leak in the canoe at least a half dozen times. Also, gas needle is south of the E, and he’s spent the last twenty minutes worrying about puttering to a stop on the side of the road, miles from a gas station.

Hunt pulls into a Chevron station on the corner of Front Street and US 285, and Henry pulls into a competing station across the street from it.

He watches the man step from his Mustang and stretch his arms. His left arm, anyway. His right arm doesn’t get above his shoulder. Arms stretched, he twists his neck around. There’s a satchel in his right hand and after he stretches he straps it over his shoulder.

Henry wonders what’s inside. Probably guns.

The man does not look like he was shot in the chest yesterday. He should be bedridden.

Well, it don’t matter. He’ll be dead by the time the sun kisses the horizon. By the time the sun shines on tomorrow at the latest.

Henry reaches for his pocket and finds it empty. He swallows back the sharp taste of stomach acid.

‘Can I pee now?’

‘Yeah, go ahead,’ he says. ‘Take Sarah with you, and don’t let her talk to nobody. You know what? Never mind. I’ll take her when you get back. She can sit with me for now. But get me some Rolaids or Tums or something like that.’ He pulls a sweaty five spot from the pocket of his Levis and hands it to Bee.

‘Okay,’ she says, taking the damp money in her fist and stepping from the truck. ‘Can I get something to drink?’

‘Sure.’

She limp-waddles toward the convenience store.

He watches her go. She isn’t the same since last night. She isn’t the same at all. He really needs to talk to her, but he doesn’t want to do it in front of Sarah. He doesn’t know why, but her presence makes him feel vulnerable, and he does not like to feel vulnerable. He does not like to talk about what he’s feeling or thinking under even the best of circumstances, and this ain’t the best of circumstances. He can ramble on about any nonsense you like, grinning and boozing and patting backs, but he cannot open his mouth and let out what he is really feeling without great effort. It wants to catch in his throat and stay there, hidden in darkness. But he needs to talk to Bee. He’s afraid he might lose her if he does not.

He glances past the traffic to Ian Hunt across the street. The man is sticking a gas nozzle into his car and squinting at the horizon. For a moment Henry thinks Hunt is staring directly at him, but he’s not. Just squinting at the horizon, that’s all.

Ian squints over the hood of his car at a gray Dodge Ram pickup truck across the intersection. A work truck, from the looks of it. Covered in dirt. Big white toolbox in the back. Tailgate down and hanging a little low, like someone put too much weight on it and bent it out of shape. It’s been behind him for a few hours now. Every once in a while he catches sight of it, white-hot sun reflecting a shiny-nickel-on-the-sidewalk star of light on the hood. The intersection is wide and Ian’s vision isn’t quite what it once was (there was a time he boasted twenty-fifteen eyesight, better than perfect, he told people), and he can’t see the face of the man sitting behind the wheel, but as he stands there pumping gas a part of him believes it must be Henry Dean.

Ian feels a terrible urge to grab the rifled shotgun from the back seat of his car, rest it in the crook of his shoulder, and fire a deer slug into the head of the man behind the wheel. He can envision the clear glass turning instantly white as the slug hits and sends millions of cracks through it. He can envision the glass falling away from the frame seconds later, revealing a man with a hole in his temple. Big enough to stick the fat end of a pool cue into. The blood and brains splattered inside the truck like a cherry bomb was planted in a wad of raw hamburger. The man falling forward, head on the steering wheel, weighing against the horn as it blares its single idiot note.

He can picture it so clearly.

But even if he knew it was Henry, now would not be the time, here would not be the place. Here he would have but one chance, and if he missed some cowboy would tackle him to the ground, and Henry would be able to drive away to freedom with Maggie still in his possession. If he missed Henry he might hit Maggie. Even if he didn’t miss, shotgun slugs have a lot of push and it might go clean through Henry and hit Maggie.

Or some other innocent.

He hasn’t given much thought to what he’s become, to how far he is willing to go down this road of degradation, but he knows he is unwilling to shoot innocents in order to achieve his ends. For now he is unwilling to do that. Unless he has to.

And anyway, he is not certain it’s Henry. He believes it is, he believes it might be, but he is old enough and has been wrong often enough to know that reality and what he believes don’t always align with one another.

The gas nozzle clicks in his hand and stops pumping, tank full. He tops it off, getting the price to an even thirty-five bucks, then puts the nozzle back into its cradle on the pump. He screws on his gas cap. He squints once more across the intersection, then heads toward the convenience store. Halfway there he starts coughing and staggers left, into a woman and her husband leaving the store.

‘Whoa there, fella,’ the man says, catching him.

Ian puts a hand on the man’s shoulder, trying to hold himself up, and the gunshot wound cored through him screams. He grunts in pain, then closes his eyes as sweat runs down his cheeks. He swallows back the urge to cough again. He stands upright, then wipes at his cheeks with the backs of his hands, left then right.

‘You all right, hon?’ the woman says.

‘Yeah,’ Ian says. ‘Thank you. Sorry about crashing into you.’

‘Sure you’re all right?’ the man says.

‘Yeah,’ Ian says. ‘Cough just ran away with me is all.’

‘You don’t look so good,’ the man says. ‘Maybe you should sit down.’

‘Do you want some water?’ the woman asks, proffering a bottle. ‘I ain’t drunk from it yet.’

‘No, thank you,’ Ian says. ‘I’m okay now.’

He sits on the toilet in the bathroom a moment, face in his palms, trying to breathe like normal humans breathe. Every exhalation creates a high-pitched wheeze bordering on a whistle. He looks down at his shirt and sees a brown spot about the size of a quarter and spreading. But not quickly. He feels hot and cold simultaneously, and though he’s covered in sweat a shiver snakes up his spine.

He gets to his feet and walks to the sink. He pours two or three tramadol into his mouth, palms water in after them, and swallows.

He grabs a bottle of water, a pre-packaged tuna fish and cheddar sandwich, a bag of barbecue-flavored corn chips, and a box of caffeine tablets. The pain medication makes him drowsy and he’s afraid he might fall asleep at the wrong moment. He walks to the counter. His knees feel wobbly. When he gets to the front of the line he sets his purchases on the counter and the woman behind it asks if that’ll be all, dear, and he asks for a cigar. All they have are dollar shits, but he says that’s fine. He doesn’t plan on smoking it, anyway, just wants something to gnaw on while he drives, another way to keep himself awake. She rings him up and bags his purchases and he heads back into the mean Texas heat.

The Dodge Ram across the street is still there. He’s not a hundred percent it’s Henry, but the damned thing has been behind him for hours. Still, it could be a coincidence. Sometimes when driving long distances you find yourself next to someone, or behind someone, or in front of someone, and you just happen to pace one another for hours, popping into and out of sight of one another as you progress on your respective journeys, and then as the sun sets you find yourself in the same diner with them, grabbing a quick bite before bed, and when you make eye contact it’s like running into an old friend. Howdy, fellow traveler.

Sometimes that happens. There’s no reason it has to be Henry. But a feeling in his gut tells him it probably is.

Ian falls back into his car and pulls a sheet of caffeine tablets from its box. He pops four pills through the sheet’s foil back and puts them into his mouth, dry swallowing one after the other. They are very bitter. Once the pills are down he tears the plastic off his sandwich and takes a bite. It’s dry and flavorless, as he knew it would be-gas-station sandwiches are never otherwise-but his stomach grumbles all the same, anticipating its descent. He chews and swallows. A piece of cheese sticks to the roof of his mouth and he scrapes it off with a finger, chews, and swallows that as well.

He starts the car, shoves it into gear, and pulls out into the street, looking for a sign that will guide him onto Interstate 10.

He shifts into fourth and looks at his speedometer. Eighty-two miles per. His old car rattles loudly at this speed, and a loud wind whirs even with the windows rolled up, the rubber seals long ago rotted away.

He glances into his rearview mirror. Sunlight stars off the hood of a gray pickup truck about a quarter mile back.

He imagines letting it come up on him. He imagines slamming on his brakes and letting it rear-end him. He imagines stepping from his vehicle and-

He cannot do it like that. Maggie is in the truck. If it is Henry, then Maggie is in the truck. And he has already been shot. If he is going to kill Henry and get his Maggie back he will have to be much more subtle than that. Much more careful than that.

He sighs, curses under his breath, and rotates his left shoulder. He figures he’s got another three or four hours of driving left in him today, and then he’s done. He’s tired and in pain and having trouble breathing. The heat is tremendous. Cold chills run through him, giving him goose-flesh. He is covered in a sickly sweat.

‘Shit,’ he says about everything and nothing at all.

Then turns on the radio to block out his thoughts.

From Fort Stockton to Sierra Blanca the land empties further. Traffic is sparse. Rock formations litter the horizon, and the scrublands spread out before you like a sheet.

Looking at this while he drives and eats barbecue-flavored corn chips and the second half of his dry tuna fish sandwich Ian thinks, not for the first time, about how ancient this land is. After he finished high school his mother-still mourning her husband’s suicide-sent him traveling through Europe, visiting London and Paris (where he met his first wife) and Rome, and the history there made him feel very strange about coming from such a young country. It made him feel like an orphan somehow, without any real history to call his own. The curse of the American mutt: you come from nowhere, son. In America you build yourself from scratch, from the ground up, making your own bootstraps to pull yourself up with, or you don’t exist. Don’t expect to stand on the shoulders of those who came before: this is a land for which there is no before. But Burroughs was right: America is not a young land. It is old and dirty and evil. It lay here for millions of years in silence, waiting; it lay here home only to beasts with no language but the hunt, waiting; it lay here ancient and scabrous, waiting. And finally twenty thousand years ago, thirty thousand years ago, people arrived, but still the evil of the land remained trapped in the soil. Then the Europeans came to the eastern shores, and they pierced the soil with their flags, and released it. And it spread across the land and polluted the waters and the vegetables and grains whose roots the waters fed. And through the food it got into the people.

Ian pops the last of the sandwich into his mouth and washes it down with a swig of water.

As he nears Sierra Blanca he decides, because he wants to see if the gray Dodge Ram follows him, to stop someplace and buy a Coke. The town is less populated than the last one he went through, and if it is Henry behind him, perhaps he can end it here. He pulls off the interstate and onto El Paso Street, glancing in his rearview mirror. The gray Dodge Ram is just in view, a glint on the horizon. Which means his car should be just in view too.

He drives past a dirt lot, then the firehouse, a red fire engine parked inside and a sign on the garage door that says DO NOT BLOCK. Beyond the firehouse, an empty parking lot. He stops at a stop sign. There are no other cars around. Brown hills float in the distance. He takes his foot off the brake. On his right he passes a white Spanish-style building and on his left a brown structure advertising ICE and COCA-COLA. Sweat trickles down the side of his face. The ICE is very tempting.

He glances at his rearview mirror. The road behind him is empty.

If the truck was going to follow him into town it should have done so by now. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Henry Dean did not own a gray Dodge Ram pickup truck. But of course even a dumb man would know to get rid of his own vehicle while on the run, and while Henry probably isn’t well-read-ain’t book-smart, as they say-Ian does not think he’s dumb. He thinks he’s sharp as a blade and merciless in exactly the same way.

He passes a grocery store and then a place called Best Cafe with a wood shingled roof and tables draped in red checkered cloth set out on a concrete slab. He passes a motel and a Southern Pacific train car sitting on a plot of dirt. He passes the Historic Sierra Lodge and a turquoise-painted gift shop with a Dr Pepper machine out front and an American flag hanging limp in the dead heat. He glances into the rearview mirror once more.

Nothing.

He pulls to the dirt lot in front of a place called the Branding Iron Steakhouse and steps from his car. The white hot sun beats down on him.

He squints at the road behind him and sees nothing.

‘Fuck,’ he says.

He no longer wants a Coke.

He’s shifting into third when he sees the gray truck on the side of the interstate, a Hudspeth County Sheriff’s Department car parked behind it and a sheriff’s deputy standing at the driver’s side window.

As Ian drives by he tries to catch a glimpse of the man behind the wheel but the deputy is blocking his view. Then as he passes he glances over his shoulder thinking maybe he can see through the windshield, but it’s late afternoon now and the sun is in the west, and its light glints off the glass making it impossible to see anything.

He shifts into fourth and looks behind him once more. He simply can’t tell. It could be Henry. It could be anyone. It could be Jesus behind the wheel with a couple apostles piled onto the seat beside him.

‘Is there wine in that jug, sir?’

‘It was water when we left. I swear it, officer.’

As he continues on he can see eastbound cars pulling off the interstate and into a lane leading through a border checkpoint.

He wonders again if that was Henry back there. If his daughter was in that truck.

He doesn’t know if he hopes it was-or if he hopes it wasn’t.

Maggie is looking through the cab’s rear window, watching the road fly out from under the truck like a gray ribbon, when she sees the police car flash its lights.

‘Shit,’ Henry says.

He slows the truck, downshifting, and the police car comes nearer. The man behind the wheel is big, with a round pink face and a mustache. Maggie smiles and waves at him and he waves back without smiling. His hand looks very big.

‘It’s the police,’ Maggie says.

‘Shut up.’

Henry flips his turn signal on and pulls the truck to the shoulder of the road.

‘Turn around in your seat,’ he says, grabbing Maggie by the shoulder. ‘Buckle up.’

‘He already saw me.’

‘Just buckle the fuck up.’

She sits down and fastens her seatbelt. She looks up into the rearview mirror to see where the policeman is, but cannot see him. The angle is wrong. She listens to traffic. A car flies by. A moment later another one. She hears footsteps on asphalt. She leans forward, past Henry, and sees a policeman appear in the window. He is broad and has black hair and for some reason his mustache looks kind of fake up close. Maggie remembers a friend having a mustache like that. He wore it when he dressed up as a pirate for Halloween.

‘Afternoon,’ the policeman says.

‘Howdy, sir,’ Henry says. ‘Hot out, ain’t it?’

‘Do you know why I pulled you over?’

‘Can’t say that I do.’

Maggie wants to mouth two words to him. She wants to but he will not look at her. He only looks at Henry.

‘You were going ninety-two miles an hour.’

‘Was I really?’ Henry laughs. ‘I’ll be goddamned, I sure am sorry about-’

‘There’s no need to take the Lord’s name in vain, sir.’

‘Aw, shit, I’m sorry. My mouth runs about five steps ahead of my brain sometimes.’ He flaps his right hand like a talking puppet.

‘I’m gonna need to see your license and registration.’

Look my way, look my way, look my way. Maggie thinks this with great concentration while staring at the policeman’s sweaty pink face.

And for a wonder he does look at her. The policeman looks right at her and their eyes meet and he has green eyes like her daddy has green eyes, like she has green eyes, and he nods his head slightly.

Help. Me.

He blinks at her, not seeming to understand.

‘You mean a sorry don’t cut in this county?’

‘License and registration, sir.’ Then he glances back toward her.

Help me. Please.

Another blink. And then, as if suddenly poked in the back by a sharp stick, his whole body stiffens and a light flashes behind his eyes. He licks his lips and his right hand drops toward his weapon. He takes a step back. His Adam’s apple bobs in his throat.

‘Step out of the car, sir.’

‘Hold on, now,’ Henry says, reaching under his seat. ‘I think I got the registration down here under the-’

The policeman draws his gun and aims it at Henry. ‘Put your hands where I can see them,’ he says. ‘No, freeze. Freeze.’

‘All right.’

The policeman licks his lips. He looks confused. He takes a step back and then a step forward. He licks his lips again.

Henry is leaning forward with his right arm underneath his seat. He moves slowly, pulling away from there. Maggie thinks he has a gun under the seat.

‘I said freeze!’ the policeman says. ‘That means don’t move.’

‘I’m froze, sir,’ Henry says. ‘I’m a fucking popsicle.’

‘Shut your mouth.’

‘You’re making a mistake, officer.’

‘I said shut up.’

The policeman reaches to the truck door and pulls it open. He licks his lips again. He looks very scared and Maggie feels kind of sorry for him. She’s afraid that he won’t be able to stop Henry. She’s afraid that Henry will kill him. Should she open her mouth and tell the policeman that Henry has a gun? Will that make him panic? Will it make Henry panic? Maybe Henry will just pull his empty hand from under the seat. But she thought in hopeful maybes last night and two people got killed.

‘Okay,’ he says to Henry. ‘Pull your hand out from under that seat. Slow.’

‘Okay.’

‘Your hand better be empty.’

‘Okay.’ Henry pulls his hand out from under the seat. Slowly.

Sweat trickles down the policeman’s face. Keeping both hands gripped around his service pistol, he wipes his face off on his shoulder, shrugging the sweat away.

Maggie opens her mouth to speak, but too late.

Henry pulls out a gun.

Henry can feel the wooden grip of the Lupara in his sweaty palm. It feels grimy there and foreign. His face is hot. He looks to his left and can see the deputy aiming his service weapon at him. He can’t be more than thirty-five, and he’s scared, which makes Henry nervous. Scared people are jumpy and jumpy people are dangerous.

Henry’s eyes feel hot in their sockets. They sting. Sweat trickles down the bridge of his nose and drips from the end of it. He can feel the rhythm of his heart in his temples. He swallows back bile and wishes he could chew an antacid.

Did the cop recognize him? One second the guy was cool and the next he was pointing a gun in Henry’s face. Something happened. Did he recognize him? Did Sarah signal him in some way? Did Beatrice?

He wants to believe that Bee would never do anything like that, but he does not. She might. She has not been herself. If she has become scared of him she might do something like that. He doesn’t want it to be the case, but he knows it’s a possibility.

Stop. Focus.

It is silent now but for the sound of his heart beating. Slowly he pulls the weapon from under the seat. Waiting for his moment. Waiting for his-

The deputy shrugs a trickle of sweat off the side of his face.

Now.

Henry whips the Lupara from under the seat of the truck. It almost catches on something, he feels it bang against a metal bar, but it does not catch. He brings it around quickly without raising it, just turns it in his fist, and pulls the trigger with his thumb.

The first shot hits the deputy in the hip and spins him around. Maggie screams and the smell of gun smoke fills the cab. He pulls the Lupara up and gives the deputy the second barrel. It takes away the left side of his chest, simply wipes it off like the skin from a rotten peach, revealing the meat beneath. He staggers backwards and then falls to the asphalt.

A screeching of brakes.

Henry looks left and sees a red Chevy sedan coming to a stop, turning sidewise on its locked tires and leaving a trail of burned rubber behind it. It comes to a stop only inches from the stricken deputy who even now is exhaling his last two or three breaths from colorless lips.

Henry opens the break and pulls out the spent shells, dropping them to the asphalt (there’s no point in pretending he needs to be careful now), and reloads the Lupara with shells from his Levis. He aims the shotgun at the blond woman behind the wheel of the Chevy and says, ‘Get the fuck out the car right now or I’ll shoot you dead.’

He looks to see how many cars are around and finds the road mercifully empty. For the moment, anyway.

The woman behind the wheel is frozen in place, staring at him with wide cow’s eyes.

‘Get the fuck out now! Do you wanna die?’

Still she does not move.

Henry walks to the car and yanks open the door and pulls the woman out. He throws her to the ground, and is taking aim when he hears Beatrice’s voice.

‘Sarah, get back here!’

He looks toward the truck. It is empty.

Beatrice is limping pathetically after Sarah as she runs across the flat, dry West Texas landscape toward the low, weathered buildings of Sierra Blanca.

‘Sarah, no!’ Bee says. ‘Come back!’

Henry runs after them, saying, ‘Sarah, stop, goddamn you!’

Beatrice trips and falls and lets out a wounded-animal yelp.

Henry runs, feeling heavy and uncoordinated, and as he does the Lupara slips from the grip of his sweaty hand and drops to the ground. He stops for it, looking around. It is lost in tall dead grass. He cannot see the goddamn thing anywhere and-

‘Henry! Henry, get Sarah!’

He looks toward Beatrice. She is still sitting where she fell. If he lets Sarah go, Bee will never forgive him. He can see it in her face.

He nods, leaves the Lupara-he can get it on the way back to the truck-and runs after the small girl frantically fleeing across the scrublands toward the white and brown buildings of Sierra Blanca, which are scattered across the ground like a child’s forgotten toy blocks.

Two and a half hours after passing through Sierra Blanca Ian reaches his limit. He has driven through the seemingly alien landscape of far West Texas, reaching Sparks and Southview and other suburbs of El Paso, then plowed through the city itself, Mexico visible on his left as Interstate 10 scooped down near the border, passing Holy Family Church America-side and Doniphan Park in Juarez. He left the city behind, tempted to stop only once, as he passed a place called Rudy’s Country Store amp; BarBQ near a hotel, the thought of a hot meal and a soft bed in a cool room briefly causing him to pull his foot from the gas pedal. But he was tired of Texas-it seemed to stretch on forever, and after fourteen hours on the road just getting across the state line became a goal-so he continued on, into New Mexico, and through Las Cruces and a closed border checkpoint. And now, after having passed through it, with airplanes flying overhead, landing at and taking off from Las Cruces International Airport just to his north (he can’t see it, but he knows it’s there to his right because he saw a sign pointing him that way), he is finished. He has made it through Texas and into New Mexico. He hasn’t seen the gray truck since Sierra Blanca, and he has convinced himself that it wasn’t Henry at all. Henry is on the road up ahead. And by tomorrow he will be waiting for Ian in a town called Kaiser, California, and that is where Ian will kill him. Ian will kill him and he will get Maggie back. That is the plan.

But that is for tomorrow.

The orange sun is sinking into the ground for another night. The sky is turning gray, the color spreading in the clear sky like a cloud of kicked-up mud in a once-clear pool of water, and soon the entire dome will be tainted by night.

He is done. Done and done.

He pulls off Interstate 10 and cruises along on an unnamed county road that runs parallel for half a mile before pulling into a dirt parking lot in front of a place that seems only to be called Motel/Food. The sign is hand-painted in white on the front of a rotting wood facade, behind which, he assumes, the food is served. The motel part of the operation looks to be about a dozen mobile homes parked willy-nilly behind the restaurant.

His tires kick up a cloud of dust as he brings the car to a stop. He kills the engine and waits for the dust to settle. With his lung in its current state he doesn’t think it’s a good idea to breathe it in. But once the air is clear he pushes open his car door and steps out into the hot day. He pulls his soggy cigar from his mouth and spits into the sand. He puts the cigar into the front pocket of his shirt and squints out at the interstate.

It is just empty asphalt.

He straps the satchel containing the Pleur-evac system over his shoulder, takes off his sunglasses, hangs them on his shirt, squints in the suddenly bright light, and heads, past a couple tables with salt and pepper shakers set upon them, into Motel/Food.

A stainless steel counter in a window between Ian and the kitchen. A short-order cook, guy in his sixties with tufts of gray hair sprouting from every orifice like shrubbery, is hunched over the counter, flipping through a titty book with a limp cigarette hanging from his bottom lip. A cloud of smoke around his head.

As the bell above the door rattles-it certainly doesn’t ring-the guy stands, straightening the greasy white box of a hat on his head. A couple inches of ash drop from the end of his smoke and fall onto a centerfold model before rolling down into the fold between the pages. He pulls the cigarette from his mouth, blows the ash to the floor, folds the magazine, and stashes it under the counter.

‘Howdy. Food or bed?’

‘I could use something to drink.’

‘Monica’s in the shitter and Betsy’s stepped out a minute, so that’ll have to wait a sec. Not hungry?’

Ian coughs into his hand, then wipes his palm off on his Levis.

‘I could have a burger,’ he says.

‘Cheeseburger?’

‘Okay.’

‘American, Swiss, cheddar?’

‘Swiss.’

‘Fries?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Fried egg on top?’

‘Of the fries?’

‘Burger.’

Ian shakes his head.

‘Sure?’

‘Yeah, no egg.’

‘All right. Coming up.’

He turns left, peels a patty off a stack of them, and tosses it onto his waiting grill. While that’s going, he pulls out a bun, smears it, drops some fries into the fry basket, and gets to humming what Ian thinks is supposed to be ‘Under My Thumb’.

Somewhere a toilet flushes, and a moment later a door opens. A woman walks out, saying, ‘We’re low on toilet paper, Uncle Hal. A whole roll in a day. Someone needs to change their fucking diet!’ Then she sees Ian standing there and blushes. It makes her pretty. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I didn’t realize.’

‘Quite all right. Monica or Betsy?’

‘Monica. Betsy’s with a. . checking on a room.’

Ian nods.

Monica’s in her thirties with reddish-brown hair set atop a pale and freckle-spotted face. She is shaped like a twig, no hips at all, and wearing a denim skirt and a T-shirt.

Ian finds her unaccountably sexy. But he has always been attracted to unconventionally pretty women.

‘I see Uncle Hal’s already cooking.’

‘Cheeseburger and fries.’

‘Fried egg on top?’

Ian shakes his head.

‘Want anything to drink?’

‘What do you got?’

She pokes her thumb over her shoulder, toward the small glass-doored refrigerator humming dully against the wall.

‘Couple Buds, I guess, and a bottle of water.’

‘All at once?’

Ian nods. ‘Thirsty.’

‘Will you be staying with us tonight?’

‘Yeah, if you got the space.’

She lets out a brief laugh. ‘Yeah, I think we can squeeze y’in. Just you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It’ll be seventy-two forty-five,’ she says. ‘Plus I’ll need a credit card on file. We got pay-per-view.’

‘I won’t use it.’

Monica smiles. ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but if we trusted every stranger walked through the door we’d’ve been broke a long time ago. Ain’t that right, Uncle Hal?’

‘Sure is, Monocle.’

‘I reckon that’s true,’ Ian says. ‘Monocle your nickname?’

‘Don’t get any ideas.’

‘Mean anything?’

Monica shakes her head. ‘Just an Uncle Hal-ism.’

He pays with a credit card and puts a five-dollar bill in the tip jar (an emptied tub of red vines with a few loose bills floating around the bottom).

Monica hands him a key.

‘You’ll be in room four, first trailer on the left, door on the left.’

Ian nods.

Monica turns around and pulls open the fridge. When she turns back, she has his two beers and his water. She sets them on the counter next to a tub of ostrich jerky.

‘You can sit wherever. I’ll bring your food when it’s ready.’

‘Thanks.’

He grabs his drinks and walks to a table by the fly-specked window. He sits down and looks out at the desert. A truck hauling groceries rumbles past, and then emptiness. After another five minutes a 747 roars by overhead, shaking the windows in their frames. And then more silence. Ian’s eyes sting. He closes them.

‘You want some TV?’

Ian is about to say no, thanks, I don’t reckon there’s anything much on right now, anyway, but Monica doesn’t wait for a reply. She grabs the remote from the counter, aims it, and presses a button. The TV comes to life, and a situation comedy flickers across the screen, all set-designed studio and laugh-track laughter. Ian pops a beer and takes a swallow. It is good and cold and soothing on his dry throat. He wonders if he shouldn’t be drinking. Alcohol thins the blood. Fuck it. It’s only beer and he’s only having two.

He nods to himself.

‘Fuck it,’ he says, aloud this time, and takes another swallow.

‘Excuse me?’

Ian shakes his head, nothing, sorry, and turns back to the smudged window. The right half of his body is throbbing with pain.

What if that was Henry Dean pulled over to the side of the road back near Sierra Blanca? Maybe he was arrested and even now is sitting in a Hudspeth County jailhouse. Maybe Debbie is on her way now to pick Maggie up. Maybe there’s a message on his answering machine telling him all about it. ‘Where the hell are you, Ian? I’ve called your cell twenty times but it keeps going to voicemail. You’ll never believe what great good fortune we’ve had. Henry Dean was-’

No: that isn’t how it happens.

His stomach tightens at the thought of it happening that way. He isn’t sure why.

Because you want to run toward oblivion and this gives you an excuse. You know exactly why, Ian, so stop lying to yourself.

He pushes that thought away. He will not accept that.

Even if that were true, it wouldn’t-

‘You’re a million miles away, aren’t you?’

Ian jumps and a startled grunt escapes his throat. After a silent moment of nothing, he laughs at himself.

‘Guess I was,’ he says.

‘I didn’t mean to scare you,’ Monica says, setting down a white plate with a cheeseburger and fries on it.

‘I know it,’ Ian says.

‘Mind if I sit down? Betsy’s back so I can kick up my heels a minute.’ She gestures toward the counter. Ian didn’t even hear the bell above the door rattle, but there she is, Betsy, standing behind the counter, sipping a Cactus Cooler and looking up at the TV in the corner of the room. She’s a little younger than Monica, and a little bit prettier, and a little bit curvier, but obviously her sister.

Ian pushes a chair out with his foot. ‘Take a load off.’

‘Thanks.’ She sits down.

Ian flashes her a brief smile, then turns back to the window. The desert stretches on and on, dotted here and there with creosote bushes. Hills float in the distance.

‘Nothing out there worth looking at,’ Monica says.

‘You don’t think so?’

She shakes her head. ‘Just desert and glimpses of people going to and from places you’ll never see yourself. Every once in a while, maybe they stop in, maybe they tell you a little bit about where they’ve been, but it’s just a story you heard, and then they leave again.’

‘Is it that hard to pick up and go?’

Monica shrugs. ‘Harder than it should be. I’ve packed my bags a dozen times.’

‘Yeah? How come you never went?’

Monica is silent for a long time. Then: ‘I guess I don’t want to talk about that.’

‘Okay.’

Ian takes another swallow of beer.

‘What about you?’ Monica says.

‘What about me what?’

‘Where you headed to?’

‘California.’

‘Los Angeles? Hollywood?’

Ian shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says, ‘not this time.’

‘But you been before?’

Ian nods.

‘Do you know anybody famous? Is it glamorous?’

‘No. It’s just a big suburb surrounding pockets of city.’

‘No, I bet it’s glamorous.’

Ian shrugs.

‘I was in a play once. A school play. Macbeth, I think. Is Macbeth the one with the witches in it?’

‘It has witches in it,’ Ian says, ‘the weird sisters.’

‘Yeah,’ Monica says. ‘I played one of them.’

‘Do you remember any of it?’

‘Oh, God.’ She looks far away for a moment, and then a smile lights up her face. ‘ “When the hurly-burly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won.” That’s all I remember. I always wanted to go to Hollywood and be famous.’

‘It’s never too late,’ Ian says.

‘You really think so?’

Ian doesn’t answer for a moment. Then: ‘I guess I don’t.’

‘That’s what I thought. What are you going to California for?’

‘It’s my turn to not want to talk about it.’

‘I didn’t mean to pry.’

Ian shakes his head. ‘You didn’t.’

He picks up a couple fries and shoves them into his mouth. They taste good. Warm and salty and over-cooked by normal standards, which is how he likes them.

‘It’s so lonesome, isn’t it?’

Ian looks at Monica. She is staring out the window at the desert landscape.

‘I guess it is.’

‘Do you ever get lonesome?’

‘Doesn’t everybody?’

‘You married?’

Ian shoves a couple more fries into his mouth and holds up his left hand. There are no rings upon his finger. ‘I was once. Well, thrice, actually. None of them stuck.’

‘You were married three times?’

He smiles. ‘I believed the vows every time, too.’

‘Wow. Do you miss it?’

‘What?’

‘Being married.’

‘Sometimes. Mostly at night.’

‘Do you think you’ll miss it tonight?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘’Cause we could pretend.’

‘I’m sorry?’

She puts her hand on his knee. ‘We could pretend. I could. .’ she licks her lips, ‘we could lie together.’

Ian smiles at her, suddenly understanding. But after laying his hand upon hers and letting it rest there a moment, he pushes her hand away. Gently. ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

‘It would only be seventy dollars. We work it out where we charge for an extra room. You could use your credit card.’

‘It’s not you, Monica. I have a medical condition.’

‘What, like herpes?’

Ian is so startled by the question, and the blankly serious look on Monica’s face, that he actually laughs. The laugh turns into a cough, but he manages to stifle it early. He clears his throat. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘No, not herpes. It’s just-it’s not a good idea.’

‘Okay,’ Monica says. ‘Do you mind if I still sit with you?’

‘No,’ Ian says. ‘In fact, I’d like that.’

He’s just eating the last of his dinner when a local news program comes on. After some talk of little or no import a brunette woman with her hair in a bun, big brown eyes, and a tight-fitting blouse says, ‘Just under three hours ago, on Interstate 10, outside the small Texas town of Sierra Blanca, a Hudspeth County Sheriff ’s Deputy, Deputy Pagana, was killed during a routine stop. The incident was captured by the deputy’s dashboard-mounted camera. Police have released the footage to the media in the hopes that it will lead to information on the whereabouts of the perpetrator of this crime. We would like to warn you that the following footage is of a disturbing nature and may be inappropriate for children.’

An awkward pause during which the newswoman blinks at the camera, and then a cut to grainy footage seen through a dirty windshield. The footage is in color, and has audio, though the audio is tinny and hard to hear. Mostly just background noise with the occasional rumblings of a voice you can’t understand. It is dated and time coded. For a moment all that’s visible is the back of a gray Dodge Ram pickup truck. Ian can see Maggie through the rear window. She is looking back at the car, seemingly at the camera, at him, then a hand, Henry’s hand, grabs her and turns her around. A uniformed sheriff ’s deputy then walks along the left side of the frame. He reaches the truck. Ian’s Mustang passes by on the road behind him. There is some talking. Then, without warning, the deputy pulls out his gun. He steps back. He looks scared. He yells. He pulls open the truck’s door and yells some more. He wipes sweat off his face with his shoulder. And then a flash from the truck. A red explosion from the deputy’s hip. He staggers backwards several steps, out of frame. A red mist hangs in the air. Then another flash from the truck. Henry steps into the daylight, breaks open his sawed-off shotgun and pulls shells from it. He drops them to the asphalt. He reloads, points the gun at something out of frame, and yells. Sounds like he’s telling someone to get out of their car. He curses and the curses are censored by beeps. He walks out of frame toward the person at whom he was yelling. A moment later Maggie slides out of the truck and onto the asphalt. There she is, the bravest person he has ever met. She looks around with frantic eyes, and then runs around the front of the truck and disappears. The gray truck wobbles slightly. Perhaps someone getting out of the passenger side. That side is not in frame. A woman’s voice tells someone named Sarah to stop. Henry runs across the frame and around the front of the truck. Toward Maggie. The program cuts back to the woman at the news desk. She looks very serious.

‘Police believe Deputy Pagana’s killer is a man named Henry Dean,’ she says, ‘who is already wanted for questioning in connection with several kidnappings and murders in Tonkawa County, Texas. He is believed to be traveling with his wife, Beatrice Dean, and a young girl named Magdalene Hunt, who, police believe, Mr Dean kidnapped from her home over seven years ago. If you have any information as to the whereabouts of Mr Dean, please call Detective Roderick with the Hudspeth County Sheriff’s Department or Detective Sanchez at the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s El Paso field office.’

Phone numbers appear onscreen.

Ian steps out into the dying light. He walks to his car, grabs a duffel bag with clothes in it and the sawed-off shotgun he got from the police station. He squints out at the gray asphalt of the interstate and past it to the desert landscape.

The entire right side of his body throbs with pain. He feels sweaty and sticky and dirty and sick.

After a moment he turns away from the road and makes his way around back of Motel/Food to find his room.

Picture yourself standing on a road beneath the white sun. Sweat trickles down your face. Your skin is overheated and itchy. Your clothes are damp and they stick to your skin. How you got here is irrelevant: you’re here. And you are looking to the northeast, toward Sierra Blanca. You’re looking that way because that’s where it’s happening. .

A blond girl in a dress runs through tall dead grass. She is barefoot, you can see that as her heels kick above the grass, and her feet kick up sprays of dirt as she runs. If the frame included only her bare feet cutting through the grass the scene could be a happy one: a girl running toward her one true love. It would all depend on the soundtrack. But this is a long shot and you see much more than just the feet, and the soundtrack is raspy breathing and feet pounding against dirt. Behind the girl is a fat older man. You’ve never met him but you know his name. Henry Dean. He runs after the girl. For every two steps she takes, the man requires only one. The distance between them shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, and she screams for help as she nears the town, but help does not come. Then the man is upon her, and he swings with a heavy arm and his fist hits the side of her head like a swinging club, and she is off her feet, in the air, still moving forward, but also sideways with the force of the blow. Then she falls, vanishing into the tall grass.

The ground rushes up at her, oh God how did this happen, I was supposed to get away, and her head smashes against a rock in the ground, and the blow switches off her consciousness like a light-click-and in the dark room of her mind she has only some small sense of what is happening. Warmth against her body: the hot ground upon which she lies. A breeze blows and the tall dead grass rustles around her making sounds like whispers. Hush. Something sticky running into the bowls of her closed eyes. Someone picks her up. A grunt, not her own, for she is silent and silent and silent.

She tries to open her eyes but she cannot. She tries to speak but she cannot. She is locked in the dark room of her mind and cannot see an EXIT sign anywhere, nor a door.

Henry walks back toward Beatrice with Sarah sagging unconscious in his arms. Bee is standing there with dirt on her knees looking at him with her mouth open. Her toes point at one another. Her arms hang at her sides.

‘I got her,’ he says. ‘I got her for you.’

‘You shouldn’t’ve hit her.’

‘She would’ve got away.’

‘You shouldn’t’ve hit her. You shouldn’t’ve hit her and you shouldn’t’ve shot them people and you shouldn’t. .’ Her voice breaks and she stops. Finally she looks up at him once more and says, ‘You shouldn’t’ve hit her.’

His first instinct is to tell her to shut her mouth, don’t be stupid, I couldn’t let her get into town, Bee, but he does not tell her that. He closes his eyes and exhales in a long sigh and opens his eyes and says, ‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’

‘Okay.’

‘Now let’s get to the truck and get out of here.’

‘Her head is bleeding.’

‘She fell on a rock.’

‘Will she be okay?’

‘How the hell should I-’

Several cars are stopped on the interstate. People are talking loudly, panic in their voices, surrounding the dead deputy. A woman is on her phone with the police, practically screaming about a murder. The blond woman he almost shot is pointing at them, and other people are now looking. He thinks of the life they left in Bulls Mouth and the few belongings they took with them. Up in the Dodge Ram. It is all lost. Don’t look over your shoulder at what you left behind. It’s best to forget what cannot be recovered.

Henry tastes bile at the back of his throat and swallows it away.

‘Turn around and walk,’ Henry says.

‘What?’

‘Turn around and walk away.’

Nobody follows.

They walk along a dirt road. Henry is looking around for a car or truck left unattended and with keys in the ignition. They’ve walked by five vehicles so far, but all of them were locked. He is getting very nervous. He wants to get into something and on the road before more police arrive, or, at the very least, before the cops have a chance to set up a roadblock. He needs to get out of Texas, but New Mexico is still a couple hours off. If the Texas police get hold of him now, after everything he’s done to Texas lawmen, spending his life in prison will be the least of his worries. He’ll be looking at a death injection.

‘My ankle hurts.’

‘I know it, Bee.’

Up ahead on the left he sees a rusted-out Chevy flatbed poking from a barn that looks about ready to collapse. He nods toward it.

‘Let’s see if we can get out of town in that.’

‘It’s kind of big.’

‘We’re not shopping around, Bee. We gotta take what’s handy.’

He looks around, but the dirt road appears to be empty of life. Sirens wail in the distance and grow louder. Their time is short.

They walk toward the truck.

‘Check it,’ Henry says as they get near.

Beatrice limps to the truck and grabs the handle and thumbs the button and pulls open the door. Flakes of rust fall to the ground. She leans in and looks.

‘There’s a key.’

Henry turns it. The truck’s engine groans. He gives it a little gas. The exhaust pipe spits black smoke. The engine starts. He puts the truck into gear and it rumbles out of the barn and onto the dirt road. He glances at Beatrice. She has Sarah leaning against her arm and she is stroking the girl’s blond hair, combing her fingers through it. Then Beatrice lifts the skirt of her own dress, revealing sweaty cotton panties, and wipes at the blood on Sarah’s face.

‘She’ll be okay,’ Henry says.

‘You shouldn’t’ve hit her,’ Bee says.

Henry drives south along a road that does not appear to have a name. After a block he reaches the Interstate 10 feeder road and turns right. He can see the interstate up ahead, several police cars-and a county SUV-parked on the side of the road, lights flashing. He’s never going to get past all those cops. It just isn’t going to happen. He should have. . well, should have what? In another half hour cops will be all over Sierra Blanca. News of what happened here will move through town like brushfire. He’s lived in a small town all his life and knows how quickly news spreads. He has to get away from here as fast as possible, and there is only one place for him to go. There is nobody he can count on but his big brother.

As he drives onto the interstate he sees the right lane is completely blocked off by flares and traffic is backed up several cars as sheriff’s deputies wave cars through one by one.

After everything that’s happened, this is where it ends; in some spit-smear of a town in West Texas with the sun beating down on him. He puts on his turn signal and merges into the left lane. He reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out a roll of antacids and thumbs one into his mouth and chews it.

There are five cars in front of him. Deputies stop each car and ask questions before allowing them through.

This is where it ends.

Henry looks in the rearview mirror as he drives away from the scene of his most recent crime. His chest feels tight, but the further he gets from it, the smaller the scene appears in his rearview mirror, the less his heart seems squeezed. He can barely believe he made it through.

‘Where you headed?’

‘My brother’s place in California.’

‘What for?’

‘Pick up a car he don’t want no more.’

‘Brought the whole family?’

‘Why not? You don’t get to go to California every day.’

‘Where you traveling from?’

‘Houston.’

‘You live in Houston?’

‘If you wanna call it living.’

‘What kinda car?’

‘Fifty-six Buick Special. Gonna restore it.’

‘Hobby of yours?’

‘Man needs a hobby.’

‘All right, go on.’

‘Thank ya.’

A smiling salute, and that was it. He was sure they’d ask him for identification. But maybe nobody with authority has arrived yet. Maybe they were just looking for suspicious behavior and if everything seemed cool they’d move on to the next. Doesn’t matter.

He slipped through.

The gray road stretches out before them. The cab is silent but for the rattling of the truck itself. Beatrice looks out the window while Sarah leans against her, asleep. Henry glances over trying to read her expression in the reflection on the glass, but it is blank. Her eyes dull, her mouth hanging open slightly. He does not like the silence between them. He is doing all of this for her and he refuses to lose her to it.

‘What are you thinking, Bee?’

‘Nothing.’ She does not even glance toward him when she speaks the word, simply continues to stare out at the emptiness.

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You must be thinking something.’

No response.

He licks his lips. ‘You know I love you, right, Bee?’

‘Okay.’

‘I know some of the stuff that’s happened last two days upset you.’

‘It didn’t happen. You done it.’

‘I had to do it. I did it for you.’

She turns now and there are tears in her eyes. ‘Well, you shouldn’t’ve.’

‘But, Bee-’

She cuts him off with the silent but vehement shaking of her head. Tears roll down her cheeks. ‘You shouldn’t’ve.’

‘There was no choice, Bee.’

‘There’s always a choice.’

‘Do you want to go to prison, Bee?’

She wipes at her eyes. ‘What would I go to prison for?’ ‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Sarah. She’s why we had to leave Bulls Mouth. She’s why we’re on the road now. She’s why we needed to get rid of our truck. Why Flint and his woman had to die. Don’t you act like you don’t know what’s going on, and don’t you act like it’s got nothing to do with you. That ain’t fair and you know it.’

‘Henry, I-’

‘You know what happened to the other Sarahs, Bee. You know what we done. We both done it. I did what I had to do to make you happy, but you let me. You knew and you wanted it so I done it. Don’t act like you wasn’t a part of all this.’

‘But. . I needed-’

Henry nods. ‘I know it,’ he says. ‘That’s why I done it.’ ‘But what you done to that nice couple and to that cop was-’

‘Was what I had to do to get us out of a tight spot Sarah got us into.’

‘You. . you killed-’

‘I did what I had to to keep our family together.’

Bee sniffles and sits silent a long moment. She licks her lips. Then she looks at him with wide hopeful eyes. ‘You had to?’

Henry nods. ‘I couldn’t let nobody tear our family apart, could I?’

‘They wanted to take Sarah away?’

‘That’s right. We couldn’t let them do that.’

‘Family’s the most important thing there is.’

‘It is.’

‘You didn’t really want to stomp on Sarah last night?’

‘I was just mad, Bee. I would never hurt Sarah. Not on purpose.’

‘Because she’s family.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And family’s the most important thing there is.’

He nods.

‘I love you too, Henry.’

‘I know it,’ Henry says. ‘Now wipe your eyes. I hate to see you cry.’

Ian stands motionless under the hot spray of the shower. His eyes are closed and all he can see is that which exists within his mind and his mind for the moment is empty. These moments are rare and he holds on to them as long as possible, which is never long. As soon as a part of his mind becomes aware of the silence within, it is no longer silent.

The catheter twists out of his chest just below and to the right of his pectoral muscle, and then curls down to the drainage system sitting on the floor just outside the bathtub in which he is standing. It is still in the satchel. He saw no reason to remove it. His body is turned slightly to the right so the shower water does not hit the wounds in his chest.

He opens his eyes and grabs a small bar of single-use soap from the window sill where it was resting. He rips the paper from it and wets it and washes himself.

Outside, through the window, he can see the sun sinking into the ground. A wind blows a swirl of dust across the lot, toward the restaurant in front of which his car is parked. He left it there before coming to his motel room, which is not a motel room at all, but half a single-wide mobile home. Where there should be a hallway leading to the back half there is only a slab of unpainted dry wall. His room consists of what would normally be the kitchen and living room, though the kitchen has been converted into a bathroom and the living room into a bedroom. The bedroom consists of small bed, a chest of drawers, a mirror, and a table on which rests a small TV. An ancient fan wobbles in a ceiling decorated by fat black flies, its five blades cutting through the hot air without cooling it in the least.

Ian rinses and shuts off the water.

He pushes the plastic shower curtain aside and steps from the tub, slipping on the linoleum floor and having to catch himself on the counter.

Something in his back tears as he reaches out to catch himself and he curses through gritted teeth, goddamn it, and closes his eyes in pain. Tears stream down his face. After a moment he opens his eyes. The pain begins to recede. It is still there, and severe, but it becomes almost tolerable. He grabs a towel from the counter and dries himself off. Arms and legs and back and fa-

The towel is covered in blood.

There are several drops of it on the linoleum floor. And now he can feel it running down his back. He picks up the satchel from the floor by the tub and walks naked to the living room where a mirror sits upon the chest of drawers. He turns around and looks at himself over his shoulder. Several of the stitches have been torn from the wound in his back-which is larger than he would have guessed, the bullet having taken its pound of flesh with it as it left-and blood is bubbling from it, frothy and seemingly thick as honey.

‘Shit.’

He stands motionless for a long time as blood drips to the carpet, and then he walks to the phone and dials the manager’s office.

‘Motel/Food.’

‘Monica?’

‘This is Betsy.’

‘Can I talk to Monica?’

‘I’m sure I can help you, hon.’

‘I’d like Monica.’

‘Right. Hold on.’

The sound of the phone being set on the counter.

‘Mon, I think it’s the guy just checked in.’

A long emptiness. Then: ‘Hello?’

‘Monica.’

‘Hey. Did you change your mind? I was hoping you would.’

‘Not exactly,’ he says. ‘Do you have a first-aid kit?’

Ian walks to his duffel bag, which is sitting on the bed, unzips it, and pulls out a pair of boxer shorts. He slips into them.

A knock at the door.

He walks to it and pulls it open. On the other side stands Monica with a white metal first-aid kit hanging from her fist. For a long time she is silent, and he can only imagine what he looks like. Middle-aged and overweight with thinning blond hair and wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts, a plastic tube twisting out of his chest and into a black satchel which he is holding by the handle like a door-to-door salesman.

‘Hi,’ he says.

‘Jesus,’ she says. ‘What-what happened?’

‘I was shot.’

‘With a gun?’

‘With a gun.’

‘You should go to the hospital.’

Ian shakes his head.

‘I’ve already been,’ he says, and holds up the satchel. ‘That’s where I got this. I just had an accident, is all.’

‘What happened?’

Ian turns around to show her his back. He looks over his shoulder at her. She is grimacing, but she does not look away. In fact, she leans forward, examining the wound.

‘You sure you don’t need to go back to the hospital?’

‘It’s not as bad as it looks.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘I can probably bandage it myself if you just-’

‘Don’t be dumb.’

‘What?’

‘It’s in the middle of your back. Unless your elbows bend the wrong way, you’re gonna need help.’

Ian stands silent for a long moment, then steps aside to let her in.

He lies on his stomach on the mattress and Monica straddles him. The first-aid kit sits open beside her. He cannot see what she is doing, but he can feel and hear her. He can feel the soft curves of her backside against the backs of his legs. He can hear her tearing the paper from something. He can feel her gently wiping the blood away from the wound with a pad of gauze.

‘You’re right,’ she says.

‘What?’

‘It’s not as bad as it looks. Only a few stitches tore out.’

He has barely felt a woman’s touch in two years, not since he went drinking at O’Connell’s and picked up one of the coeds from Bulls Mouth City College, and that was an angry drunken fuck, nothing like the gentleness he feels now from Monica. He had forgotten that this kind of gentleness existed.

After she wipes the area around the wound, he feels her pour something onto it and into it. It stings and he sucks in air in a hiss.

‘Sorry.’

‘It’s okay.’

She wipes at it again, and then lays something over it. She does it with gentleness, a soft touch that makes the pain feel almost pleasurable. Then she pulls something else from the first-aid kit, and he hears a clinking sound, then something like tearing. Medical tape being unspooled and torn away. She tapes a pad of gauze onto his back. After another minute, she tosses everything into the first-aid kit and latches it closed.

‘All done.’

‘Maybe you could stay a while longer.’

‘You’re in no shape for that.’

‘I know. That’s not what I want.’

‘What do you want?’

He lies on his back in bed and watches her take off her clothes. She does it slowly, first her T-shirt, and then her bra. She unbuttons her skirt and lets it drop to her feet. She is wearing a pair of utilitarian white panties. She puts her thumbs into the waistband and pushes them down. She has a thick thatch of reddish-brown pubic hair. The bones in her hips are visible. Her breasts are small and her nipples light pink, ghosts of nipples. There is a mole on her left breast. She stands there completely naked before him, looking at his face.

Then she walks to him and lays herself down beside him, on his left side, and he feels her smooth legs against his legs and her warm breasts brush against his skin, her coarse pubic hair against his hip, and her breath on his cheek, and she rests her head in his armpit and she puts a hand on his heart.

‘It’s beating so fast,’ she says.

‘I know,’ he says.

Ian watches the fan in the ceiling spin. He tries to follow a single blade as it makes its way round and round, but keeps losing track after four or five rotations, the blade dissolving back into a blur with the rest of them. He imagines his life after getting Maggie back. He imagines living in an apartment in Los Angeles with her and Monica. Monica is sweet and gentle and true. He might be able to live with her. He likes the idea of once more having a woman in his life. A partner. He thinks of Debbie, widowed back in Bulls Mouth, but he knows there is nothing left there. Sometimes people have too much history together, history of the wrong kind, and people cannot tear pages from the book of their life. Once something is written there it is permanent. But maybe he could start something new with a new woman and his daughter. Chapter four. Her body feels right against his body. He smiles at the thought, though he knows in the back of his mind that it’s nothing more than a childish fantasy. He smiles at the thought and tries to hold on to it for as long as possible.

‘Maybe you can stop by again on your way back from California,’ Monica says.

‘I’d like that.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

‘I would too. I like you.’

‘We could have a date,’ he says. ‘A real date.’

‘Yeah?’

‘I could buy you dinner and we could ask each other what our favorite color is.’

‘We could start now.’

‘Okay.’

‘You first.’

‘Green.’

‘Me too,’ she says. ‘What’s your favorite food?’

‘Meat.’

‘Meat isn’t a food.’

‘It’s a food group.’

‘Then mine is sugar.’

‘Okay. Filet mignon.’

‘That’s better.’

‘What’s yours, really?’

‘You’re gonna laugh.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Promise?’

‘Stick a needle in my eye.’

‘Okay. Those little sour gummy worms. You know the ones?’

‘Really?’

She nods. He can feel the movement against him, though he sees only the ceiling above.

‘That’s disgusting.’

‘You promised you wouldn’t laugh.’

‘I’m not. I’m closer to puking.’

‘Stop it,’ she says. ‘You’re making me feel dumb.’

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry. You can have sour gummy worms on our date if you want.’

‘That’s better,’ she says. ‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’

Ian swallows. ‘I don’t like this game anymore,’ he says.

‘How bad can it be?’ she says. ‘Did you steal something?’

‘Let’s skip that question and move on to-’

The sound of a car outside makes him stop. He listens closely. It pulls to a stop out front.

He sits up.

‘Could you see who it is?’ he says.

‘Are you in trouble?’

‘Please,’ he says.

Monica gets to her feet and walks naked to the window. She pulls back the curtain and looks out.

He shouldn’t have let himself relax. He knew better than to let himself-

‘Who is it?’

‘It looks like a police car.’

He gets to his feet and bends down to pick up his satchel, but suddenly everything goes gray like a thin blanket thrown over him, and the blanket is very heavy, and he’s falling to the floor, it pushes him to the floor, and then he’s on the floor, and there’s nothing.

Maggie opens her eyes. She does not know where she is. She is leaning against something, something soft and warm. A person. Her head is throbbing. Her mouth tastes bad. She sits up and looks around. She is in a truck, Beatrice on her right and Henry on her left. They are both eating hamburgers wrapped in yellow paper. She looks out the windshield. They are in a parking lot behind a McDonald’s, and beyond the McDonald’s the pink evening sky lined with gray clouds that look almost solid. The descending darkness makes the sky feel very small: it is closing in on her. She feels trapped sitting in the cab of this truck, trapped on either side by the hulking figures of Beatrice and Henry.

She rubs at her eyes.

Beatrice glances over at her. ‘You’re up,’ she says.

Maggie nods, but does not feel like she is up. She feels groggy and gray and caught in a dream. A nightmare.

‘How’s your head?’

‘Hurts.’

‘You had a accident.’

She thinks of the ground rushing up at her.

‘I know.’

‘We got you some food.’

Beatrice leans down between her feet and brings up a hamburger from a white paper bag. She hands it to Maggie and Maggie takes it. She holds it and looks at it. For a moment she thinks she is not hungry, that she will not be able to eat the hamburger, but then her stomach grumbles loudly and she realizes she is starving. It’s been a long time since she last ate. She unwraps the hamburger and her stomach clenches and she takes a bite and tastes ketchup and pickle and she barely chews before swallowing and taking another bite.

‘What do you say?’

She looks at Henry and swallows. ‘Thank you.’

‘Not me.’

She turns to Beatrice. ‘Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome.’ Beatrice smiles at her.

Maggie takes another bite.

Fifteen minutes later they’re back on the road. Maggie sits between Beatrice and Henry and looks out the windshield. Darkness is spreading quickly across the land now that the sun is below the horizon. She is afraid that she will never escape. She wonders where her daddy is.

She closes her eyes and counts to ten.

She opens her eyes. She feels like a person in a snow globe. The sky is so close. Maybe it always was that close and she just doesn’t remember. She spent a long time in the Nightmare World. Outside is bound to seem strange to her now.

She wonders what Borden is doing.

He’s not real.

Everything will be okay, she thinks. Everything will be okay.

The sky is darkening, but she has her own light inside. Not even the Nightmare World could kill it. Certainly the setting of the sun will not.

Diego parks his car next to Ian’s Mustang in what is left of the day’s dying light. He kills the engine and steps outside. He squints at the interstate, then sprinkles tobacco into a rolling paper, rolls it, licks it, and sticks it between his lips. He thumbs the end of a match into a flame and lights his cigarette. It’s a loose roll and it burns quickly. It tastes good but in four drags it is burned down to his nicotine-stained knuckles. He drops it to the dirt and heels it into submission and walks toward a building fronted with a sign that says MOTEL/FOOD in hand-painted white lettering.

The place is quiet but for the TV on the wall in the corner. It plays a series of loud and obnoxious commercials while a woman and a cook with a cigarette hanging from his lip play a game of cards.

When the bell above the door clinks dumbly, the woman turns around and says, ‘Hi there, officer.’

‘Howdy.’

‘Are you here on business,’ the cook says, ‘or are you eating?’

‘I could eat.’

‘What’ll it be?’

‘What’s good?’

‘Cheeseburger.’

‘Then that’s what I’ll have.’

‘Fried egg on top?’

‘I’ll skip that part.’

‘American, Swiss, cheddar?’

‘Cheddar.’

‘All right, coming up. Fries?’

‘Onion rings.’

‘Will you be staying with us tonight?’ the brunette asks.

‘I hadn’t really thought about it. I reckon so. I stopped here because I’m looking for-’

The door swings open behind Diego, the bell clinking, and he spins around. A stick of a woman in a denim skirt and a T-shirt, barefoot and with her hair mussed, comes in and her gaze shifts around the room till it finds him.

‘Ian wants to see you,’ she says.

There is a smear of blood on the front of her T-shirt and another on her cheek.

‘Is he okay?’

‘I think so. He passed out for a second, but I. . I think he’s okay now.’

Diego nods. ‘Where’s he at?’

She leads him outside and around to the back of the building where several single-wide mobile homes are scattered across the land, and there is Ian, walking out the front door of one of them in nothing but boxer shorts and a pair of black shoes. He is pale and his skin is almost translucent as cooked onion. His shirtless belly is very white and there is a tattoo on his right shoulder, though from where Diego is standing it just looks like a green-gray smudge. Sweat stands out in beads on his face. A tube runs from his chest and into a black satchel he carries in his right hand like a man spreading the good news.

‘Diego.’

‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ the woman says.

‘I’m fine. I just lost some blood and shouldn’t have bent down.’

‘I thought you were dead for a second.’

‘I don’t kill that easy.’

‘You look pretty near it,’ Diego says. ‘You need to rest.’

‘Can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Someone might be passing by. I need to be alert. Asleep isn’t alert.’ Then he looks to the woman. ‘Do you mind if I talk with my friend privately a minute?’

‘Yeah,’ the woman says. ‘I’ll just be up front. Sure you’re okay?’

Ian nods. ‘Thank you.’ Then he looks toward Diego. ‘Let’s go inside,’ he says. ‘I need to sit down.’

Ian sits on the edge of the bed and Diego pulls a wooden chair away from the wall and sits across from him. Diego hasn’t seen his friend since right after Henry Dean put a bullet through him and is shocked at how exhausted and sick he seems-somehow worse than when he lay in the gravel bleeding. He shouldn’t be up. He certainly shouldn’t be driving halfway across the country.

‘You killed Donald Dean,’ he says.

‘He was scum.’

‘He was a person. You didn’t have the right to-’

‘I know. I know that, Diego. But I did it anyway. I don’t give a shit about right or wrong. I want my daughter back. Once she’s safe, then I’m willing to face the consequences for what I’ve done. . and for what I haven’t done yet. But until then, nothing is gonna stand in my way. Not Donald Dean, not a bullet, and certainly not you.’

‘You try to face off against Henry Dean in the shape you’re in, he’s gonna kill you.’

‘I don’t have a choice. He might be coming down that stretch of road in the next hour or two, unless the law catches up with him first, and I can’t be asleep if he does.’

‘It’ll be dark by then. He might drive right by.’

‘He might. If he does, I know where he’s headed. But if I’m not ready for him and he does decide this is the place he’s getting me off his back. .’ Ian coughs into his hand. The sound is wet and comes from a very deep place. Ian’s face turns red. When he is done coughing he looks at his hand.

‘Let me see.’

Ian opens his palm toward him.

A meaty wad of red in its center like a Christly stigma. Ian wipes it off on his blanket.

‘You need to get to a hospital.’

‘Not happening.’

‘Ian.’

‘Goddamn it, Diego. I didn’t ask you to come here.’

‘At least get some rest. We can park our cars around back so he can’t see them from the interstate. You can get some sleep, we can go after him tomorrow and finish this.’

‘He still could stop here.’

‘I’ll watch for him.’

‘If I agree to this I don’t want you with me tomorrow.’

‘We’ll talk about that then. What you need now is rest.’

Ian closes his eyes. His mouth hangs open. He looks to be on the verge of falling asleep even as he sits there. Falling asleep or passing out, Diego cannot tell which. He wonders if Ian can. Ian opens his eyes again and looks at him for a long time.

‘You’re a good friend,’ he says finally. ‘You could have. .’

‘I’m loyal to my friends. Now get some rest. I’ll move our cars around back.’

‘And. . and you’ll watch for Henry.’

‘I will.’

‘Okay.’

Ian watches Diego walk out the door and close it behind him. He will have to convince Diego to go back to Bulls Mouth tomorrow. Ian doesn’t want him anywhere near what will have to happen if he’s to get Maggie back. But it’s good that he is here tonight. Ian is more tired than he can remember ever being. He is tired and not thinking straight. His eyes sting and his eyelids feel very heavy. If he closes his eyes that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love Maggie. It doesn’t mean he won’t get her back. It doesn’t mean anything. He’ll get her back tomorrow. But tonight he can sleep. Blessed sleep. Punishing himself will not get her back, nor will it prove his love. Diego is right. He needs to sleep. Henry will kill him if he doesn’t get some rest. He lies on the bed and feels hot and cold simultaneously and slightly nauseous as well. He deserves a little sleep. Who puts a fried egg on a cheeseburger? He is very tired. He had a friend in school who used to put potato chips on his bologna sandwiches. A little sleep now and lot of sleep once he gets Maggie back. Maybe fried egg is good on a cheeseburger. Someone should close the curtains. If anybody ever asks him again if he wants fried egg on his cheeseburger he’s going to say yes. Life is short. A person should only say no if they have to.