“I gotta make,” Dennis said. “My stomach hurts.”

“Okay, Dennis. Over there,” pointing out the restroom door at the back of the station.

Dennis opened the car door and sat there for a moment, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. Then he pulled himself out in sections, first his feet, then both arms, finally the rest of his body. He stumbled off to the bathroom and went inside.

I was dead tired; I must’ve gone back to sleep. When I woke up again, I wasn’t sure if it hadn’t been a dream-Dennis waking me to go the bathroom. My ex-wife had been like that-holding conversations with me at 2 in the morning, then accusing me of making it up.

But Dennis wasn’t in the car. The pink light had morphed into pale yellow.

It was 5:40.

I got out, walked to the bathroom door, and knocked.

“Dennis, you okay in there?”

I heard an answering grunt.

I walked around to the front of the station in search of food.

When I entered bleary-eyed through the front door, the Indian-he was probably a Sikh since he wore one of those red turbans-didn’t even acknowledge me. He was hunched across the front desk, reading a newspaper.

I walked down the aisle looking for something to eat. Gas stations were evidently oblivious to the latest nutritional guidelines. This one was pretty much restricted to the food group ending in -os.

Cheetos. Doritos. Tostitos. Rolos.

It was quiet enough that when I pulled two bags of Doritos off the shelf, the resultant crackle seemed as jarring as a gunshot.

Not to the Sikh-he remained buried in the newspaper.

“Do you have any salsa?” I called out to him.

He ignored me.

“Salsa,” I said. “Where is it?”

No answer.

“Hey!” I said.

The air conditioner began rattling. A car drove by.

An alley cat screeched outside the window.

The power lines snapped and crackled.

Sometimes bits of knowledge come all at once-several distinct and awful realizations flooding your brain at the same moment in time, and suddenly, just like that, you can’t breathe.

You’re drowning.

I raced out of the store; the Doritos fell to the floor.

I screamed his name out loud.

“Dennis!” Flinging open the bathroom door and saying, “Oh my God, oh my God, Dennis, oh my God, Dennis…”

Me, who generally avoided God’s name since he’d never done all that much for me, invoking it three times, like some sacred cant. Like the proscribed penance for committing a sin.

I had committed a sin.

I’d fallen asleep.

FORTY-ONE

We raced down the highway.

Away from the station, where the Indian clerk lay face down in his newspaper-Indian, not Sikh, since his turban wasn’t really red after all, no, not until fifteen minutes ago, when someone had put a bullet into his head.

It was different in the bathroom. There was nothing there to soak up the blood. It had covered the entire floor and part of the shattered bathroom mirror. A broken shard had still been lying there on the floor.

The one the plumber must’ve used to slice out Dennis’s tongue.

IT ROSE UP ON OUR LEFT, JUST TWO MILES FROM THE STATION-AS IF GOD said, you acknowledge me, I’ll acknowledge you.

VA Hospital 138.

Just like that.

It looked ancient, more like an armory-all stone and turrets. But it was a hospital with doctors and nurses and medicine and Dennis was bleeding to death.

On the way through the gate, I noticed the barred windows on the top floor.

I drove the car up the front door and pulled Dennis out of the car and half carried him in. Which is when the admitting nurse took one look at him and said:

“Mr. Flaherty, where the hell have you been?”

Okay.

We’d found our hospital.

“ALL RIGHT,” THE SURGEON, A BRISTLE-HAIRED MAJOR DECOLA, SAID, after they’d finally stopped the bleeding-of all the appendages in the human body, it’s the tongue that bleeds the most. “What the hell happened to him?”

“Someone attacked him,” I said.

We were sitting in the lounge: tables, bridge chairs, two mostly empty snack machines.

“No shit, Sherlock,” DeCola said. “Who?”

“I don’t know. He was in a gas-station bathroom about ten miles down the road, and someone went in there and got him.”

I left out the part about the gas-station owner being dead.

Why?

Because he’d been shot with my gun.

They would find a.38 bullet in his head.

I knew it.

Not that the murder would remain a secret much longer-odds were that someone had already entered the station for a pack of smokes and found a body in rigor mortis instead.

I would tell the police-I silently practiced this-that I’d been sleeping in the back. That I’d heard Dennis cry out. That I’d found him with his tongue cut out. That’s all.

I got my chance a half hour later. Two detectives and a patrolman came and found me in the lounge.

Major DeCola had called them, they explained.

They knew all about the dead Indian.

The patrolman was half the squad car that answered the call from a hysterical and nearly incoherent woman motorist who’d gone to the station for a fill-up and ended up running down the road in one high heel.

I related my edited version of events.

“You were sleeping in your car?” Detective Wolfe said. He had a certain tone to his voice. Maybe because people who slept in cars were usually the kind of people who committed crimes, as opposed to being victimized by them.

“That’s right,” I said.

When I told him I was a journalist, he looked even more perplexed.

“What were you doing with Mr. Flaherty?” he asked. He had the kind of clean-cut all-American looks you saw on TV shows about the military-JAG, maybe. “Flaherty was a patient in the psych ward here, correct? He was MIA.”

“Yeah. I was bringing him back.”

“Why’s that?”

“Why?”

“Why you, Mr. Valle? What’s your relation to him?”

“I was interviewing him about a story.”

“Really? What kind of story?”

“About war veterans,” I said. “About the tough adjustment they face back home and the raw deal a lot of them have been getting.” I’m not sure why I said that instead of something else. Maybe because that’s the story Wren had done once upon a time. The story I now felt had led him straight to an even bigger one. I was connecting the dots. Or maybe because the plumber who’d cut out Dennis’s tongue had official access to my credit card receipts, and these were three more officials.

“Okay. And both of you were sleeping in your car?”

“That’s right. Dennis didn’t remember what hospital he’d been in. We were working our way south, checking them all.”

“He can’t remember?”

“He goes in and out, pretty much,” I said.

“Uh-huh.” Detective Wolfe glanced at his partner, who was trying to get the lone remaining bag of chips out of a snack machine, smacking the side of it with his hand as if it were an unresponsive suspect.

“So you say you heard Mr. Flaherty cry out,” Wolfe turned back, “and you ran to the bathroom and found him like that?”

“That’s right. Then I drove here.”

“You never went into the store?”

“No.”

“You never heard a gunshot?”

“No,” I said. “But who knows, maybe that’s what woke me up.”

“Who knows? You know.”

“I don’t remember hearing anything; I just woke up.”

“And you didn’t see anyone-exiting the bathroom, out in front, anywhere?”

“No. I was sound asleep.”

“And you never went into the store?”

“No.” He’d asked me that already.

“There were two bags of-what were they, John?” he asked his partner.

“Doritos,” John said, in a tone of voice intimating that he could use some right now. The snack machine had stubbornly refused to yield its bag.