“You’re not giving me anything. You owe me over a hundred thou. I owe that to other people. If you don’t pay the vig, the vig falls on me. I don’t pay other people’s vig, Nick.”

“Was your driver at my club last night?”

“How would I know?”

“A guy answering his description got thrown out. He was shooting off his mouth with my manager. He claimed he was going to be working there. You want the sit-down or not? You called this guy Collins a religious nut. If I get to him first, I’ll tell him that.”

There was a long pause. “Maybe your wife gave you a blow job this morning and convinced you you’re not a pitiful putz. The truth is otherwise, Nick. You’re still a pitiful putz. But I’ll call Preacher. And I’ll also have those transfers of title rewritten. Forget twenty-five percent. The new partnership will be fifty-fifty. Give me some shit and it will go to sixty-forty. Guess who will get the forty.”

Hugo hung up.

“Got everything worked out?” the driver of the Chrysler said through the window.

PETE AND VIKKI got exactly sixteen miles up a dark highway when the car Pete’s cousin had sold him on credit dropped the crankshaft on the asphalt, sparks grinding under the frame as the car slid sideways into soil that exploded around them like soft chalk.

When Pete called, the cousin told him the car came with no guarantees and the cousin’s car lot did not have a complaint window for people with buyer’s remorse. He also indicated he and his wife were leaving with the kids early in the morning for a week of rest and relaxation in Orlando.

Vikki and Pete removed two suitcases and Vikki’s guitar and a bag of groceries from the car and stood by the roadside, thumbs out. A tractor-trailer rimmed with lights roared past them, then a mobile home and a prison bus and a gas-guzzler packed with Mexican drunks, the top half of the car cut off with an acetylene torch. The next vehicle was an ambulance, followed by a sheriff’s cruiser, both of them with sirens on.

Two minutes later, a second cruiser appeared far down the road, its flasher rippling, its siren off. It came steadily out of the south, a bank of low mountains behind it, the stars vaporous and hot against a blue-black sky. The cruiser seemed to slow, perhaps to forty or forty-five miles per hour, gliding past them, the driver holding a microphone to his mouth, his face turned fully on them.

“He’s calling us in,” Pete said.

“Maybe he’s sending a wrecker,” Vikki said.

“No, he’s bad news.” Pete widened his eyes and wiped at his mouth. “I told you, he’s stopping.”

The cruiser pulled to the right shoulder and remained stationary, its front wheels cut back toward the center stripe, the interior light on.

“What’s he doing?” Vikki said.

“He’s probably got a description of us on his clipboard. Yep, here he comes.”

They stared numbly into the cruiser’s approaching headlights, their eyes watering, their hearts beating. The air seemed clotted with dust and bugs and gnats, the roadway still warm from the sunset, smelling of oil and rubber. Then, for no apparent reason, the cruiser made a U-turn and headed north again, its weight sinking on the back springs.

“He’ll be back. We have to get off the highway,” Pete said.

They crossed to the other side of the asphalt and began walking, glancing back over their shoulders, their abandoned car with all their household possessions dropping behind them into the darkness. A half hour later, a black man wearing strap overalls with no shirt stopped and said he was headed to his home, seventy miles southwest. “That’s pert’ exactly where we’re going,” Pete said.

They paid a week’s advance rent, twenty dollars per day, at a motel on a stretch of side road that resembled a Hollywood re-creation of Highway 66 during the 1950s: a pink plaster-of-Paris archway over the road, painted with roses; a diner shaped like an Airstream trailer with a tin facsimile of a rocket on top; a circular building made to look like a bulging cheeseburger with service windows; a drive-in movie theater and a miniature golf course blown with trash and tumbleweed, the empty marquee patterned with birdshot; a red-green-and-purple neon war bonnet high up on the log facade of a beer joint and steak house; three Cadillac car bodies buried seemingly nose-first in the earth, their fins slicing the wind.

“This is a pretty neat place, if you ask me,” Pete said, sitting on the side of the bed, looking through the side window at the landscape. He was barefoot and shirtless, and in the soft light of morning, the skin along his shoulder and one side of his back had the texture of lampshade material that has been wrinkled by intense heat.

“Pete, what are we going to do? We don’t have a car, we’re almost broke, and cops are probably looking for us all over Texas,” Vikki said.

“We’ve done all right so far, haven’t we?” Pete began talking about his friend Billy Bob Holland, a former Texas Ranger who had a law practice in western Montana. “Billy Bob will he’p us out. When I was little, my mother used to bring home men, usually late at night. Most of them were pretty worthless. This one guy was more worthless than all the rest put together and then some. One night he smacked both me and my mom around. When Billy Bob found out about it, he rode his horse into the beer joint and threw a rope on the guy and drug him out the front door into the parking lot. Then he kicked him into next week.”

“Your lawyer friend can’t help a fugitive. All he can do is surrender you.”

“Billy Bob wouldn’t do that.”

“We have to get your disability check.”

“That’s kind of a problem, isn’t it?” Pete stood up and propped one arm against the wall, gazing out the window, his upper torso shaped like a V. “That check should have come yesterday. It’s just sitting there in the box. The government always gets it there on the same date.”

“I can ask Junior to get it and send it to us,” she said.

“Junior doesn’t quite look upon me as a member of his fan club.”

Vikki was sitting at the small desk by the television set. She stared emptily at the decrepit state of their room-the water-stained wallpaper, the air-conditioning unit that rattled in the window frame, the bedspread that she feared to touch, the shower stall blooming with mold. “There’s another way,” she said.

“To turn ourselves in?”

“We haven’t done anything wrong.”

“I tried it already. That one won’t flush,” he said.

“You tried to turn us in?”

“I called a government eight hundred number. They switched me around to a bunch of different offices and finally to a guy with Immigration and Customs. He said his name was Clawson.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It didn’t go too well. He said he wanted to meet me, like somehow all this was between him and me and we were buds or something. He had a voice like a robot. You know what’s going on when people talk like robots? They don’t want you to know what they’re thinking.”

“What’d you tell him, Pete?”

“That I was by the church when the shooting started. I told him the guy who was paying me three hundred dollars to drive the truck was named Hugo. I told him I feel like a damn coward for running away while all those women were being killed. He said I needed to come in and make a statement and I’d be protected. Then he said, ‘Is Ms. Gaddis with you? We can he’p her, too.’

“I said, ‘She’s not a part of this.’ He says, ‘We know about the characters at the truck stop, Pete. We think they either killed her or she put a hole in one of them. Maybe she’s dead and lying unburied someplace. You need to do the right thing, soldier.’”

Pete sat back down on the bed and began drawing his shirt up one arm, the network of muscles in his back tightening like whipcord.

“What’d you say?”

“I told him to kiss my ass. When people try to make you feel guilty, it’s because they want to install dials on you. It also means they’re gonna sell you down the river the first chance they get.”