“What are you guys up to?” Pete asked.

No answer.

He uncapped the bottle and let the cap tinkle down the side of the rocks onto the sand. He felt the foam rise over the lip of the bottle and slide down his fingers and the back of his hand and his wrist. He looked back over his shoulder and could make out the screen of the drive-in movie and, farther down the street, the steak house and beer joint where Vikki had used another last name and taken a job as a waitress, the money under the table. He wiped his mouth with his hand and could taste the salt in his sweat.

At the foot of the table rocks, the polished bronze beer cap seemed to glow hotter and hotter against the grayness of the sand. It was the only piece of litter as far as he could see. He climbed down from the rocks, his beer bottle in one hand, picked up the cap, and thumbed it into his pocket. The armadillos stared up at him, their eyes as intense and unrelenting as black pinheads.

“Are you guys friendlies or Republican Guard? Identify yourself or get shot.”

Still no response.

Pete reached for the bottle of beer on top of the rocks, then approached the burrow. The adult armadillo and both babies scurried back inside.

“I tell you what,” he said, squatting down, a bottle in each hand. “Anybody that can live out here in this heat probably needs a couple of brews a lot worse than I do. These are on me, fellows.”

He poured the first beer down the hole, then popped off the cap on the second one and did the same, the foam running in long fingers down the burrow’s incline. “You guys all right in there?” he asked, twisting his head sideways to see inside the burrow. “I’ll take that as an affirmative. Roger that and keep your steel pots on and your butts down.”

He shook the last drops out of both bottles, stuck the empties in his pockets, and hiked back to town, telling himself that perhaps he had just walked through a door into a new day, maybe even a new life.

At ten A.M. exactly, he went down to the motel office just as the mailman was leaving. “Did you have anything for Gaddis or Flores?” he said.

The mailman grinned awkwardly. “I’m not supposed to say. There was a bunch of mail for the motel this morning. Ask inside.”

Pete opened the door and closed it behind him, an electronic ding going off in back somewhere. The clerk came through a curtained doorway. “How you doing?” he said.

“I’m not sure.”

“Sorry, I didn’t see nothing in there for y’all.”

“It’s got to be here.”

“I looked, believe me.”

“Look again.”

“It’s not there. I wish it was, but it’s not.” The clerk studied Pete’s face. “Your rent is paid up for four more nights. It cain’t be all that bad, can it?”

THAT NIGHT VIKKI took her sunburst Gibson to work with her and played and sang three songs with the band. The next morning there was no mail addressed to her or Pete at the motel office. Pete used the pay phone at the steak house to call Junior Vogel at his home.

“You promised Vikki you were gonna pick up my check and send it to us,” he said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You damn liar, what’d you do with my check? You just left it in the box? Tell me.”

“Don’t call here again,” Junior said, and hung up.

AT TWO A.M. Nick Dolan watched his remaining patrons leave the club. He used to wonder where they went after hours of drinking and viewing half-naked women perform inches away from their grasp. Did their fantasies cause them to rise throbbing and hard in the morning, unsated, vaguely ashamed, perhaps angry at the source of their dependency and desperation, perhaps ready to try an excursion into the dark side?

Was there a connection between what he did and violence against women? A female street person had been raped and beaten by two men six blocks from his club, fifteen minutes after closing time. The culprits were never caught.

But eventually, out of his own ennui with the subject, Nick had stopped thinking about his patrons or worrying about their deeds past or present, in the same way a butcher does not think about the origins and history of the gutted and frozen white shapes hanging from meat hooks in his subzero locker. Nick’s favorite admonition to himself remained intact and unchallenged: Nick Dolan didn’t invent the world.

Nick drank a glass of milk at the bar while his girls and barmaids and bartenders and bouncers and janitors said good night and one by one went outside to their cars and their private lives, which he suspected were little different from anyone else’s, except for the narcotics his girls often relied upon.

He locked the back door, set the alarm, and locked the front door as he went out. He paused in front of the club and surveyed the parking lot, the occasional car passing on the four-lane, the great star-strewn bowl of sky overhead. The wind was balmy blowing through the trees, the clouds moonlit; there was even a promise of rain in the air. The.25 auto he had taken from his desk rested comfortably in his trousers pocket. The only vehicle in the parking lot was his. For some reason the night struck him as more like spring than late summer, a time of new beginnings, a season of tropical showers and farmers’ markets and baseball training camps and a carpet of bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush just over the rise on the highway.

But for Nick, spring was special for another reason: No matter how jaded he had become, spring still reminded him of his youthful innocence and the innocence his children had shared with him.

He thought of the great green willow tree bending over the Comal River behind his property, and the way his children had loved to swim through its leafy tendrils, hanging on to a branch just at the edge of the current, challenging Nick to dive in with them, their faces full of respect and affection for the father who kept them safe from the world.

If only Nick could undo the fate of the Thai women. What did the voice of Yahweh say? “I am the alpha and omega. I am the beginning and the end. I am He who maketh all things new.” But Nick doubted that the nine women and girls whose mouths had been packed with dirt would give him absolution so easily.

He walked across the parking lot to his car, watching the tops of the trees bend in the wind, the moon like silver plate behind a cloud, his thoughts a tangled web he couldn’t sort out. Behind him, he heard an engine roar to life and tires ripping through gravel down to a harder surface. Before he could turn around, Hugo’s SUV was abreast of him, Hugo in the passenger seat, a kid in a top hat behind the wheel.

“Get in, Nick. Eat breakfast with us,” Hugo said, rolling down the window.

A man Nick didn’t know sat in the backseat, a pair of crutches propped next to him.

“No, thanks,” Nick replied.

“You need to hop in with us, you really do,” Hugo said, getting out of the vehicle and opening the back door.

The man who sat in back against the far door was watching Nick in tently now. His hair was greased, the part a neat gray line through the scalp, the way an actor from the 1940s might wear his hair. His head was narrow, his nose long, his mouth small and compressed. A newspaper was folded neatly in his lap; his right hand rested just inside the fold. “I’d appreciate you talking to me,” the man said.

The wind had dropped, and the rustling sounds in the trees had stopped. The air seemed close, humid, like damp wool on the skin. Nick could hear his pulse beating in his ears.

“Mr. Dolan, do not place your hand in your pocket,” the man said.

“You’re the one they call Preacher?” Nick asked.

“Some people do.”

“I don’t owe you any money.”

“Who said you did?”

“Hugo.”

“That’s Hugo, not me. What are you carrying in your pocket, Mr. Dolan?”