“Say again?”

“That must be the convenience store yonder,” he said.

They parked and introduced themselves to the assistant manager. He had the manic look and behavioral manner of someone who might have spent his life inside a windstorm. His description of Bobby Lee Motree was not helpful. “You tend to forget what people look like when they’re waving a pistol in your face,” he said.

“You don’t happen to have the surveillance tape, do you?” Hackberry said.

“Them FBI people took it.”

“Have you ever seen Pete Flores?”

“Who?”

“The kid who left the beer on your counter and took off. The one with the long scar on his face.”

“No, sir. I can tell you one thing about him, though. That boy can flat haul ass.”

“How’s that?”

“After the weirdo with the gun drove off, I went out back looking for the kid with the scar. I saw him there on the other side of the road in the moonlight, his shirttail flying, heading due north. He went over the top of a rail fence like he had wings on.”

“Did you get the weirdo’s tag number?” Hackberry asked.

“There was mud smeared on it.” The assistant manager lifted up a baseball bat and dropped it on top of the counter. “The next time I see that guy, I’m gonna park his head over Yellow House Peak. Them FBI people are gonna be hauling off a man with no head.”

Hackberry and Pam got back in the cruiser, the air conditioner running, the sun white and straight overhead. “Where to?” Pam asked.

“Danny Boy Lorca said Pete told him he’d met a guy at an A.A. meeting who tried to kill him,” Hackberry said. “How many A.A. meetings are held on a given night in a rural area like this?”

“Not many. Maybe one or two,” she said.

“You ever attend one?”

“My mother did.”

“Let’s go back to that last town.”

She pulled out on the road, blowing gravel off the back tires. “I’ve never seen you drink,” she said.

“What about it?”

“I thought maybe you went to A.A. meetings at one time or another.”

“No, I just don’t drink anymore. When people ask about it, that’s what I tell them. ‘I used to drink, but I don’t anymore.’”

She looked across the seat at him, her eyes unreadable behind her shades. “Why’d you quit?”

There was a taste like pennies in his saliva. He rolled down the window and spat. He wiped his mouth and stared at the countryside sweeping by, the grass on the hillsides brown and bending in the wind, a cattle truck parked by a turnout where a historical marker stood, the cattle bawling in the heat. “I quit because I didn’t want to be like other members of my family.”

“Alcoholism runs in your family?”

“No, killing people does,” he said. “They killed Indians, Mexicans, gunmen, Kaiser Bill’s heinies-anyone they could get in their sights, they blew the hell out of them.”

She concentrated on the road and was silent a long time.

At the intersection of the county and state highways, Hackberry used a pay phone to call the regional hotline of Alcoholics Anonymous. The woman who answered said that only one meeting was available in the area on the night Hackberry asked about. It was held in a white frame church house just north of the intersection where Hackberry was calling from.

“There’re some early-bird meetings. I also have a schedule for Terlingua and Marathon, if you don’t mind driving a piece,” she said.

“No, I think the one at the church is the one I’m interested in. That’s the only one here’bouts on Tuesday nights, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Who can I talk to there?”

“Anybody at the meeting.”

“No, I mean right now.”

“You think you’re going to drink?”

“I’m an officer of the law, and I’m investigating a multiple homicide…Hello?”

“I have to think about what you just told me.” There was a short pause. “I finished thinking about it. Thanks for calling the A.A. hotline. Goodbye.” The line went dead.

Hackberry and Pam drove through town and found the church on the east side of the state highway. A rail of a man was hammering shingles on the roof, his denim shirt buttoned at the throat and neck against the heat, his armpits dark with sweat, his knees spread like a clamp on the roof’s spine. Pam and Hackberry got out of the cruiser and looked up at him, trying to shield their eyes from the glare.

“You the pastor?” Hackberry called up.

“I was when I got up this morning.”

“I’m looking for a young man named Pete Flores. Maybe he attended an A.A. meeting here.”

“I wouldn’t know,” the man said.

“Why not?” Hackberry said.

“They don’t use last names.”

“I’ve got a picture of him. Mind if I come up?”

“Doubt if it’ll do any good.”

“Why not?”

“I let them use the building, but I don’t go to their meetings, so I’m not real sure who attends them.”

“Give me the picture, Hack. I’ll take it up,” Pam said.

“I’m fine,” Hackberry said. He mounted the ladder and climbed steadily up the rungs, his neutral expression held carefully in place as a bright red fire blossomed in the small of his back. He worked the photo Ethan Riser had given him out of his pocket and handed it to the pastor. The pastor studied it, his uncut hair stuck like wet black points on the back of his neck.

“No, sir, I never saw this fellow at my church. What’d he do?” said the pastor.

“He’s a witness to a crime and may be in danger.”

The pastor looked at the photo again, then handed it back to Hackberry without comment.

“You said you never saw him at your church.”

“No, sir, I haven’t.”

“But maybe you saw him somewhere else.”

The pastor took the photo back, his face starting to show the strain of squatting on the roof’s slant. “Maybe I saw a kid in a filling station or up at the café. He wasn’t in uniform, though. He had a scar on his face. It looked like a long drop of pink wax running down his skin. That’s why I remember him. But the soldier in this picture don’t have a scar.”

“Think hard, Reverend. Where’d you see him?”

“I just don’t recall. I’m sorry.”

“You ever hear of a woman here’bouts who likes to sing country spirituals in nightclubs or beer joints?”

“No, sir. But you must do mighty interesting work. Let me know if you ever want to trade jobs.”

BOBBY LEE’S FRUSTRATION with events and with Liam’s weather-vane personality was starting to reach critical mass. It was Liam’s truck that had broken down on the state highway, forcing them to call for a tow to a shithole with one restaurant and one mechanic’s shop. It was Liam who had left vinyl garbage bags spread all over the bottom of his camper shell, causing the mechanic to ask if they were trying to get a jump on deer season. It was Liam who had droned on and on about how Bobby Lee had screwed up at the convenience store, his eyes as self-righteous and mindless as a moron’s, his tombstone teeth too large for his mouth.

They were in a booth at the back of the restaurant, Liam’s gym bag by his foot, a change of clothes and a shaving kit and the cut-down shotgun zipped inside. They were waiting for the mechanic’s brother-in-law to drive them forty-five miles to the motel where Bobby Lee’s SUV was parked under the porte cochere.

“If you hadn’t pulled your piece on a nerd in a convenience store, we wouldn’t be having this problem,” Liam said. “We could be using your vehicle instead of mine. I told you I had transmission trouble last week. You can’t get information out of a nerd without sticking a gun up his nose?”

“I didn’t pull my piece. You got that? It fell out of my belt. But I didn’t pull it deliberately, Liam. How about giving it a rest?”

The waitress brought their food and poured more water in their glasses. They stopped speaking while she tended to the table. She set a basket with packaged crackers between them, then retrieved salt and pepper shakers from another table and set them by the basket. Bobby Lee and Liam waited. She loomed over them, her big shoulders and wide hips and industrial-strength perfume somehow shrinking the space around them.