She felt his presence before she actually saw him, in the same way one encounters a faceless presence in a dream, a protean figure without origins, from an unknown place, who can walk through walls and locked doors, and in this instance place himself in the cloth-covered chair by the closet, on the far side of the bed, the only telephone in the room two feet from his hand.

He had made himself comfortable, one leg crossed on his knee, his pin-striped suit in need of pressing, his white shirt starched, his shoes buffed, his knit necktie not quite knotted, his shave done without a mirror. Like the dream figure, he was a study in contradiction, his shabby elegance not quite real, his rectangularity that of a grandiose poseur sitting in a soup kitchen.

He kept his eyes on hers and did not lower them to her body, but she could see the flicker of hunger around his mouth, the hollows in his cheeks, his suppressed need to lick his tongue across his bottom lip.

“You,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I hoped I would never see you again.”

“Worse men than I are looking for you, missy.”

“Don’t you talk down to me.”

“You don’t wonder how I got in?”

“I don’t care how you got in. You’re here. Now you need to leave.”

“But that’s not likely, is it?”

“By your foot.”

“What?”

“What’s that by your foot?”

He looked down at the carpet. “This?”

“Yes.”

“A twenty-two derringer. But it’s not for you. If I were a different sort of fellow, it might be. But it’s not.” He cupped his hand to lift his leg gingerly off his knee and set it down. “You did me up proper on the highway.”

“I stopped to help you because I thought you had a flat. You repaid the kindness by trying to abduct me.”

“I don’t ‘abduct’ people, miss. Or Ms.”

“Excuse me. You kill them.”

“I have. When they came after me. When they tried to kill me first. When they were part of a higher plan that I didn’t have control over. Sit down. Do you want your bathrobe?”

“I don’t have one.”

“Sit down anyway.”

She felt as if a hot coal had been placed on her scalp. Moisture was leaking out of the towel she had wrapped on her head. Her face stung, and her eyes burned. She could feel drops of sweat networking down her thighs like lines of ants. His eyes dropped to her loins, then he looked away quickly and pretended to be distracted by the noise the air conditioner made. She sat down at the small table against the wall, her knees close together, her arms folded across her chest. “Where’s Pete?” she asked.

“He was rescued by a friend of mine.”

“Rescued?” She paused and said the word a second time. “Rescued?” She could taste the acidity in her saliva when she spoke.

“Do you want me to leave without resolving our problem? Do you want to leave Pete’s situation undecided? He’s out there somewhere on a dark road in the hands of a man who believes he’s a descendant of Robert E. Lee.”

“Who are you a descendant of? Who the fuck are you?”

The fingers of Preacher’s right hand twitched slightly. “People don’t speak to me that way.”

“You think a mass killer deserves respect?”

“You don’t know me. Maybe I have qualities you’re not aware of.”

“Did you ever fight for your country?”

“You might say in my own way I have. But I don’t make claims for myself.”

“Pete was burned in his tank. But the real damage to him happened when he came back home and met you and the other criminals you work with.”

“Your friend is a fool or he wouldn’t be in this trouble. I don’t appreciate the coarseness of your remarks to me.”

Again she could feel a pool of heat building inside her head, as though the sun were burning through her skull, cooking her blood, pushing her out on the edges of a place she had never been. Her towel was starting to slip loose, and she gathered it more tightly around her, pressing its dampness against her skin with her arms.

“I’d like for you to go away with me. I’d like to make up for any harm I did to you. Don’t speak, just listen,” he said. “I have money. I’m fairly well educated for a man without much formal schooling. I have manners, and I know how to care for a fine woman. I have a rented house on a mountaintop outside Guadalajara. You could have anything you want there. There would be no demands on you, sexual or otherwise.”

She thought she heard a train in the distance, the massive weight and power of the locomotive grinding dully on the track, the vibrations spreading through the hardpan like the steady tremors given off by an abscessed wisdom tooth.

“Give Pete back to me. Don’t hurt him,” she said.

“What will you give me in turn?”

“Take my life.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“I put two bullets in you.”

“You don’t know me very well.”

“You know why you’re here. Go ahead and do it. I won’t resist you. Just leave Pete alone.” Her eyes seemed to go in and out of focus, the room shimmering, a dark liquid swelling up from her stomach into her throat.

“You offend me.”

“Your thoughts are an offense, and you don’t hide them well.”

“What thoughts? What are you talking about?” The skin under his left eye wrinkled, like putty drying up.

“The thoughts you don’t want to admit are yours. The secret desires you mask with your cruelty. You make me think of diseased tissue with insects crawling on it. Your glands are filled with rut, but you pretend to be a gentleman wishing to care for and protect a woman. It’s embarrassing to look at the starvation in your face.”

“Starvation? For a woman who insults me? Who thinks she can tongue-lash me after I saved her from a man like Hugo Cistranos? That’s right, Hugo plans to kill you and your boyfriend. You want me to hit the speed dial on my cell phone? I can introduce your friend to an experience neither of you can imagine.”

“I need to get dressed. I don’t want you to watch me.”

“Dressed to go where?”

“Out. Away from you.”

“You think you’re controlling the events that are about to happen around you? Are you that naive?”

“My clothes are in the dresser. I’m going to take them into the bathroom and dress. Don’t come in there. Don’t look at me while I’m removing my clothes from the drawer, either. After I’m dressed, I’ll be going somewhere. I’m not sure where. But it won’t be with you. Maybe I’ll end here, in this room, in this dirty room, in this godforsaken place on the edge of hell. But you won’t be a part of it, you piece of shit.”

His facial expression seemed divided in half, as though his motor controls were shutting down and the muscles on one side of his face were collapsing. His right hand trembled. “You have no right to say these things.”

“Kill me or get out. I can’t stand being around you.”

He stooped over and picked up the blue-black white-handled derringer from the carpet. He was breathing raggedly through his nose, his eyes small and hot under his brow. He approached her slowly, his white shirt catching the pink glow of the neon outside the window, giving his face a rosy hue it didn’t possess on its own. He stood in front of her, his stomach flat behind his shirt and his tightly notched belt, an odor of dried perspiration wafting from his suit. “Say that last part again.”

“I hate being in the presence of a man like you. You’re what every woman dreads. Your physical touch causes nausea.”

He lifted the barrel of the derringer to her mouth. Through the wall, she could hear the electronic laughter from the neighbor’s television set. She could hear the locomotive pulling a mile-long string of gondolas and boxcars between the hills, the reverberations shaking the foundation of the motel. She could hear Preacher’s dry exhalations just above her forehead. He put his left hand under her chin and lifted her line of vision to his. When she tried to turn away, he pinched her jaws and jerked her head straight. “Look into my eyes.”