“No.”

“You’re afraid?”

“No. Yes.”

“Of what?”

“Of what I’ll see there. You’re evil. I think you carry the abyss inside you.”

“That’s a lie.”

“In your sleep, you hear a howling wind, don’t you? It’s like the sound the wind makes at night on the ocean. Except the wind is inside you. I read a poem once by William Blake. It was about the worm that flies at night in the howling storm. I think he was writing about you.”

He released her, almost flinging her face from his hand. “I couldn’t care less about your literary experience. It’s you who’s the agent of the devil. It’s inherent in your gender. From Eden to the present.”

Her head was lowered, her arms still folded across her bosom, her back starting to tremble. He reached in his pocket with his left hand. She felt something touch her cheek. “Take it,” he said.

She showed no response other than to wrap herself more tightly in her own skin, and curl her shoulders and spine into a tighter ball, and keep her eyes fixed on the tops of her folded arms.

He pushed an object that was both sharp and yielding against her cheek, jabbing the jawbone, trying to force her head up. “I said take it.”

“No.”

“There’s six hundred dollars in the clip. Cross into Chihuahua. But don’t stop till you get to Durango. Hugo Cistranos’s people are everywhere. South of Durango, you’ll be safe.” He held the money clip with two fingers in front of her. “Go ahead. No strings.”

She spat on the money clip and on the bills and on his fingers. Then she began to weep. In the silence that followed, the pink glow of his shirt and the odor of his perspiration and the proximity of his loins to her face seemed to crush the air out of her lungs, as though the only reality in the world were the figure of Preacher Jack Collins hovering inches from her skin. She had never realized that silence could be so loud. She believed its intensity was like the creaking sounds a drowning person hears as he sinks to the bottom of a deep lake.

He traced the double muzzles of the derringer across her temple and hairline and along her cheek. She closed her eyes, and for a moment she thought she heard the electronic laughter from the television set subsumed by a train engine blowing through a tunnel, its whistle screaming off the walls, a lighted dining car filled with revelers disappearing into the darkness.

When she opened her eyes, she saw a cell phone in his hand, saw his thumb touch a single button, saw the phone go out of her line of vision toward his ear. “Cut him loose,” he said.

Then the room was quiet again, and she felt the hot wind of the desert puffing through the door and saw an eighteen-wheeler driving by on the state highway, its trailer outlined with strings of festive lights, the stars winking above the hills.

EVEN BEFORE THE sun had broken the edge of the horizon, Hackberry Holland knew the temperature would reach a hundred degrees by noon. The influence of the rainstorm and the promise it had offered had proved illusory. The heat had lain in abeyance through the night, collecting in stone and warm concrete and sandy river bottoms that boiled with grasshoppers; at dawn it had come alive again, rising with the sun inside a warm blanket of humidity that shimmered on the fields and hills and made the eyes water when you stared too long at the horizon.

At seven-thirty A.M. Hackberry raised the flag on the pole in front of his office, then went inside and tried again to reach Ethan Riser. He did not know what had happened to Pete Flores since Pete had called from a phone booth and told Hackberry he remembered one letter and two numbers from Jack Collins’s car tag, or at least the tag of the tan Honda that Flores had showered rocks on. Hackberry had given the Texas DMV the single letter and two digits and asked that they run every combination possible through the computer until they found a match with a Honda. He had also called Riser and told him of the call from Flores.

The DMV had come back with 173 possibles. Riser not only did not get back to him; he had stopped returning Hackberry’s calls altogether. Which raised another question: Was Riser like too many of his colleagues, cooperative and helpful as long as the locals were useful, then down the road and gone after he got what he needed?

Or maybe Riser had been told by his superiors to stay away from Hackberry and worry less about local problems and concentrate on putting Josef Sholokoff out of business.

On occasion, federal agencies practiced a form of triage that went beyond the pragmatic into a marginal area that was one step short of ruthless. Psychopaths were sprung from custody without their victims or the prosecution’s witnesses being notified. People who had trusted the system with their lives discovered they had been used and discarded as casually as someone flicking away a cigarette butt. Most of these people usually had the power and social importance of fish chum.

By ten A.M. Hackberry had left two messages with Riser. He opened his desk drawer and removed a thick brown envelope that contained the eight-by-ten crime-scene photos taken behind the church at Chapala Crossing. Besides their morbid subject matter, the photos contained a second kind of peculiarity: None of the uniformed deputies, the paramedics, the federal personnel, or the forensic team from Austin wore any expression. In photo after photo, their faces were empty of emotion, their mouths down-hooked at the corners, as though they were playing roles in a film that was not supposed to make use of sound or any display of feeling. The only photography he could compare it with was the black-and-white news footage taken during the mass burials at the death camps liberated by American forces in early 1945.

He returned the photos to the drawer.

What had happened to Pete Flores and Vikki Gaddis? What was the next move Preacher Jack Collins would make? What kind of cage could contain the evil that had perpetrated the slaughter at Chapala Crossing?

AT TWO-THIRTY THAT afternoon Danny Boy Lorca was driving his converted army-surplus flatbed truck up the two-lane from the Mexican border, the wind as hot as a blowtorch through the window, the unmuffled roar of the engine shaking the cab, his fuel gauge ticking on empty. He saw the hitchhikers in the distance, standing on the roadside between two low hills whose sides had been scorched by a wildfire. There was no other traffic on the road. The outlines of the two hitchhikers were warping in the heat, the glaze on the road like a pool of tar. As he drew closer, he realized one of the hitchhikers was a woman. A guitar case rested by her foot. Her denim shirt was pasted to her skin with perspiration. The man next to her wore a coned-up straw hat and a shirt he had sawed off at the armpits. The top of one arm was wrinkled with scar tissue that looked like the material in an overheated lampshade.

Danny Boy pulled to the side of the road, glancing warily in the rearview mirror. “Y’all came back,” he said through the passenger window.

“Will you give us a ride?” the woman asked.

Danny Boy never answered questions whose answer seemed obvious, in the same way he did not say hello or goodbye to people when their actions or presence were obvious.

Pete Flores swung a duffel bag onto the truck bed and placed Vikki’s guitar case between it and the cab. He opened the passenger door, blowing on his hand after he did, waiting for Vikki to get inside. “Wow,” he said, looking at his hand. “How long has your truck been in the sun?”

“It’s a hunnerd and seven,” Danny Boy said.

“Thank you for stopping,” Vikki said.

Pete climbed inside and shut the door. He started to offer his hand, but Danny Boy was concentrating on the wide-angle mirror.

“You know the cops are looking for you? Federal agents and state people and Sheriff Holland, too. A federal agent got killed.”