The plump man glanced at the driver. The driver shrugged, looking disgusted, and the plump man pushed his door open. "That sounds reasonable," he said. "And the odds are that we won't come across Morton anyway. But we have to try."

Blackburn squeezed past the plump man and sat on the bench seat behind him. The cool air inside the van was wonderful. "I'll be happy to pay for your gas," Blackburn said. "I'm on vacation this week, so I'm getting paid for nothing. And right now I'd rather buy a ride to town than anything else."

"No need," the plump man said, shutting his door and rolling up his window as the van started moving again. "We're going as far as Palestine anyway, and then we'll drive back to Rusk on another path less taken."

"Waste of time," the driver muttered.

The plump man looked back at Blackburn. "I hope you don't mind if we aren't too talkative. We need to keep our eyes peeled."

"I don't mind at all," Blackburn said. It was the truth. Not having to talk would mean that he wouldn't need to elaborate on his story about being a Northerner transplanted to Palestine.

"And if you should happen to see someone wearing a white hospital gown," the plump man said, "be sure to holler."

"Where should I be looking?" Blackburn asked.

The plump man gestured at the forest alongside the road. "In there. Morton likes to play in the woods." He stuck his right hand back at Blackburn. "By the way, I'm Dr. Joe Norris."

Blackburn shook his hand. "Bruce Rayburn," he said. "Just down from Iowa City."

The driver looked at him in the rearview mirror and grimaced.

"How'd you get the shiner, Bruce?" Dr. Norris asked.

Blackburn touched his right cheekbone, where the DPS trooper had hit him with the Python. It was tender. His nose was sore from the trooper's forearm, too.

"I was carrying a chair into my new house and ran into a doorjamb," he said.

Dr. Norris nodded. "That's why I always hire movers." He turned away and peered out at the trees.

The driver whispered "Dumbass Yankee" just loud enough for Blackburn to hear.

The van proceeded west at forty miles per hour. Blackburn wiped his shoes on the floor mat and watched the woods for a glimpse of a man in a white gown. If he saw him, he would keep his mouth shut.

As the van approached a state highway loop on the outskirts of Palestine, Blackburn spotted a shopping center with an H.E.B. supermarket. He asked Dr. Norris to let him off there. He would call his wife at work, he said, and she would pick him up. Norris's driver muttered something about not having been hired as a chauffeur, but he pulled the van into the H.E.B. parking lot.

Blackburn got out, and as the van drove off, he looked up and down the highway loop and saw a sign for a Best Western motel about a mile to the north. That motel would be his next stop, but first things first. He tucked his rolled-up jacket under his arm and went into the supermarket.

He bought bread and cheese, a couple of apples, a Texas highway map, a disposable razor, and a meat-tenderizing mallet. Then he went outside and bought a copy of the Dallas Morning News from a machine. He sat down on a bench beside the machine, made a cheese sandwich, and found Palestine on the map. His zigzagging during the night had taken him back farther to the west than he had realized; Palestine was a hundred and fifty miles straight north of the western edge of Houston. He was no closer to Louisiana than he had been before his escape.

On the other hand, the DPS would be keeping an eye on the Louisiana border, and they wouldn't be looking for him here. Plus, Palestine had a population of sixteen thousand, which was big enough for him not to be noticed as a stranger. It was also big enough for him to find a car. As long as he wasn't spotted by a city cop, sheriff's deputy, or DPS trooper, he could rest here until after dark, then acquire a vehicle and head for Oklahoma. He didn't think the DPS would be expecting him to try for Oklahoma.

He folded the map and then looked at the newspaper while eating his sandwich. His escape had made the front page, but the article was at the bottom right corner, and there was no photograph of him. The article did mention the brown wool suit he was wearing, but nothing else that would identify him. Its lead paragraph claimed that he had escaped during a "gun battle" with police and DPS troopers. Blackburn thought it was stretching the truth to call one shot a "battle."

He finished his sandwich and was about to leave the newspaper on the bench when another article on the front page caught his eye. It said that a Texas prison inmate named Jay Pinkerton was to be executed by lethal injection at Huntsville that night. He would be the third man to be executed in Texas so far in 1986. He had been seventeen years old when he had committed rape and murder, and had now been on Death Row for four years. He had been taken to the execution chamber once before and had received a stay only minutes before the intravenous solution was to have been administered. Now his time had run out again. The article suggested that there would not be another stay.

Blackburn's sandwich lay in his stomach like concrete.

He too had killed at seventeen. He too was accused of rape and murder. If they had convicted him and sent him to Huntsville, would they have made him wait four years before giving him the needle?

The thought was sickening. If you had to kill someone, it was better to do it quickly. If you had a choice. And surely the State of Texas had a choice.

Blackburn felt sorry for Jay Pinkerton. Not that Pinkerton didn't deserve to die; the article made it clear that he did. He had raped and killed a woman, which put him in the same class as Roy-Boy. But Blackburn would not have made even Roy-Boy wait on his death for four years. That would have been sadism on the order of Roy-Boy's own.

He pulled the front page from the newspaper, crumpled it, and tossed it into a garbage can beside the bench. He folded the rest of the paper and laid it on the bench for someone else to read, then took his rolled-up jacket and his plastic grocery bag and walked down the shopping center's sidewalk to a sporting goods store. There he bought black shorts, a white T-shirt with ADIDAS stenciled on the chest in red, an athletic supporter, white socks, and the cheapest pair of running shoes he could find. That still left him with almost a hundred dollars of his attorney's money. His jacket, with the Python, fit inside the sporting-goods-store bag with his new clothes.

He walked to the Best Western and rented a room from the dazed old woman in the office. She didn't even glance at the phony name and auto-license number he wrote on the check-in form. Nor did she seem to notice that he was sweating and carrying two plastic bags instead of luggage. Blackburn was pleased.

His room was on the second floor on the north side of the building. Once inside, he turned the air conditioner on high, stripped, and lay on the bed in the cold breeze. When his skin was dry, he sat up and ate another cheese sandwich and both apples. Then he lay back down for a nap.

He was exhausted, but he had trouble falling asleep. He should have passed over the Dallas Morning News and picked up a comic book instead.

Blackburn awoke to red and blue flashing lights and sat up gasping. He had been dreaming of drowning, and had seen the lights filtered through the water. Now he saw them filtered through the curtains over his motel room window. Except for them, the room was dark.

He slid out of bed and crept on all fours toward the window. The carpet was stiff and grungy. Beneath the window, the air conditioner was still blasting. He gulped a lungful of iced air and shivered.