“See them cows bunching up in the arroyo?” Nix said. “Bet it’ll rain by noon.”

“Got to ask you something, boss. I heard you took away my good time.”

“You shouldn’t have got in Cap’n Rankin’s face.”

“I spent the night on the barrel for something I didn’t do, but I didn’t complain about it. You shouldn’t have taken away my good time.”

“Sounds like you got up with a hard-on this morning.” Nix pulled a cigarette out of a package on the dash and stuck it in his mouth. “What are we gonna do about that?”

“I want my good time back.”

“I bet you do, you little bitch.”

Nix didn’t speak the rest of the way into town. After they picked up fifty bags of crushed white rock for the trim along the walkway and gardens in front of the administration building, Nix drove to a diner and went inside and ate while Jimmy Dale sat in the truck. When Nix came out, he handed Jimmy Dale a paper bag and a cold can of soda and started the truck. “You didn’t think about taking off on me?”

“I just want my good time back,” Jimmy Dale said.

“Come Monday, I think you’ll be going back on the hard road. But that don’t change the relationship we got, you get my drift?”

They drove in silence to Nix’s camp, the land spreading with shadow, the temperature dropping, electricity leaking from the thunderclouds overhead. Jimmy Dale saw a solitary bolt of lightning strike the top of a distant mesa. It seemed to quiver there, as though it had sought out an animal and impaled it to the earth.

“You think we’re doing something illegal here, you working on my property?” Nix said.

“I thought about it.”

“You thought wrong. I’m a founding officer and stockholder in the corporation that owns this prison. That means my living quarters come with the package. Inmate maintenance here is just like inmate maintenance at the compound. If you was thinking about getting an ACLU lawyer-”

“I just want my good time back, boss.”

“You got a bad case of mono-brain,” Nix said.

He parked the truck by the windmill and told Jimmy Dale to get the posthole digger out of the toolshed. Then he went inside to use the bathroom. Just as the first raindrops struck the ground, Jimmy Dale heard the toilet flush. He twisted the posthole digger into the ground, busting through gravel and clay that had baked as hard as ceramic. He spread the wood handles to widen the hole. Then he cleaned the blades of the posthole digger in a bucket of water and started in again. The wind puffed the hackberry tree that shaded Nix’s house. The air was cool and rain-scented, and Jimmy Dale could hear the windmill’s blades ginning behind him. A bolt of lightning exploded on top of the cliff and startled him.

“When people is scared of lightning, it’s usually ’cause they grew up in a strict church,” Nix said. He was standing on the back porch, stripped to the waist, his yellow leather gloves pulled snugly on his hands. He had tucked his trousers inside his half-topped boots, as though he didn’t want to soil his trouser cuffs. He stepped off the porch onto the ground, the wind blowing his hair, his chest taut and dry-looking in the shadowy light, the limbs of the hackberry tree thrashing above his head. “You scared of lightning?”

“Not really. Fact is, I ain’t scared of a whole lot, boss.”

“Lay the posthole digger down.”

Jimmy Dale let it drop to the side, the handles clattering against the hardpan.

“I thought I was gonna go easy on you this time. But there’s something about you that really pisses me off. I just cain’t put my finger on it,” Nix said.

“People cain’t change what they are,” Jimmy Dale replied, unbuttoning his denim shirt with his left hand.

“It makes me want to lose all restraint and flat tear you apart. Can you relate to that?” Nix said.

“All I wanted was my good time back, boss.”

“Take off your britches. Or I can do it for you.”

“I don’t give a shit what you do, boss.”

Nix looked at him quizzically. Jimmy Dale was still facing the cliff, his face turned to the wind when he needed to speak. He slipped his hand down toward his belt buckle or perhaps his side pocket.

Nix stepped closer. He touched Jimmy Dale’s shoulder and slowly turned him around. “Say that again?”

The shank Hidalgo had made for Jimmy Dale had been fashioned from a triangular piece of automotive windshield glass, the blade three inches long, as pointed as a stiletto, as sharp on the edges as a barber’s razor, the butt end inserted in the sanded-down handle of a shoe-polish applicator, all of it wrapped in a scabbard made from newspaper and electrician’s tape.

“Sorry to hurt you like this, kid, but that’s just the way it is,” Nix said.

“You got it all wrong, boss,” Jimmy Dale replied.

He turned with the shank and slashed Nix backhanded across the jaw, opening the flesh to the bone. Then he hit him twice in the chest, each time going deep, aiming for the heart or the lungs. Nix reached out toward him, either trying to keep his balance or to ward off the next blow. But Jimmy Dale got under his arm and drove the blade into Nix’s chest again, going even deeper this time and snapping it off at the hilt, as Hidalgo had instructed him. Nix struck the ground heavily, his mouth puckered, his breath coming in short gasps, as though, somehow, through an act of will, he could control the massive hemorrhage taking place inside his chest.

Jimmy Dale went through the back door of the house and pulled a shirt and pair of work pants out of Nix’s bedroom closet, streaking the interior of the house with Nix’s blood. As he changed into Nix’s clothes, he looked through the back window and saw Nix rise from the ground and then collapse below the level of the window. A sound like kettle drums was thundering in Jimmy Dale’s head.

Moments later, he was roaring down the dirt road in the stake truck, hailstones bouncing off the windshield, his hands trembling on the wheel. He skidded in a cloud of dust onto the state road and headed due west, the front end shaking when he hit ninety, the engine needle on the dash climbing into the red. Nix’s stolen clothes felt like an obscene presence on his skin.

CHAPTER 5

FROM WHERE SHE sat at the bar, Jamie Sue could see out the back window of the saloon onto Swan Lake. The lake was vast and steel-colored in the twilight, ringed with alpine mountains, the white cap of Swan Peak razored against the sky on the south end. Down the shore was a group of guest cottages among birch trees, and when the wind gusted off the water, the riffling leaves of the birches made Jamie Sue think of green lace.

A man and a woman Jamie Sue didn’t like were drinking next to her. They said they were from Malibu and driving to Spokane to catch a flight back to California. The woman’s hair hung to her shoulders and was dyed black, and she had a habit of touching it on the ends, as though it had just been clipped. She had an ascetic face and gray teeth and wore dark clothes and purple lipstick. She seemed to have no awareness of her surroundings or the fact that the subject of her conversation would be considered bizarre and distasteful by normal people.

“After about a year I got tired of working for Heidi,” she said. “Most nights I’d sit and watch while an eye surgeon freebased himself into the fourth dimension. I’d rather make five hundred a night having dinner and intellectual conversation, and maybe messing around later, than fifteen hundred watching a married guy freebase and pretend he’s head of FOX, know what I mean?”

Jamie Sue tried to focus on what the woman was saying, but she was on her third whiskey sour, and her attention kept wandering across the empty dance floor to a face she thought she had seen behind the bead curtain that gave onto the café attached to the saloon.