He shifted into first and drove into the field, headed for the dirt road and the log bridge that would take him across the river. I walked into the yard and fired until the cylinder was empty, the recoil jerking my wrists upward with each shot, my ears almost deaf now. The entry holes on the truck cab looked like dented silver coins embedded in the metal.

I watched the truck grow smaller in the distance and I thought Wyatt Dixon had eluded us again. Then the truck swayed out of the track and cruised through a long swath of Indian paintbrush and came to a stop six inches from the trunk of an aspen tree.

I went back into the house and removed a box of hollow-point.45 rounds from the kitchen table and shucked out the spent shells from L.Q.'s cylinder and began reloading. Temple and Doc were out in the backyard, staring at the truck in the distance. Doc worked the bolt on his Springfield rifle and ejected a spent cartridge in the dirt and locked down the bolt again. The keys to his pickup were on the table. I picked them up and dropped them into the drawer I had taken the box of.45 rounds from and closed the drawer, just as Doc entered the room.

"Where you going?" Temple said.

"I'll check on our man. Y'all call the sheriff's office," I said.

"He's alive in there, Billy Bob. The truck stopped because Doc hit the engine," Temple said.

"Really?" I said, and went out the front door before they could say anything else and drove into the field.

Through the rain I could see Wyatt Dixon moving around inside the cab of his truck. The wind had grown cold and torn pieces of cloud hung in the hills, like smoke rising out of the trees. In the rearview mirror I saw Doc and Temple and Lucas standing in the yard, like three figures trapped inside an ink wash.

I cut my engine just as Wyatt Dixon opened the passenger door on his truck and half fell into the weeds. He raised himself to one knee and reached for the.44 Magnum that now lay on the floorboards. I grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him away from the cab, and was surprised at the level of his physical weakness. He tried to get up but fell again, then pushed himself up against the rear tire, his face bloodless, his eyes blinking against the rain.

"Are you hit?" I asked.

He shook his head and breathed through his mouth, as though he were trying to oxygenate his blood. His eyes looked up at the revolver in my hand, then at my face.

"I told you, you'd know when it was my ring," he said. His teeth showed at the edge of his mouth when he smiled.

"I got a problem, Wyatt. I'm afraid you'll be on the street again one day."

"Folks love a rodeo clown. They don't got no love for lawyers."

"Why'd you bury Temple?"

"It made me feel good."

I squatted down next to him, L.Q.'s revolver propped across my thigh.

"You a praying man?" I asked.

"My daddy was. I never took to it."

"Your clock's run out, partner."

He nodded and looked out into the rain. "Give me my hat."

"Pardon me?"

"My hat. It fell on the floor. I want my damn hat."

I reached inside the open passenger door and picked up a white Stetson with a gray feather in the band and knocked the dust off it against my thigh and handed it to him. He pulled it down on his head and stared out under the brim into the field of flowers. His shirt was buttoned at the throat, and the flesh under his chin looked old, wrinkled, peppered with white whiskers.

I knelt on one knee, three feet from him, and pointed L.Q.'s.45 at his jawbone.

"My notion is nobody knows what goes on inside a man like you. But all your life you look for a bullet. If need be, you make the state your executioner," I said.

He turned his head slowly toward me, the pain rippling upward into his face.

"I ain't afraid of no man. Do it and be done. I'll live in your dreams, motherfucker," he said.

I removed a hollow-point round from L.Q.'s revolver and dropped it into his lap.

"That's why you're going into a cage, Wyatt, where somebody can study you, the way they would a gerbil. We plan to have a good life. You won't be part of it, either."

I stood up and felt the bones pop in my knees. I steadied myself against the side of the truck, kicking the stiffness loose from one leg, like a man who knows he's a little older, a little more worn around the edges, a little more prone to let the season have its way.

I got into my truck and drove through the rain toward Lucas and Temple and Doc and Maisey, who were walking toward me under a huge red umbrella, indifferent to the lightning that split the sky.

Epilogue

Wyatt Dixon's.44 Magnum proved to be the weapon that had killed the biker and rapist Tommy Lee Stoltz. The death of the third rapist, the one who was found drowned in his chest waders, was written off as accidental. But I suspect Carl Hinkel ordered the attack against Maisey as a way of hurting her father, then, after Lamar Ellison was killed, had the other two men murdered in order to hide his own culpability.

But we'll never know the entire truth of what happened. Wyatt Dixon went to trial and gave up no one, even though he was facing a capital sentence. Oddly, the jury seemed to like him. At least two female jurors couldn't keep their eyes off him. When Dixon was sentenced to sixty years in Deer Lodge, he drew himself to attention and saluted the judge and called him a great American.

Terry Witherspoon confessed to burying Temple alive, not out of remorse but to incriminate Dixon and pile as much time on him as he could. The irony is that while Witherspoon was hospitalized in a body cast, his bloodwork came back HIV positive. Dixon may leave prison one day but Witherspoon will not.

I received a letter from Xavier Girard, written from the same penitentiary where Dixon and Witherspoon were being held. It was short and did not contain either the litany of grief or the self-pronounced redemption that is characteristic of most people who have made a holocaust of their lives. It read:

Dear Mr. Holland,

I wanted to apologize for making a nuisance of myself. You seemed like a nice gentleman and I'm sure you had more to do than put up with a lot of grandiose and silly behavior from an expatriate coonass.

I've given up fiction for a while and have gone back to writing poetry. I think some of my new poems are pretty good. I can't say I've learned very much in here, unless an old truth that I knew as a young man and forgot as I reached my middle years. A writer's art is only as good as his devotion to it. I forgot that I didn't do anything to earn my talent. I burned my own kite but I hurt a lot of other people as well.

Come see me anytime in the next few decades. I'll be here.

Please consider this letter an apology to Ms. Carrol as well.

Best to you both, Xavier Girard

After the charges against Doc were dropped, Temple and Lucas and I drove back to Texas through the northern tip of New Mexico and stopped for the night at Clayton, a short distance from the Texas state line. We walked from the motel at the end of what had been a scorching day to a nineteenth-century hotel named the Eklund and had dinner in a dining room paneled with hand-carved mahogany. The hotel was three stories, built of quarried stone, anchored in the hardpan like a fortress against the wind, but the guest rooms had long ago been boarded up and the check-in desk and boxes for mail and metal keys abandoned to dust and cobweb.

On the wall of the small lobby was a framed photograph of the outlaw Black Jack Ketchum being fitted with a noose on a freshly carpentered scaffold. Another photograph showed him after the trapdoor had collapsed under his feet. Ketchum was dressed in a black suit and white shirt and his face showed no expression in the moments before his death, as though he were a witness to a predictable historical event rather than a participant in it.