of a handshake but Turner was just reaching for a kerchief he kept tucked up his left sleeve. He wiped off his forehead, even though he wasn’t sweating.

Jimmy still hadn’t said a word. It was the right thing not to say.

“You had lunch?” Turner said.

He didn’t wait for an answer, just walked past Jimmy toward a black flagship Mercedes S600 that hadn’t been there thirty seconds ago. Another Basque man now stood beside the pickup. Mexican men in jobs like these always looked at the ground when you weren’t talking to them. These men looked at you. One of them retrieved an automatic rifle from the trunk of the Mercedes before Turner got behind the wheel and they left.

They drove for a mile between two fields and then turned right and drove another mile. All the roads were paved. They had them to themselves. There were tumbleweeds and burger wrappers blown against the chain-link fences. They came out onto the access road and then onto the highway, Interstate 10, headed east through the brown and the green, all of it as flat as the top of a stove. They drove and drove. The Chocolate Mountains on the other side of the valley were getting bigger in front of them.

Maybe they were going to Phoenix.

The green glass in the window beside Jimmy’s head was an inch thick. He tipped his head over to where he could see the side mirror. The black pickup was a half mile back, three of the Basques shoulder to shoulder in the front seat.

Turner didn’t say much of anything, beyond naming the crops in the fields alongside the interstate as they passed, three kinds of summer lettuce, “baby’s breath”—which he sure enough made sound like a product—jojoba and sod. The sod farm was out the window for a long minute at eighty miles an hour, an expanse of lawn with no big house behind it, unsettling, wrong.

They passed a section of planted date trees, Medjool dates, Turner said.

“Dates are too sweet.” Which meant they were somebody else’s dates.

Jimmy didn’t disagree.

Just as he was settling into his seat, thinking they were going to Phoenix, or at least Blythe, they came up on a big new gaudy Morongo Indian casino with a hundred-foot sign out front and a name that didn’t say anything about Indians. Turner looked over at it with a long look that made Jimmy figure he owned that, too, or a piece of it. And he took the brand-new exit just past it.

But they weren’t going to the casino. They took another road, another paved road straight south for five or six miles and then there was a big white box of an aluminum building, nothing else for miles, with three Lincoln Town Cars and a pickup and a new Cadillac in the lot in front. It didn’t have a sign.

There was just one long wooden table inside but it was covered with white linen and the tableware was silver, though a plain pattern. There weren’t any flowers. There weren’t any windows either. It was about sixty degrees, a hundred and nine outside.

A single waiter in a plain-front white shirt and black pants stood next to the kitchen door. There wasn’t any music, just six or seven men talking. They were all dressed like fie ld hands. In four-h undred-dollar boots. None of them were young.

“We waited, Harry,” one of them said. The plate in front of him had a pile of bloody bones and a last smear of what looked liked creamed spinach.

Turner slapped the man on the back.

“Don’t get up,” he said, since the man wasn’t moving.

He shook the hands of two of the other men. One of them introduced the man beside him he’d brought as a guest. Turner knew the rest of them. He didn’t introduce Jimmy and the other men didn’t ask.

“Looks like it’s lamb,” Turner said as he and Jimmy sat down across the table from each other at one end, away from the others.

Jimmy nodded.

“It’ll be good,” Turner said. “Americans don’t know how to slaughter lambs.” The way he said Americans made Jimmy wonder if maybe Turner wasn’t his real name. A lot of the farmers and ranchers out here were Armenian. “Most Americans think they’ve eaten lamb and most of them think they don’t like the taste. You butcher it wrong, you let any part of the meat touch the layer of fat just under the wool and the lanolin turns the meat, gives it that lamb