of a cigar butt climbing up the curtain by the television set. He put on his shirt, not bothering to button it, and sat on the side of the bed and wondered what he should do next.
Billy Bob had said to trust his cousin the sheriff. But what about the feds? Sometimes they hung witnesses out to dry. Pete had heard stories about the Justice Department prosecuting cases that couldn?t be won, turning over the names of confidential informants to defense lawyers who passed the names on to their clients and exposed the informants to violent and perhaps fatal retribution.
His and Vikki?s names would be in the newspapers. Vikki had pumped two rounds into this guy Preacher when he had tried to force her into his car. Pete had never seen the man?s face and knew nothing of his history or background but had little doubt what he would do to Vikki if he got his hands on her.
But what if Pete continued to do nothing? So far he and Vikki had been lucky. If they just had money or passports or a car. Or a weapon. But they had none of these things, and now, to compound his problems, he had fought with Vikki.
The rains had passed when he went outside, but the sky was sealed from horizon to horizon with clouds that were as heavy and gray as lead, like a giant lid pressing the humidity and heat back into the earth. In the convenience store that doubled as a Greyhound bus stop, he bought a box of saltine crackers and a can of Vienna sausages. He also bought a coned-up straw hat from a Mexican who was selling hats and serapes and garish velvet paintings of either the Crucifixion or the Sacred Heart of Jesus off the back of a pickup truck. He bought a bottle of Coca-Cola from the outside machine, and just as the sun was breaking through the overcast, spearing columns of light onto the desert, he squatted down in the shade of the store and began eating the sausages sandwiched between crackers, drinking from the soda, moistening the dried-out saltines to the point where they were almost chewable.
He could not explain adequately to himself why he had bought the hat, which had cost six dollars, except for the fact that squatting down on his haunches, the leather of his colorless cowboy boots spiderwebbing with cracks, eating his lunch in the hot shade of a convenience store on the outer edges of the Great American Desert, his hat slanted down on his brow, was like a conduit back into a time when he had thought of the world in terms of chimerical holograms rather than events?bobber-fishing in a green river, Angus grazing in red clover, sunlit showers breaking on bluebonnets in the spring, harvest moons that were as big and brown and dust-veiled as a planet that had strayed from its orbit.
Pickup trucks and country music and dancing to the ?Bandera Waltz? under Japanese lanterns at a beer garden on the banks of the Frio. Barbecues and fish frys and high school kids on hayrides and other kids hanging out on horseback in front of the IGA. Dinner on the ground and devil in the bush and baptism by immersion and outdoor preachers ranting in ecstasy with their eyes rolled back in their heads. If he could just reach back a couple of years and put his hand on all of it and hold on to it and never let anyone talk him into giving it up.
That was the secret: to hold on to the things you loved and never give them up for any reason, no matter how strong the entreaty.
He walked down the street to the town?s one block of business buildings, stepping up on an elevated sidewalk that still had tethering rings inset in the concrete. He passed a shut-down bank that had been constructed in 1891, a barbershop with a revolving striped pole in a plastic tube, a used-appliance store, a caf茅 that advertised bison burgers in water-based white paint on the window, a barroom that was as long and narrow and dark as a boxcar. The town?s library was tucked compactly inside a one-story limestone building that once sold recapped automobile tires.
In the reference section, he found a stack of phone books for all the counties in Southwest Texas. It took him only five minutes to find the number he needed. He borrowed a pencil from the reference librarian