his trousers jump and even smoke for a second. Then it seemed as though his entire pants leg was darkening with his blood.

But the man who called himself Preacher wasn’t through. He made a grinding sound down in his throat, as though both eating his pain and energizing himself, and threw his weight against her, locking his arms around her knees. She fell in the grass and struck at his head with the revolver, lacerating his scalp, to no avail. Then she screwed the muzzle into his ear. “You want your brains on your shirt?” she said.

He didn’t let go. She lowered the revolver and aimed at the top of his shoe but couldn’t position her finger adequately to pull against the trigger’s tension. She worked her thumb over the hammer, cocked it back, and squeezed the trigger against the guard. The barrel made a second loud pop, and a jet of blood exploded from the bottom of his shoe. He sat up on his haunches and grabbed his foot with both hands, his jaw dropping open, his face the pained red of a boiled crab.

She got into her vehicle and turned the ignition. This time the engine caught, and she dropped the transmission into low and began easing back onto the highway.

“My father was a Medicine Lodge police officer and taught me how to shoot when I was ten years old. Next time you won’t get off so easy, bubba,” she said.

She flung the .38 through the passenger window into the darkness and rolled across his cell phone, crushing it into pieces. Then she pushed the accelerator to the floor, a cloud of blue-black oil smoke ballooning behind her.

4

NOBODY COULD BE this unlucky, Nick Dolan told himself. He had taken his wife and daughters and son with him to their vacation house on the Comal River, outside New Braunfels, hoping to buy time so he could figure out a way to get both Hugo Cistranos and Artie Rooney off his back—in particular Hugo, whom Nick had stiffed for the thousands he claimed Nick owed him.

His vacation home was built of white stucco and had a blue-tile roof and a courtyard with a wishing well and lime and orange trees, and terraced gardens and stone steps that descended to the riverbank. The river had a soap-rock bottom that was free of silt and was green and cold and fed by springs even in August, and pooled with shadows from the giant trees that grew along the bank. Maybe he could enjoy a few days away from problems he did not create, that no one could blame him for, and this trouble would just blow over. Why shouldn’t it? Nick Dolan had never deliberately hurt anybody.

But when he looked out his window and saw a man with a shaved, waxed head stepping out of a government car, he knew the cosmic plot to make his life miserable was still in full-throttle, turbo-prop overdrive and the Fates were about to special-deliver another fuck-you message to Nick no matter where he went.

The government man must have been at least six-four, his shoulders like concrete inside his white shirt, his forehead knurled, his eyes luminous pools behind octagon-shaped rimless glasses, eyes that Nick could only associate with space aliens.

The government man was already holding up his ID when Nick opened the door. “Isaac Clawson, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. You Nick Dolan?” he said.

“No, I just look like him and happen to live at this address,” Nick answered.

“I need a few minutes of your time.”

“For what?”

The sun was hot and bright on the St. Augustine grass, the air glistening with humidity. Isaac Clawson touched at the sweat on his forehead with the back of his wrist. In his other hand he clutched a flat, zippered portfolio, the fingers of his huge hand spread on it like banana peels. “You want to do something for your country, sir? Or would you like me to ratchet up the procedure a couple of notches, maybe introduce you to our grand-jury subpoena process?”

“What, I didn’t pay into workman’s comp for the guy who cuts my lawn?”

Clawson’s eyes stayed riveted on Nick’s. The man’s physicality seemed to exude heat and repressed violence, a whiff of testosterone, an astringent tinge of deodorant. The formality and tie and white shirt and big octagon-shaped glasses seemed to Nick a poor disguise for a man who was probably at heart a bone breaker.

“My kids are playing Ping-Pong in the game room. My wife is