to glow hotter and hotter against the grayness of the sand. It was the only piece of litter as far as he could see. He climbed down from the rocks, his beer bottle in one hand, picked up the cap, and thumbed it into his pocket. The armadillos stared up at him, their eyes as intense and unrelenting as black pinheads.

“Are you guys friendlies or Republican Guard? Identify yourself or get shot.”

Still no response.

Pete reached for the bottle of beer on top of the rocks, then approached the burrow. The adult armadillo and both babies scurried back inside.

“I tell you what,” he said, squatting down, a bottle in each hand. “Anybody that can live out here in this heat probably needs a couple of brews a lot worse than I do. These are on me, fellows.”

He poured the first beer down the hole, then popped off the cap on the second one and did the same, the foam running in long fingers down the burrow’s incline. “You guys all right in there?” he asked, twisting his head sideways to see inside the burrow. “I’ll take that as an affirmative. Roger that and keep your steel pots on and your butts down.”

He shook the last drops out of both bottles, stuck the empties in his pockets, and hiked back to town, telling himself that perhaps he had just walked through a door into a new day, maybe even a new life.

At ten A.M. exactly, he went down to the motel office just as the mailman was leaving. “Did you have anything for Gaddis or Flores?” he said.

The mailman grinned awkwardly. “I’m not supposed to say. There was a bunch of mail for the motel this morning. Ask inside.”

Pete opened the door and closed it behind him, an electronic ding going off in back somewhere. The clerk came through a curtained doorway. “How you doing?” he said.

“I’m not sure.”

“Sorry, I didn’t see nothing in there for y’all.”

“It’s got to be here.”

“I looked, believe me.”

“Look again.”

“It’s not there. I wish it was, but it’s not.” The clerk studied Pete’s face. “Your rent is paid up for four more nights. It cain’t be all that bad, can it?”

THAT NIGHT VIKKI took her sunburst Gibson to work with her and played and sang three songs with the band. The next morning there was no mail addressed to her or Pete at the motel office. Pete used the pay phone at the steak house to call Junior Vogel at his home.

“You promised Vikki you were gonna pick up my check and send it to us,” he said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You damn liar, what’d you do with my check? You just left it in the box? Tell me.”

“Don’t call here again,” Junior said, and hung up.

AT TWO A.M. Nick Dolan watched his remaining patrons leave the club. He used to wonder where they went after hours of drinking and viewing half-naked women perform inches away from their grasp. Did their fantasies cause them to rise throbbing and hard in the morning, unsated, vaguely ashamed, perhaps angry at the source of their dependency and desperation, perhaps ready to try an excursion into the dark side?

Was there a connection between what he did and violence against women? A female street person had been raped and beaten by two men six blocks from his club, fifteen minutes after closing time. The culprits were never caught.

But eventually, out of his own ennui with the subject, Nick had stopped thinking about his patrons or worrying about their deeds past or present, in the same way a butcher does not think about the origins and history of the gutted and frozen white shapes hanging from meat hooks in his subzero locker. Nick’s favorite admonition to himself remained intact and unchallenged: Nick Dolan didn’t invent the world.

Nick drank a glass of milk at the bar while his girls and barmaids and bartenders and bouncers and janitors said good night and one by one went outside to their cars and their private lives, which he suspected were little different from anyone else’s, except for the narcotics his girls often relied upon.

He locked the back door, set the alarm, and locked the front door as he went out. He paused in front of the club and surveyed the parking lot, the occasional car passing on the four-lane, the great star-strewn bowl of sky overhead. The wind was balmy blowing through the trees, the clouds moonlit; there was even a promise of rain in