isn’t a race, it’s a religion. That’s what I’m talking about. All of you are ignorant. That’s your common denominator.”

Bobby Lee had already cut the headlights and was slowing to a stop by the pond. The open end of the newspaper in Preacher’s lap was still pointed at Nick’s side. Nick thought he was going to be sick. Hugo pulled open the back door and ran his hand along Nick’s legs. His face was so close that Nick could feel Hugo’s breath on his skin. Hugo slipped the .25 auto from Nick’s pocket and aimed it at the pond.

“This is a nice piece,” he said. He released the magazine and worked the slide. “Afraid to carry one in the chamber, Nicholas?”

“It wouldn’t have done me any good,” Nick said.

“Want to show him?” Hugo said to Preacher.

“Show me what?” Nick said.

Preacher tossed the newspaper to the floor and got out on the other side of the vehicle, pulling his crutches after him. The newspaper had fallen open on the floor. There was nothing inside it.

“Tough luck, Nicholas,” Hugo said. “How’s it feel to lose to a guy holding a handful of nothing?”

“Bobby Lee, open up the back. Hugo, give me his piece,” Preacher said.

“I can take care of this,” Hugo said.

“Like you did behind that church?”

“Take it easy, Jack,” Hugo said.

“I said give me the piece.”

Nick could feel a wave of nausea permeate the entirety of his metabolism, as though he had been systemically poisoned and all his blood had settled in his stomach and every muscle in him had turned flaccid and pliant. For just a moment he saw himself through the eyes of his tormentors—a small, pitiful fat man whose skin had become as gray as cardboard and whose hair glowed with sweat, a little man whose corpulence gave off the vinegary stink of fear.

“Walk with me,” Preacher said.

“No,” Nick said.

“Yes,” Bobby Lee said, pressing a .45 hard between Nick’s shoulder blades, screwing it into the softness of his muscles.

The cows in the yard of the farmhouse had strung shiny green lines of feces around the pond. In the moonlight Nick could see the cows watching him, their eyes luminous, their heads haloed with gnats. An unmilked cow, its swollen udder straining like a veined balloon, bawled with its discomfort.

“Go toward the house, Mr. Dolan,” Preacher said.

“It ends here, doesn’t it?” Nick said.

But no one spoke in reply. He heard Hugo doing something in the luggage area of the SUV, shaking out a couple of large vinyl garbage bags and spreading them on the carpet.

“My family won’t know what happened to me,” Nick said. “They’ll think I deserted them.”

“Shut up,” Bobby Lee said.

“Don’t talk to him that way,” Preacher said.

“He keeps sassing you, Jack.”

“Mr. Dolan is a brave man. Don’t treat him as less. That’s far enough, Mr. Dolan.”

Nick felt the skin on his face shrink, the backs of his legs begin to tremble uncontrollably, his sphincter start to give way. In the distance he could see a bank of poplars at the edge of an unplowed field, wind flowing through Johnson grass that had turned yellow with drought, the brief tracings of a star falling across the sky. How did he, a kid from New Orleans, end up here, in this remote, godforsaken piece of fallow land in South Texas? He closed his eyes and for just a second saw his wife standing under the colonnade at the corner of St. Charles and Canal, raindrops in her hair, the milky whiteness of her complexion backlit by the old iron green-painted streetcar that stood motionless on the tracks.

“Esther,” he heard himself whisper.

He waited for the gunshot that would ricochet a .25-caliber round back and forth inside his brainpan. Instead, all he heard was the cow bawling in the dark.

“What did you say?” Preacher asked.

“He didn’t say anything,” Bobby Lee said.

“Be quiet. What did you say, Mr. Dolan?”

“I said Esther, the name of my wife, a woman who will never know what happened to her husband, you cocksucker.”

Nick could hear the tin roof on the farmhouse lift and clatter in the wind.

“What’s wrong, Jack?” Bobby Lee said.

“You swear to God that’s your wife’s name?” Preacher said.

“I wouldn’t cheapen her name by swearing to a man like you about it.”

“Don’t let him talk to you like that, Jack.”

Nick could hear Preacher breathing through his nose.

“Give me his piece. I’ll do it,” Bobby Lee said.

“Bring the vehicle around,” Preacher said.

“What are you doing?” Bobby Lee asked. He was taller than Preacher, and