think he should have a badge.”

“He’s not our man.”

“Nice talking to you, sir,” Hackberry said, and eased the receiver back into the phone cradle.

PREACHER JACK COLLINS had once read that the neurological and optical wiring of horses created two screens inside their heads and allowed them to simultaneously monitor two broad and separate visions of their surroundings. To Preacher, this did not seem a remarkable step in the evolution of a species.

For him, there had always been two screens inside his head: one that people walked onto and off of and that he looked at or ignored as he chose; on the other, the one on which he was a participant, there were dials and buttons that allowed him to reverse or change the flow of traffic, or to distort or smudge out images that didn’t belong there.

He had a dark gift, but it was a gift nonetheless, and he had been convinced since adolescence that his role in the world was preordained and it was not his province to question the unseen hand that had shaped his soul before he was conceived.

A floor fan in the back of the saloon fluttered his trouser cuff and cooled the skin around the edges of his cast. From where he sat with a white mug of black coffee hooked on his index finger, the long boxcar-like structure of the saloon was almost like a study in man’s journey from the womb to the last page on his calendar. The early sunlight shone on the outside windows with the kind of delivery-room electric glare that blinded the newborn. The saloon had been a dance hall once, and the checkerboard floor was still in place, walked upon by hundreds if not thousands of people who never looked down at their feet and saw the mathematical design in their lives.

The only light source in the building that never changed shape was the brilliant yellow cone created by the tin-shaded bulb over the pool table. It lit the mahogany rails and leather pockets and green felt of the table and swallowed the arms and necks and shoulders of the players who bent over it. Preacher wondered if any of them, their buttocks arched tightly against their jeans, their genitalia touching the wood, the right arm tensed to drive the cue like a spear into a white ball, ever saw themselves as fools leaning into their own coffins.

The waiter brought Preacher his refill in a metal pot painted blue and flecked with white specks. The waiter left the pot on the table alongside a saucer with six sugar cubes on it. The two screens in Preacher’s head were muted now, as they often were at sunrise, and in moments like these, he wondered if the silence was part of a larger design or an indication of divine abandonment.

In Elijah’s search to hear the voice of God, he had awakened to find that during the night an angel had provided him a jug of water and a cake cooked on a hot stone. But the voice of Yahweh was not to be found in an earthquake or the wind or even inside a fire. That’s what the scripture said. The voice would speak in a whisper at the entrance to a cave, one that Preacher would enter when it was time.

But how would he recognize it? How would he know it was not just the wind blowing through a hole in the earth?

The fire-exit door opened suddenly, causing Preacher’s hand to jerk, spilling his coffee. Bobby Lee stood framed against the sunlight in the alleyway, wearing bradded orange work pants and a white T-shirt and a top hat, his wideband suspenders notched into his deltoids, his jaw unshaved.

“Didn’t mean to give you a start,” Bobby Lee said, wiping his nose with the heel of his hand, surveying the saloon’s interior. “What a dump. You actually eat in this place?”

“Don’t you ever come up behind me like that again,” Preacher said.

“Little touchy this morning?”

Preacher cleaned the coffee off his hand with a paper napkin. “Put some money in the jukebox,” he said.

“What do you want to hear?”

“I look like I care what’s on that jukebox?”

Bobby Lee got change from the bartender and fed the jukebox with eight quarters, then sat down across from Preacher.

“Tell me,” Preacher said.

“It got messy. We had to chase the guy and run him off the road.”

“Go on.”

Bobby Lee shrugged. “The guy didn’t want to give it up. Liam explained the choices the guy had.