is buried in the Baptist cemetery there. I was gonna call her today. She’s hard of hearing, but if I shout, she knows it’s me. She’s seventy-nine and cain’t see real good, either. We still talk to each other. She doesn’t know what I do for a living.”

Preacher was holding something in his hand, but she couldn’t bring herself to look at it. She went on, “If you let me walk out the door, you’ll never see me again. I’ll never tell anyone what we talked about. I’ll never see Liam again, either.”

“I know you won’t,” he said in an almost kindly fashion.

“Please, sir, don’t.”

“Come closer.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You need to, Mona. We don’t choose the moment of our births or the hour of our deaths. There are few junctures in life when we actually make decisions that mean anything. The real challenge is in accepting our fate.”

“Please,” she said. “Please, please, please.”

“Get on your knees if you want. It’s all right. But don’t beg. No matter what else you do in this world, don’t beg.”

“Not in the face, sir. Please.”

She was on her knees, her eyes welling with tears. She felt his hand grasp hers and lift her arm into the air, turning up the paleness of her wrist and the green veins in it. The static-filled storm on the television screen seemed to invade her head and blind her eyes and pierce her eardrums. Her fingernails bit into her palm. She had heard stories of people who did it in a warm bathtub and supposedly felt no pain and just went to sleep as the water turned red around them. She wondered if it would be like that. Then she felt his thumb dig into her palm and peel back her fingers.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“You go into the brightness of the sun. You go inside its whiteness and let it consume you, and when you come out on the other side, you’ve become pure spirit and you never have to be afraid again.”

She tried to pull her hand from his, but he held on to it.

“Did you hear me?” he said.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

He placed five hundred-dollar bills across her palm and folded her fingers on them. “The Greyhound for Los Angeles leaves in the morning. In no time you’ll be in Albuquerque, and you’ll see what I mean. You’ll go west into the sun across a beautiful countryside, a place that’s just like the world was on the day Yahweh created light. The person you were when you walked into this room won’t exist anymore.”

When she got to the bottom of the stairs, she lost a shoe. But she did not stop to pick it up.

DURING THE RIDE to the car-title loan office in San Antonio, Hackberry did not speak again of Pam’s attack on the ICE agent Isaac Clawson. They were in his pickup truck, and the undulating countryside was speeding by rapidly, the chalklike hills layered with sedimentary rock where the highway cut through them, the sun a dust-veiled orange wafer by late afternoon.

Finally, she said, “You don’t want to know why I hit Clawson?”

You attacked him with a blackjack because you’re full of rage, he thought. But that was not what he said. “As long as it doesn’t happen again, it’s not my concern.”

“My father started having psychotic episodes when I was about eight or nine and we were living up in the Panhandle,” she said. “He’d look out on a field of green wheat and see men in black pajamas and conical straw hats coming through elephant grass. He went into a treatment program at the naval hospital in Houston, and my mother stayed there to visit him. She put me in the care of a family friend, a policeman everybody trusted.”

“Sure you want to talk about this?” he said, steering around a silver-plated gas tanker, his yellow-tinted aviator shades hiding the expression in his eyes.

“That bastard raped me. I told a teacher at school. I told a minister. They lectured me. They said the cop was a fine man and I shouldn’t make up stories about him. They said my father was mentally ill and I was imagining things because of my father’s illness.”

“Where’s this guy today?”

“I’ve tried to find him, but I think he died.”

“I used to dream about a Chinese guard named Sergeant Kwong. The day I informed on two fellow prisoners, I discovered I was the eighth man to do so. My fingernails were yellow talons, and