carrying its own canteen.”
“That’s dry.”
“You looking for a ride? ’Cause the bread-delivery man is fixing to head back to town.”
“No, I’m visiting down the road there. South a piece.” The man drank from his orange juice and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and began eating his sandwich again.
“Did you see any salt and pepper up there at the counter?” R.C. asked.
“I think I did. Where the ketchup and such are. In that little tray.”
“You want some?”
“No, sir, I’m fine.”
R.C. went to the counter by the coffee and cold-drink dispensers and began sorting through the condiments. “Do y’all have any hot sauce?” he said to the cashier.
“It’s there somewhere,” the cashier replied.
“I sure cain’t find it.”
The cashier walked over and picked up the hot sauce and handed it to R.C. He was a short man with a sloping girth who always showed up at work in a dress shirt and an outrageous tie and with polished shoes. He had a tiny black mustache that expanded like grease pencil when he grinned. “Glad it wasn’t a snake.”
“Keep looking straight at me,” R.C. said.
The cashier’s face clouded, but he kept his eyes locked on R.C.’s.
“You know that old boy over yonder?” R.C. said.
“I think he was in yesterday. He bought some Ding Dongs and a newspaper.”
“He was by himself?”
“He came here with another man. The other fellow stayed in the car.”
“What’d the other guy look like?”
“I didn’t pay him much mind.”
“What kind of car?”
The cashier looked into space and shook his head. “It was skinned up. It didn’t have much paint on it. I don’t know what kind it was.”
“You ever see it before?”
The cashier rubbed his eye. “No, sir,” he said. “Are we fixing to have some trouble here? ’Cause that’s something I really don’t need.”
“No. Did the guy in the car buy gas with a credit card?”
“If he did, I didn’t see it. He got air.”
“What?”
“He went to the air pump. I remember that ‘cause he was the last to use it. Somebody ran over the hose, and I had to put an out-of-order sign on it. Ain’t nobody used it since.”
R.C. went back to his table and set the bottle of hot sauce down, then snapped his fingers as though he had forgotten something. He went outside to his cruiser and picked up a clipboard off the seat, then walked past the air pump. The concrete slab around it was covered with a film of mud and dust that had dried into a delicate crust. A set of familiar tire tracks was stenciled across it. “Michelins,” R.C. said under his breath.
R.C. went back to his table with the clipboard. “I got to do these dadburn time logs,” he said to the man at the next table.
“I bet that’s what we’ll all be doing when somebody drops a nuclear missile on us,” the man said.
“I never thought of it like that. I think you got your hand on it.”
“Hope we get some rain. This is about the hottest place I’ve ever been,” the man said.
“You know what General Sherman said when he was stationed here? He said if he owned both Texas and hell, he’d rent out Texas and live in hell,” R.C. said.
The man tilted up his orange juice and drank it empty, swallowing smoothly, never letting a drop run off the side of his mouth. R.C. went back to eating, his long legs barely fitting under the table, his jaw filled with food, one eye on his clipboard. “This stuff is a royal pain in the ass,” he said. “I’m going back on patrol. If they want my time logs filled out, they can fill them out their own self.”
“If I were you, I’d put the times in there somebody wants and not worry about it. That’s how organizations are run. You just got to make things look right. Why beat yourself up over it?”
“You sound like a guy who’s been around.”
“Not really.”
“Where you staying at, exactly?”
“A little vacation spot a buddy of mine has got rented. It’s just a place to go hunting for rocks and arrowheads and such.”
“Look, is somebody coming to pick you up? You looked like you were limping.”
“I’ll hitch a ride. People here’bouts are pretty nice.”
“I don’t mind driving you home. That’s part of the job sometimes.”
“No, I was in an accident a while back. I don’t like to start depending on other people. It gets to be a habit too easy.”
R.C. picked up the remnants of his nachos and chili dog and threw them in the trash, then sat down at the table with the man, who was now feeding a Ding Dong into his mouth. “You seem like a right good fellow,” he said. “The kind of guy who don’t want to hurt nobody but who might get into something that’s way to shit and gone over his head.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“I always figured if a guy makes a mistake, he ought to get shut of it as quick as he can and keep on being the fellow he always was.”
“That could be true, but I think you’ve got somebody else in mind.”
“You’re not from Texas, but you’re from down South somewhere, right?”
“Me and a few million others.”
“But you weren’t raised up to keep company with criminals. It’s got to grate on you. I reckon that’s why you hitched a ride here today.”
“You want a Ding Dong?”
“Not right now,” R.C. said, and fitted one end of his handcuffs onto the man’s left wrist and snicked the ratchet into the locking mechanism. “Mind if I call you Noie?”
“I’ve answered to worse.”
“You have a friend who drives a Trans Am that has Michelin tires on it?”
“Can’t say as I do.”
“Where’s Preacher Collins at, Noie?”
The man squinted thoughtfully and scratched at an insect bite on the back of his neck with his free hand. “Who?” he said.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Maydeen said, standing in Hackberry’s doorway.
He looked up from his desk and waited.
“R.C. says he’s got Noie Barnum hooked up in the back of his cruiser,” she said.
Hackberry stared at her blankly.
“He says Barnum walked into a convenience store down by the four-lane,” she said. “He’d hitched a ride to have lunch there.”
“How does R.C. know it’s Barnum?”
“He says the guy looks just like his photo, except he’s a little leaner. He’s got a limp and maybe has some broken ribs.”
“The guy admits he’s Noie Barnum?”
“R.C. didn’t say. He just says it’s him.”
“What about Jack Collins?”
“R.C. said there were Michelin tire tracks where Collins’s car was parked yesterday. I didn’t get it all, Hack. Want me to notify the FBI?”
“No.”
“You don’t?”
