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Ouzel asked.
     
    “The worm in that bottle is still moist, so I doubt it was in the ditch more than a couple of days. Both of us know this bottle came from your bar. Help me on this, Ouzel. What we’re talking about here is a lot more weight than you’re ready to deal with.”
     
    “Those Oriental women at Chapala Crossing? That’s why you come out here?”
     
    “Some of them were girls. They were machine-gunned, then buried by a bulldozer. At least one of them may have still been alive.”
     
    Ouzel’s stare broke. “They were alive?”
     
    “What happened to your hand?” Hackberry said.
     
    “This?” Ouzel said. He touched the tape and gauze wound around his wrist and fingers. “Kid at the market slammed the car door on it.”
     
    “What’s his name?” Pam said.
     
    “Ma’am?”
     
    “My nephew works at the IGA. You’re saying maybe my nephew crushed your fingers and didn’t tell anybody about it?”
     
    “It was in Alpine.”
     
    A heavy woman in a sundress that barely covered her huge dugs came out the back door, looked at the cruiser, and went back inside.
     
    “Have the feds been here?” Hackberry said.
     
    “No, sir, no feds.”
     
    “But somebody else was here, weren’t they?” Hackberry said.
     
    “No, sir, just neighborly people dropping by, that sort of thing. Nobody is bothering me.”
     
    “Those men will kill both you and your wife. If you’ve met them, you know what I say is true.”
     
    Ouzel gazed at his property and at all the paint-blistered road graders and dozers and front-end loaders and farm tractors and chemical tankers leaking fluid into his land. “It’s a mess out here, ain’t it?” he said.
     
    “Who’s Pete?” Hackberry asked.
     
    “I sold a pint of mescal to a kid name of Pete Flores. He’s part Mexican, I think. He said he was in Iraq. He come in one day with no shirt on. My wife went and got him a shirt of mine.”
     
    “You have a dress code?” Pam said.
     
    “You meet up with him, take a look at his back. Get you a barf bag when you do it, too.”
     
    “Where’s he live?” Hackberry asked.
     
    “Don’t know and don’t care.”
     
    “Tell me who hurt your hand.”
     
    “It’s going to be a hot, windy one, Sheriff, with little likelihood of rain. Wish it wasn’t that way, but some things here’bouts don’t ever change.”
     
    “You’d better hope we don’t have to come back out here,” Pam said.
     
    Hackberry and Pam got back in the cruiser. Ouzel started to walk away, then heard Hackberry roll down the window on the passenger side of the cruiser. “Is any of the equipment on your property operational?” Hackberry asked.
     
    “No, sir.”
     
    “Can you tell me why you keep all this junk here?”
     
    Ouzel scratched his cheek. “With some places, I guess anything is an improvement.”
     

     

     

     
     
    3
     
    V IKKI GADDIS CALLED the diner at the truck stop on her cell and told her boss she couldn’t work that night and in fact was quitting, and could she please get her wages, maybe in cash, because she would be en route to El Paso, which was a lie, when the banks opened in the morning.
     
    The owner, Junior Vogel, lifted the receiver from his ear and held the sound piece so it caught the full volume of noise from the counter and tables and jukebox and cooks dinging the bell at the serving window as they clattered plateloads of food onto the Formica surface for the waitresses to pick up. “You’ll make at least fifty bucks in tips. Cut me some slack here, Vikki.”
     
    “I’m packing. I’ll be in at eleven. Junior?”
     
    “ What? ”
     
    “Cash, okay? It’s important.”
     
    “You’re letting me down, kid.” He hung up, not angrily, but he hung up just the same, knowing that for the next three hours, she would worry about the manner in which she was paid or worry that he would be gone when she got there.
     
    Now it was 10:51 as she drove down the two-lane state highway to ward the truck stop, the wind rushing at her through the glassless windows, the road grit stinging her