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We got ’em, buddy. We got ’em.”
    “What do we do now?”
    Dave Olshaker thought a moment, cocking his head back to look up at the white blank sky. Then Dave reached down under his seat and drew out a warm can of Pabst, popped the top and took a chug down. “Kee-rist, I don’t know. But that jock-strapped pretty boy has my baby. And I mean to get her back any way I can. She belongs to me.”
    3
    “Son of a bitch!” Griff said. He had kicked the tire six or seven times as if he could bring it back to life.
    “You really don’t have a spare?” Bronwyn whispered to Josh, pressing her lips so close that he could feel her heat on top of the heat of the day.
    Josh looked out over the highway. It was not the route they were supposed to take. Nothing but scrub and dust and a long barbed-wire fence that made him think somebody actually owned this corner of hell. Sweat trickled down his back, and he felt a mushiness of sweat around his balls, and he wished he had a nice motel room with a long cool shower.
    Ziggy was already toking out on a big rock above the highway. “Hey, I see somebody coming!”
    “Yeah?” Tammy shouted back.
    “A trucker! We’re gonna get a lift. I know we are!” He shot his arm out, pointing to the west. “There’s something way over there, man! It looks like a gas station. All we have to do is get the trucker to give us a ride, and we’re set.”
    “Thank God,” Bronwyn said, lifting a cigarette in the air like she was flipping the bird. “This is my last smoke.”
    4
    The truck was a big-ass Kenmore, and the guy slowed down, pulling on his horn. Tammy was out in the middle of the highway, jumping up and down. It was her tits that did it—that’s what everyone felt without having to say a word about it. Someday, they’d build a memorial to her boobs. They were bouncing like basketballs, and no trucker in his right mind wouldn’t have come to a stop just to see whether it was a mirage or a real live woman of twenty with humongous breasts.
    “Men never cease to live down to my expectations,” Bronwyn said, shaking her head. She dropped the last of her cigarette in the dust. She stubbed at it with her toe, then shivered a little as if she were cold.
    “You okay?” Josh asked.
    “Just that feeling. You know—the one where they say a goose walked over your grave. Like something’s wrong.” Then she laughed. “Maybe I just need another cigarette.”
    5
    Bronwyn had to scrunch up next to the trucker, but she didn’t mind. He was a rugged, rode-hard kind of guy with a face that must’ve been pretty at one time, but turned into baked granite from the sun, with crack lines along his smile and around his eyes.
    “Best I can do is dump you two up ahead. There’s a place about two miles up.”
    “That’d be great,” Josh said.
    “It was nice of you to stop,” Bronwyn said, then leaned a bit against his shoulder. He smelled like axle grease, but there was something comforting about it.
    “I drive this highway eight times a week, back and forth. There ain’t much here.” He introduced himself: Ely. He told them about his life, which was mainly the road and a little shack out in a town called Naga, not too far away. You knew you had reached his place because a paved road ended where a dirt road shot off to the west, and you could see a silvery glimmer—from all the hubcaps hanging on the front fence and you could hear the music he blasted from his workshop out back. “Mainly ZZ Top. Mainly. Sometimes I get into the mood for Boston. But mainly ZZ.”
    “That’s quite a life,” Josh said.
    “Ha,” Ely spat back. “I bet you kids are rich and are on spring break and just tooling around because you got nothin’ else to do.”
    “I think that pretty much sums it up, except we really don’t have money,” Bronwyn said. Glancing sidelong at Josh, cigarette hanging from her lips, “Don’t you think?”
    “Abso,” he said.
    “Abso?” Ely laughed when he heard the