“I think your friend is with the Wellstone woman this morning,” she said.

“Can you say that again?”

“I believe he’s about to get himself in a lot of trouble,” she said. “Thank you for your time. Thank you for preparing the coffee, too, Ms. Robicheaux.”

Then Alicia Rosecrans went out to her car and drove away. But I had a feeling we would be seeing a lot more of her.

“What was that?” Molly said.

“The feds have Jamie Sue Wellstone under surveillance. The question is why.”

TROYCE NIX’S HOSPITAL window gave onto a terrace planted with mimosa and palm trees, bougainvillea, yellow bugle vine, crown of thorns, and Spanish daggers. In the early-morning hours and at sunset, the automatic sprinklers clicked on and misted the plants and created miniature rainbows above the terrace wall. But Troyce Nix was not interested in the beauty of a tropical garden or the baked hills across the river in Old Mexico or the millions of lights that seemed to come on at night along the dry floodplains of the Rio Grande. His favorite time of day was high noon, right after lunch, when the nurse turned on his morphine drip and the sky turned a blinding white and he found himself inside a vast desert somewhere west of the Pecos where neither God nor civilized man bothered to lay claim, where a solitary figure waited for him, both Troyce’s and the figure’s tracks finally braiding together amid sand dunes that were as tall as mountains.

In Troyce’s dream, the figure wore state-issue blues that were stiff with dried sweat and caked with salt under the armpits. His hair was blown with grit, his lips cracked from dehydration, his work boots split on his feet. The desert was devoid of shadows, even those of carrion birds. The only remnants of modern civilization that Troyce could see were the bodies of automobiles, half buried in the sand, the paint scoured from the metal. As Troyce approached the figure, the water in his canteen sloshing on his hip, he could feel a thickness growing in his loins. He felt his palms starting to tingle and the same sense of expectation that he always experienced just this side of orgasm. He heard sand rilling down the face of a dune, wind whistling through the glassless window of a Model T Ford. He heard the sound of water as he drank it from his canteen, his throat working steadily. He smelled the astringent, reassuring odor of his own manhood as he wiped his face on his shirtsleeve.

He could do and experience all these things because he was alive and growing stronger by the minute, in control of another’s fate, about to measure out justice and vengeance in any fashion he chose.

The figure dressed in state blues was terrified, his mouth opening silently with his fear.

Been thinking about me, Jimmy Dale?

A whole lot, boss. Real sorry about what happened back there. You got some water?

Look down at your pants.

Sir?

You just pissed your britches.

What you gonna do, boss?

Nothing.

Sir?

I’m gonna make you do it to yourself. I’m gonna make you do it to what you love. I’m just gonna watch.

I don’t understand.

You know what Chinamen call the death of a thousand cuts?

No sir.

It’ll be quite a ride.

That don’t sound good, boss.

You don’t know the half of it.

When Troyce Nix would wake from his dream, his throat would be parched, his phallus throbbing, his big, flat-plated chest damp with perspiration. When the male nurse came in to give him fresh ice water and to sponge-bathe him, Troyce would sometimes convince him to turn the drip back on. Then he would lie back in a sleepy pink haze, a sliver of ice on his tongue, mentally constructing his next encounter with Jimmy Dale Greenwood, the images for redress so stark he had to touch the male nurse on the back of the hand to keep his bearings.

But this afternoon was different. In the morning he would be leaving the hospital, perhaps unsteadily, his system laced with painkillers, but leaving nonetheless. The only problem now was the deputy sheriff sitting by his bed, a pencil pusher with soft hands and a pink egg-shaped face and carefully combed hair and breath that smelled of peppermint mouthwash. Unfortunately, the man’s mind-set did not go with his demeanor or appearance. His name was Rawlings, and he was the fourth investigative deputy to visit Troyce Nix’s bedside. He was also the most unrelenting.

“A few millimeters either way and any one of them body thrusts could have done you in,” he said. “I’d buy me a bunch of lottery tickets or go to the dog track. You ever go to the dog track?”

“No,” Troyce answered.

“So you figure it was a tramp hiding in your closet?” Rawlings said. “He was in your house and he hid in your closet when he heard your truck come up the road? That’s what you’re saying?”

“It’s not what I’m saying. It’s what happened,” Troyce said. His chest was crisscrossed with tape and gauze; he shifted himself on the bed to relieve a place where the bandages were binding under his heart.

“And Jimmy Dale Greenwood was digging postholes behind your house or cabin or whatever? Wasn’t no way it was him who hurt you? I mean, here on your statement it says you laid down to take a nap and this guy come out of the closet when you woke up. Wasn’t no way you just got confused about who attacked you?”

“I was fixing to make Greenwood a full trusty. I greased the way for his parole. Why would he attack me?”

“Maybe he was chewing on peyote buttons. I’ve seen Indians stick their hand in a fire when they were souped up on mescal. He might have been down on grand auto, but he also put a knife in a guy.”

“Jimmy Dale Greenwood stole my truck and took off on me when I was near bleeding to death. But it wasn’t him who cut me up. It was a white man, not a breed.”

“Trouble is, that shank your attacker busted off inside you was made from automotive window glass, the same kind that was in the shop where Greenwood worked. What would a tramp be doing with a prison-made shank?”

Troyce turned his head on the pillow and looked at Rawlings. The slash wound on his cheek had gone to the bone, and the connective tissue on one side of his face didn’t work properly. “You wouldn’t call me a liar, would you?”

Rawlings stared into space as though considering the question. He propped the heels of his hands on his thighs and returned Troyce’s stare. “I understand you’re checking out in the morning.”

“That’s right.”

“Going to be doing some traveling, seeing the country, that sort of thing?”

“I got me a little woman in Las Cruces.”

Rawlings nodded thoughtfully. He seemed to watch a fly crawling up the wall. Then he rose from his chair. He touched Troyce Nix on the thigh with his clipboard, through the sheet. “Take care of yourself, bub. Just one reminder, though.”

Troyce waited.

“The worst fate can befall a lawman is to end up stacking time with the same sonsofbitches we been riding herd on,” Rawlings said. “The thought of it makes something inside me shrivel up and die.”

THREE HOURS AFTER Special Agent Alicia Rosecrans’s visit to our cabin, Clete’s Caddy pulled into our yard. The top was up, the maroon finish gleaming with a fresh wax job. Clete got out and shut the door firmly and stared back down the road. The sun was above the mountain crests now, and Albert’s horses had moved into the shade of the cottonwoods along the creek. When the wind gusted through the trees on the hillsides, it made a sound exactly like rushing water. The sound made Clete look around him, as though he wasn’t sure where he was standing. I wondered if he had been drinking.

I told him about my conversation with Alicia Rosecrans. I also told him she believed he had been with Jamie Sue Wellstone that morning. But he seemed distracted, his eyes closing and opening as he sorted through my words.