Amusement had its drawbacks, especially when it came to betting.

Music and the smell of beer wafted out of open doorways. I heard Jerry Lee Lewis singing

“Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” from one juke and Ferlin Husky emoting “Wings of a Dove” from the one next door. I was propositioned by four hookers and a sidewalk vendor who was selling hubcaps, rhinestone-glittery straight razors, and Lone Star State flags embossed with the words DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS. Try translating that one into Latin.

That troubling sense of déjà vu was very strong, that feeling that things were wrong here just as they had been wrong before. Which was crazy—I’d never been on Greenville Avenue in my life

—but it was also undeniable, a thing of the heart rather than the head. All at once I decided I didn’t want a beer. And I didn’t want to rent Mr. Johnson’s converted garage, either, no matter how good the air-conditioning was.

I had just passed a watering hole called the Desert Rose, where the Rock-Ola was blasting Muddy Waters. As I turned to start back to where my car was parked, a man came flying out the door. He stumbled and went sprawling on the sidewalk. There was a burst of laughter from the bar’s dark interior. A woman yelled, “And don’t come back, you dickless wonder!” This produced more (and heartier) laughter.

The ejected patron was bleeding from the nose—which was bent severely to one side—and also from a scrape that ran down the left side of his face from temple to jawline. His eyes were huge and shocked. His untucked shirt flapped almost to his knees as he grabbed a lamppost and pulled himself to his feet. Once on them, he glared around at everything, seeing nothing.

I took a step or two toward him, but before I could get there, one of the women who’d asked me if I’d like a date came swaying up on stiletto heels. Only she wasn’t a woman, not really. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen, with large dark eyes and smooth coffee-colored skin. She was smiling, but not in a mean way, and when the man with the bloody face staggered, she took his arm.

“Easy, sweetheart,” she said. “You need to settle down before you—” He raked up the hanging tails of his shirt. The pearl-handled grip of a pistol—much smaller than the one I’d bought at Machen’s Sporting Goods, really not much more than a toy—lay against the pale fat hanging over the beltless waistband of his gabardine slacks. His fly was half-unzipped and I could see boxer shorts with red racing cars on them. I remember that. He pulled the gun, pressed the muzzle against the streetwalker’s midriff, and pulled the trigger. There was a stupid little pop, the sound of a ladyfinger firecracker going off in a tin can, no more than that. The woman screamed and sat down on the sidewalk with her hands laced over her belly.

“You shot me!” She sounded more outraged than hurt, but blood had begun to spill through her fingers. “You shot me, you pissant bugger, why did you shoot me?” He took no notice, only yanked open the door of the Desert Rose. I was still standing where I’d been when he shot the pretty young hooker, partly because I was frozen by shock, but mostly because all of this happened in a matter of seconds. Longer than it would take Oswald to kill the President of the United States, maybe, but not much.

“Is this what you want, Linda?” he shouted. “If this is what you want, I’ll give you what you want!”

He put the muzzle of the gun into his ear and pulled the trigger.

12

I folded my handkerchief and pressed it gently over the hole in the young girl’s red dress. I don’t know how badly she was hurt, but she was lively enough to produce a steady stream of colorful phrases she had probably not learned from her mother (on the other hand, who knows). And when one man in the gathering crowd moved a little too close to suit her, she snarled: “Quit lookin up my dress, you nosy bastard. For that you pay.”

“This pore ole sumbitch here is dead as can be,” someone remarked. He was kneeling beside the man who had been thrown out of the Desert Rose. A woman began to shriek.

Approaching sirens: they were shrieking, too. I noticed one of the other ladies who had approached me during my stroll down Greenville Avenue, a redhead in capri pants. I beckoned to her. She touched her chest in a who, me? gesture, and I nodded. Yes, you. “Hold this handkerchief on the wound,” I told her. “Try to stop the bleeding. I’ve got to go.” She gave me a wise little smile. “Don’t want to hang around for the cops?”

“Not really. I don’t know any of these people. I was just passing by.” The redhead knelt by the bleeding, cursing girl on the sidewalk, and pressed down on the sodden handkerchief. “Honey,” she said, “aren’t we all.”

13

I couldn’t sleep that night. I’d start to drift, then see Ray Mack Johnson’s sweat-oily, complacent face as he blamed two thousand years of slavery, murder, and exploitation on some teenage kid eyeballing his father’s gearshift. I’d jerk awake, settle back, drift . . . and see the little man with the unzipped fly sticking the muzzle of his hideout gun in his ear. Is this what you want, Linda? One final burst of petulance before the big sleep. And I’d start awake again. Next time it was men in a black sedan throwing a gasoline bomb through the front window of my place on Sunset Point: Eduardo Gutierrez attempting to get rid of his Yanqui from Yankeeland. Why? Because he didn’t like to lose big, that was all. For him, that was enough.

Finally I gave up and sat down by the window, where the hotel air-conditioner was rattling gamely away. In Maine the night would be crisp enough to start bringing color to the trees, but here in Dallas it was still seventy-five at two-thirty in the morning. And humid.

“Dallas, Derry,” I said as I looked down into the silent ditch of Commerce Street. The brick cube of the Book Depository wasn’t visible, but it was close by. Walking distance.

“Derry, Dallas.”

Each name comprised of two syllables that broke on the double letter like a stick of kindling over a bent knee. I couldn’t stay here. Another thirty months in Big D would send me crazy. How long would it be before I started seeing graffiti like I WILL KILL MY MOTHER SOON? Or glimpsed a juju Jesus floating down the Trinity River? Fort Worth might be better, but Fort Worth was still too close.

Why do I have to stay in either?

This thought came to me shortly after 3:00 A.M., and with the force of a revelation. I had a fine car—a car I’d sort of fallen in love with, to tell you the truth—and there was no shortage of good fast roads in central Texas, many of them recently built. By the turn of the twenty-first century, they would probably be choked with traffic, but in 1960 they were almost eerily deserted. There were speed limits, but they weren’t enforced. In Texas, even the state cops were believers in the gospel of put the pedal to the metal and let er bellow.

I could move out from beneath the suffocating shadow I felt over this city. I could find a place that was smaller and less daunting, a place that didn’t feel so filled with hate and violence. In broad daylight I could tell myself I was imagining those things, but not in the ditch of the morning.