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Sort of involved.
Yeah.
Are we talkin kin?
No. Just people from my county. People I'm supposed to be lookin after.
He handed the transponder unit to the sheriff.
What am I supposed to do with this?
It's Maverick County property. Crime scene evidence.
The sheriff shook his head. Dope, he said.
Dope.
They sell that shit to schoolkids.
It's worse than that.
How's that?
Schoolkids buy it.
VII
I wont talk about the war neither. I was supposed to be a war hero and I lost a whole squad of men. Got decorated for it. They died and I got a medal. I dont even need to know what you think about that. There aint a day I dont remember it. Some boys I know come back they went on to school up at Austin on the GI Bill, they had hard things to say about their people. Some of em did. Called em a bunch of rednecks and all such as that. Didnt like their politics. Two generations in this country is a long time. You're talkin about the early settlers. I used to tell em that havin your wife and children killed and scalped and gutted like fish has a tendency to make some people irritable but they didnt seem to know what I was talkin about. I think the sixties in this country sobered some of em up. I hope it did. I read in the papers here a while back some teachers come across a survey that was sent out back in the thirties to a number of schools around the country. Had this questio
Here a year or two back me and Loretta went to a conference in Corpus Christi and I got set next to this woman, she was the wife of somebody or other. And she kept talkin about the right wing this and the right wing that. I aint even sure what she meant by it. The people I know are mostly just common people. Common as dirt, as the sayin goes. I told her that and she looked at me fu
Chigurh limped up the seventeen flights of concrete steps in the cool concrete well and when he got to the steel door on the landing he shot the cylinder out of the lock with the plunger of the stungun and opened the door and stepped into the hallway and shut the door behind him. He stood leaning against the door with the shotgun in both hands, listening. Breathing no harder than if he'd just got up out of a chair. He went down the hallway and picked the crushed cylinder out of the floor and put it in his pocket and went on to the elevator and stood listening again. He took off his boots and stood them by the elevator door and went down the hallway in his sockfeet, walking slowly, favoring his wounded leg.
The doors to the office were open onto the hallway. He stopped. He thought that perhaps the man did not see his own shadow on the outer hallway wall, illdefined but there. Chigurh thought it an odd oversight but he knew that fear of an enemy can often blind men to other hazards, not least the shape which they themselves make in the world. He slipped the strap from his shoulder and lowered the airtank to the floor. He studied the stance of the man's shadow framed there by the light from the smoked glass window behind him. He pushed the shotgun's follower slightly back with the heel of his hand to check the chambered round and pushed the safety off.
The man was holding a small pistol at the level of his belt. Chigurh stepped into the doorway and shot him in the throat with a load of number ten shot. The size collectors use to take bird specimens. The man fell back through his swivel-chair knocking it over and went to the floor and lay there twitching and gurgling. Chigurh picked up the smoking shotgun shell from the carpet and put it in his pocket and walked into the room with the pale smoke still drifting from the canister fitted to the end of the sawed-off barrel. He walked around behind the desk and stood looking down at the man. The man was lying on his back and he had one hand over his throat but the blood was pumping steadily through his fingers and out onto the rug. His face was full of small holes but his right eye seemed intact and he looked up at Chigurh and tried to speak from out of his bubbling mouth. Chigurh dropped to one knee and leaned on the shotgun and looked at him. What is it? he said. What are you trying to tell me?
The man moved his head. The blood gurgled in his throat.
Can you hear me? Chigurh said.
He didnt answer.
I'm the man you sent Carson Wells to kill. Is that what you wanted to know?
He watched him. He was wearing a blue nylon ru
The reason I used the birdshot was that I didnt want to break the glass. Behind you. To rain glass on people in the street. He nodded toward the window where the man's upper silhouette stood outlined in the small gray pockmarks the lead had left in the glass. He looked at the man. The man's hand had gone slack at his throat and the blood had slowed. He looked at the pistol lying there. He rose and pushed the safety back on the shotgun and stepped past the man to the window and inspected the pockings the lead had made. When he looked down at the man again the man was dead. He crossed the room and stood at the doorway listening. He went out and down the hall and collected his tank and the stungun and got his boots and stepped into them and pulled them up. Then he walked down the corridor and went out through the metal door and down the concrete steps to the garage where he'd left his vehicle.
When they got to the bus station it was just breaking daylight, gray and cold and a light rain falling. She leaned forward over the seat and paid the driver and gave him a two dollar tip. He got out and went around to the trunk and opened it and got their bags and set them in the portico and brought the walker around to her mother's side and opened the door. Her mother turned and began to struggle out into the rain.
Mama will you wait? I need to get around there.
I knowed this is what it would come to, the mother said. I said it three year ago.
It aint been three years.
I used them very words.