Yes we do. We have a three X beaver in the Resistol and a little better grade in the Stetson. A five X, I think it is.
Let me see the Stetson. That silverbelly color.
All right sir. Are white socks all right?
White socks is all I wear.
What about underwear?
Maybe a pair of jockey shorts. Thirty-two. Or medium.
Yessir. You just make yourself comfortable. Are you all right?
I'm all right.
The man nodded and turned to go.
Can I ask you somethin? Moss said.
Yessir.
Do you get a lot of people come in here with no clothes on?
No sir. I wouldnt say a lot.
He carried the pile of new clothing with him to the dressingroom and slid off the coat and hung it from the hook on the back of the door. A pale dried blood was crusted across his sallow sunken paunch. He pushed at the edges of the tape but they wouldnt stick. He eased himself down on the wooden bench and pulled on the socks and he opened the package of shorts and took them out and pulled them over his feet and up to his knees and then stood and pulled them carefully up over the dressing. He sat again and undid the shirt from its cardboard forms and endless pins.
When he came out of the dressing room he had the coat over his arm. He walked up and down the creaking wooden aisle. The clerk stood looking down at the boots. The lizard takes longer to break in, he said.
Yeah. Hot in the summer too. These are all right. Let's try that hat. I aint been duded up like this since I got out of the army.
The sheriff sipped his coffee and set the cup back down in the same ring on the glass desktop that he'd taken it from. They're fixin to close the hotel, he said.
Bell nodded. I aint surprised.
They all quit. That feller hadnt pulled but two shifts. I blame myself. Never occurred to me that the son of a bitch would come back. I just never even imagined such a thing.
He might never of left.
I thought about that too.
The reason nobody knows what he looks like is that they dont none of em live long enough to tell it.
This is a goddamned homicidal lunatic, Ed Tom.
Yeah. I dont think he's a lunatic though.
Well what would you call him?
I dont know. When are they fixin to close it?
It's done closed, as far as that goes.
You got a key?
Yeah. I got a key. It's a crime scene.
Why dont we go over there and look around some more.
All right. We can do that.
The first thing they saw was the transponder unit sitting on a windowsill in the hallway. Bell picked it up and turned it in his hand, looking at the dial and the knobs.
That aint a goddamn bomb is it Sheriff?
No.
That's all we need.
It's a trackin device.
So whatever it was they was trackin they found.
Probably. How long has it been settin there do you reckon?
I dont know. I think I might be able to guess what they were trackin, though.
Maybe, Bell said. There's somethin about this whole deal that dont rattle right.
It aint supposed to.
We got a ex-army colonel here with most of his head gone that you had to ID off of his fingerprints. What fingers wasnt shot off. Regular army. Fourteen years service. Not a piece of paper on him.
He'd been robbed.
Yeah.
What do you know about this that you aint tellin, Sheriff?
You got the same facts I got.
I aint talkin about facts. Do you think this whole mess has moved south?
Bell shook his head. I dont know.
You got a dog in this hunt?
Not really. A couple of kids from my county that might be sort of involved that ought not to be.
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 questionnaire about what was the problems with teachin in the schools. And they come across these forms, they'd been filled out and sent in from around the country answer in these questions. And the biggest problems they could name was things like talkin in class and runnin in the hallways. Chewin gum. Copyin homework. Things of that nature. So they got one of them forms that was blank and printed up a bunch of em and sent em back out to the same schools. Forty years later. Well, here come the answers back. Rape, arson, murder. Drugs. Suicide. So I think about that. Because a lot of the time ever when I say anything about how the world is goin to hell in a handbasket people will just sort of smile and tell me I'm gettin old. That it's one of the symptoms. But my feelin about that is that anybody that cant tell the difference between rapin and murderin people and chewin gum has got a whole lot bigger of a problem than what I've got. Forty years is not a long time neither. Maybe the next forty of it will bring some of em out from under the ether. If it aint too late.
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 funny. She thought I was sayin somethin bad about em, but of course that's a high compliment in my part of the world. She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: I dont like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I dont think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. The way I see it goin I dont have much doubt but what she'll be able to have an abortion. I'm goin to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she'll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation.
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.