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 runningsuit and a pair of white leather shoes. Blood was starting to pool about his head and he was shivering as if he were cold.
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.
Just wait till I get around there.
In the rain, her mother said. She looked up at the cab-driver. I got cancer, she said. Now look at this. Not even a home to go to.
Yes mam.
We're goin to El Paso Texas. You know how many people I know in El Paso Texas?
No mam.
She paused with her arm on the door and held up her hand and made an O with her thumb and forefinger. That's how many, she said.
Yes mam.
They sat in the coffeeshop surrounded by their bags and parcels and stared out at the rain and at the idling buses. At the gray day breaking. She looked at her mother. Did you want some more coffee? she said.
The old woman didnt answer.
You aint speakin, I reckon.
I dont know what there is to speak about.
Well I dont guess I do either.
Whatever you all done you done. I dont know why I ought to have to run from the law.
We aint runnin from the law, Mama.
You couldnt call on em to help you though, could you?
Call on who?
The law.
No. We couldnt.
That's what I thought.
The old woman adjusted her teeth with her thumb and stared out the window. After a while the bus came. The driver stowed her walker in the luggage bay under the bus and they helped her up the steps and put her in the first seat. I got cancer, she told the driver.
Carla Jean put their bags in the bin overhead and sat down. The old woman didnt look at her. Three years ago, she said. You didnt have to have no dream about it. No revelation nor nothin. I dont give myself no credit. Anybody could of told you the same thing.
Well I wasnt askin.
The old woman shook her head. Looking out through the window and down at the table they'd vacated. I give myself no credit, she said. I'd be the last in the world to do that.
Chigurh pulled up across the street and shut off the engine. He turned off the lights and sat watching the darkened house. The green diode numerals on the radio put the time at 1:17. He sat there till 1:22 and then he took the flashlight from the glovebox and got out and closed the truck door and crossed the street to the house.
He opened the screen door and punched out the cylinder and walked in and shut the door behind him and stood listening. There was a light coming from the kitchen and he walked down the hallway with the flashlight in one hand and the shotgun in the other. When he got to the doorway he stopped and listened again. The light came from a bare bulb on the back porch. He went on into the kitchen.
A bare formica and chrome table in the center of the room with a box of cereal standing on it. The shadow of the kitchen window lying on the linoleum floor. He crossed the room and opened the refrigerator and looked in. He put the shotgun in the crook of his arm and took out a can of orange soda and opened it with his forefinger and stood drinking it, listening for anything that might follow the metallic click of the can. He drank and set the half-empty can on the counter and shut the refrigerator door and walked through the diningroom and into the livingroom and sat in an easy chair in the corner and looked out at the street.
After a while he rose and crossed the room and went up the stairs. He stood listening at the head of the stairwell. When he entered the old woman's room he could smell the sweet musty odor of sickness and he thought for a moment she might even be lying there in the bed. He switched on the flashlight and went into the bathroom. He stood reading the labels of the pharmacy bottles on the vanity. He looked out the window at the street below, the dull winter light from the streetlamps. Two in the morning. Dry. Cold. Silent. He went out and down the hallway to the small bedroom at the rear of the house.
He emptied her bureau drawers out onto the bed and sat sorting through her things, holding up from time to time some item and studying it in the bluish light from the yardlamp. A plastic hairbrush. A cheap fairground bracelet. Weighing these things in his hand like a medium who might thereby divine some fact concerning the owner. He sat turning the pages in a photo album. School friends. Family. A dog. A house not this one. A man who may have been her father. He put two pictures of her in his shirtpocket.
There was a ceiling fan overhead. He got up and pulled the chain and lay down on the bed with the shotgun alongside him, watching the wooden blades wheel slowly in the light from the window. After a while he got up and took the chair from the desk in the corner and tilted it and pushed the top backladder up under the doorknob. Then he sat on the bed and pulled off his boots and stretched out and went to sleep.
In the morning he walked through the house again upstairs and down and then returned to the bathroom at the end of the hall to shower. He left the curtain pulled back, the water spraying onto the floor. The hallway door open and the shotgun lying on the vanity a foot away.