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.
He dried the dressing on his leg with a hairdryer and shaved and dressed and went down to the kitchen and ate a bowl of cereal and milk, walking through the house as he ate. In the livingroom he stopped and looked at the mail lying in the floor beneath the brass slot in the front door. He stood there, chewing slowly. Then he set bowl and spoon on the coffeetable and crossed the room and bent over and picked up the mail and stood sorting through it. He sat in a chair by the door and opened the phone bill and cupped the envelope and blew into it.
He glanced down the list of calls. Halfway down was the Terrell County Sheriff's Department. He folded the bill and put it back in the envelope and put the envelope in his shirt-pocket. Then he looked through the other pieces of mail again. He rose and went into the kitchen and got the shotgun off the table and came back and stood where he'd stood before. He crossed to a cheap mahogany desk and opened the top drawer. The drawer was stuffed with mail. He laid the shotgun down and sat in the chair and pulled the mail out and piled it on the desk and began to go through it.
Moss spent the day in a cheap motel on the edge of town sleeping naked in the bed with his new clothes on wire hangers in the closet. When he woke the shadows were long in the motel courtyard and he struggled up and sat on the edge of the bed. A pale bloodstain the size of his hand on the sheets. There was a paper bag on the night table that held things he'd bought from a drugstore in town and he picked it up and limped into the bathroom. He showered and shaved and brushed his teeth for the first time in five days and then sat on the edge of the tub and taped fresh gauze over his wounds. Then he got dressed and called a cab.
He was standing in front of the motel office when the cab pulled up. He climbed into the rear seat, got his breath, then reached and shut the door. He regarded the face of the driver in the rearview mirror. Do you want to make some money? he said.
Yeah. I want to make some money.
Moss took five of the hundreds and tore them in two and passed one half across the back of the seat to the driver. The driver counted the torn bills and put them in his shirtpocket and looked at Moss in the mirror and waited.
What's your name?
Paul, said the driver.
You got the right attitude, Paul. I wont get you in trouble. I just dont want you to leave me somewheres that I dont want to be left.
All right.
Have you got a flashlight?
Yeah. I got a flashlight.
Let me have it.
The driver passed the flashlight to the back.
You're the man, Moss said.
Where are we going.
Down the river road.
I aint pickin nobody up.
We're not pickin anybody up.
The driver watched him in the mirror. No drogas, he said.
No drogas.
The driver waited.
I'm goin to pick up a briefcase. It belongs to me. You can look inside if you want. Nothin illegal.
I can look inside.