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They make pretty good oysters there?”
Luntz said, “Best oysters in the world, Juarez,” and hung up.

    She woke on the riverbank with rain falling on her face. She got up and closed herself inside the car. Burrowed into the big blue coat. Woke some time later stiff and cold, having slept deeply and freely.
She found the key and fired it up. Turned on the AM radio and caught a country station drifting over from Sparks, Nevada, while the engine warmed and the defroster blew the mist off the glass. Giant night of stars out there. She headed onto the highway.
The man from Sparks said it was 10:00 p.m. She’d slept like the dead for nearly four hours. Eighteen months she’d spent fighting the judge and Hank, politicking the sheriff and the town council and harrying her lawyers and working the press, campaigning against the inevitable. Now it was over. Time for a long vacation. Not that she could afford even a short one.
At the lounge at the Ramada near the county airport she ordered a second tequila sunrise as the waitress delivered the first one. “And please, please,” she said, “don’t turn on the karaoke.”
“I’ll wait till eleven,” the girl said.
“Just wait till I’m gone.”
“Happy Hour starts at eleven.”
“Then I’m working on a deadline.”
Why do they call it happy, and why do they say it’s an hour? Happy Hour lasts two miserable hours. Aah, she thought—who am I talking to? And how many seconds till some asshole offers to buy me a drink and make me a satisfied woman?
Approximately eighteen seconds. The same skinny guy from the river—the one who’d tossed the gun to the currents—coming back from the pay phone and toilets, now sporting a checkered vest and white tux over his T-shirt. He paused beside her booth. Exactly the cheap bastard for whom the two-dollar window was invented.
“Hey, there,” he said.
“Very suave. You silver-tongued devil.”
“Are you a resident of this motel, or just a patron?”
“I’m not anything,” she said. “I’m having a drink.”
He dropped something, a quarter, stooped to pick it up, dropped it, picked it up again, and stood looking around him as if the room had changed drastically in the two seconds he’d had his eyes off it. Not drunk. A little too vibrant for drunk.
He perched himself on the very outermost corner of the seat across from her, saying, “I don’t usually just walk up and sit down with people.”
“Help yourself. I was just leaving.”
He peered at her, nearsighted or stupid, she couldn’t tell which, and said, “What is your nationality?”
“What?”
“Are you a Spic?”
She stared. “Yeah. I am. Are you an asshole?”
“Mostly,” he said.
“What’s your name?”
He said, “Uh.”
“Uh? What is Uh? Lithuanian or something?”
“You’re witty,” he said. “My name’s Frank. Franklin.”
“Frankie Franklin,” she said, “I have a lot on my mind right now, and I’d like to be alone.”
“No problemo,” he said, and kind of oozed out of the booth and dematerialized.
The barmaid brought her a second tequila sunrise while she ordered a third. “Hey, miss,” Anita said, “when do we get this karaoke rolling?”

    Luntz watched it all unwind. The woman was the hit of the evening, at least in her own opinion. She sat on a stool she’d dragged from the bar and placed exactly next to the karaoke contraption, nobody daring to interfere with this spectacle—singing half a song and talking through the rest of it and selecting another through two hours of encores, but nobody called for them.
She wore a blue coat over the same gray skirt and white blouse he’d seen her in that afternoon by the river. A good-looking woman. With or without makeup, in any style of clothes, drunk or sober. “Thank you very much, I love this town!” she said many, many times.
She stopped reading the lyrics on the screen and made up her own instead, and then stopped singing the melodies and made those up too, closing her eyes and