All day long, Hank prowls the South Presa Strip from the beer joint to the railroad tracks, covering the distance each way in the space of single malignant thought. Pedestrians he encounters notice only an incongruous chill, it being a typical sunny South Texas November morning, but they shake it off and go on about their business. There are those lost souls with one foot already in the grave who perceive a shadow falling across their paths, but they shrug it off as too much of this or too little of that and stumble along to their doom. Hank can see them, all right, and worse, he can hear them, whining and crying like babies about nothing, but he can't make them hear him no matter how hard he tries. Only Doc can hear Hank, and Doc's nowhere to be found.
Hank's having one hell of a time keeping up with Doc since he's taken to pretending that he doesn't hear him when he calls. Laying off the dope some too, not that he's taken the cure. He's a hophead to the bone, Doc, but lately he's not hitting the old medicine like he used to do. Just dibs and dabs to keep sickness away. Hank knows that the higher Doc gets, the better he listens, and more than anything else, the dead want to be heard.
So Hank just keeps searching, up and down the street, eaten from the inside out with rage; not the white-hot, short-lived kind that exorcises lesser demons and affords a body some kind of relief, but the slow-burning, festering strain that neither time nor distance can ever heal. He checks all of the traps, over and over again. Doc's not in his room or at his usual table or anywhere in between. When Hank comes to the railroad track and tries to cross over, he discovers, to his horror, that without Doc to hitch on to, the other side's closed to him now.
That's the last straw. Doc's given Hank the slip and gone off somewhere he can't follow. Hank throws back his head and he opens his mouth. And nothing comes out. Nothing at all.