By the middle of September he had changed his name three times and was in a new place every night. Today he was in room 338 of a Motel 6 off Interstate 94 in Paw Paw, Michigan, hip deep in a world of self-inflicted shit.

In Ypsilanti he bought a 1983 Toyota pickup from a crippled pawnbroker he knew from Joppatowne, paid for it with the cash he still had from that Denny’s thing, plus he threw in the Joppatowne bull’s Browning nine-mill. Yes, it was risky, but it was even riskier to run around, boost a new ride every forty-eight hours, because that sort of thing would ring a bell in every federal office in Michigan. Better to try to have a legit ride, even if it meant that this legless Joppatowne buddy could shop him if he wanted to; Delbert didn’t think he’d want to, because he knew Delbert was hard-core and never forgot a fink. Can’t run far in a wheelchair, can you?

He put Idaho plates on the Toyota, and he was using an Idaho state DL that the seller swore was clean until May at least, although the seller was dead, so what was Delbert going to do if it was dirty? Dig the guy up and ask for his money back?

Insurance for the Toyota could be faked, and anyway there was no way he was going into the DMV, sit there for six hours staring into the video surveillance, waiting for some black bitch with a faceful of bad attitude to tell him, come back later, Mister Peckerwood. Anyway, God help the Michigan state trooper who stopped him and asked for his papers. Aside from the Thunderbolt hand-zapper in his back pocket and the can of Bear-Back pepper spray in the visor, Delbert always had a Taurus nine-mill tucked up under his crotch while he was driving. Let some harness bull stick his head in the window, Delbert would blow it off his shoulders, right there by the side of the interstate. Thinking about that made him grit his teeth, which was a big mistake.

A mistake because his head felt like a basketball filled with broken glass. Because his jaw hurt. And his teeth hurt. His bones hurt too, but he was getting used to that. Every morning he’d rinse his mouth out with hydrogen peroxide and spit blood into the sink. It would run down the porcelain sideways in a pink flood with ribbons of dark brown, and Delbert would think about the Pick ’N Pay, stand there watching the water run down the drain, and see that bitch-stupid chink clerk dive down, and then his wife, she pops up behind him like a NO SALE sign in a cash register, and she has that ugly little SIG-Sauer in her hand—a SIG, for chrissake; whatever happened to those cheesy little Llamas everybody packed back in the eighties?—and her broad Korean face pale as Sheetrock, her eyes narrow, no fear, full of ugly intentions, then POP POP POP. That wasn’t the first time somebody had shot at Delbert Sutter, but it was sure as hell the first time somebody had hit him.

Actually getting hit was a new experience for him, and for a while back there it had shaken him a little, made him wonder if maybe he was losing a step or two, should maybe get into something else. Also he thought about the kind of picture it must have made on the videocamera up on the wall behind the clerk’s desk. He could imagine the feds sitting around, running it one frame at a time, drinking coffee and eating grilled cheese sandwiches in some puke-green and babyshit-yellow federal office, laughing like hell every time that goddamn chink broad comes in from the storeroom with that SIG in her hand, starts popping away at Delbert, Delbert standing there with his ass in neutral, yelping like a pup, head ducking, not even firing back, just hopping around there like a mope while a chink storekeep stitches him up right in his face. It was weird too, seeing the tiny black hole of the muzzle fill up with fire, and smelling the muzzle blast in his face. It smelled like burned cotton. Delbert had been on the other end of that sort of thing many times, and this was absolutely the first time he’d ever thought about what it was like for the shootee.

It was an embarrassing thing to think about, and Delbert tried not to think about it, but right now, staring at the mirror, it was hard to avoid the subject. Armed robbery was what he did, it was his main thing. Some kidnapping now and then, and whatever looked good at the time, car parts, extortion, running whores, but mainly his job skill was gunpoint robbery—pay or pop—and in all the years he’d been doing it, big complicated jobs like the Wal-Mart in Grand Island or the Key Bank in La Crosse, or little in-and-outs like all those rest area jobs on 1-70, not once did he get shot. Not once. Knifed now and then, one time in the back of his left knee, on account of a belly full of applejack and a careless way with a prison punk, which was kind of trick for the punk, considering his position at the time, although Delbert made it the punk’s last evening as an air breather. Gouged once in the left eye, but you had to expect stuff like that, kind of associates Delbert had to work with. But shot? Not once thank you. He had been proud of that.

Then the Pick ’N Pay thing, which should have been a gimme, make it up as you go, who knew? Now here he is in a Motel 6 in Paw Paw with a hole in his face and a mouthful of broken teeth. He turned his face right and left in the dead-blue light from the overhead fluorescent.

His left cheek was blown out like a pork belly, the eye swollen half-shut, red and yellow streaks in the white around his iris. The shank scar from Junior Beltrano in Deer Lodge looked like a gravel road. He tried his jaw again and felt the grinding where the stumps of his molars butted up against the bone spur. Moving it like that would have put him on his back in a heartbeat if it weren’t for the Demerol. Demerol. Proof of the existence of God.

Now your mood management, that was a big part of the job. Delbert had read The Compendium of Pharmaceutical Supplies from cover to cover in the library at Deer Lodge. Also The St. John’s Ambulance Handbook. Man in his line of work, you couldn’t count on Blue Cross. Heal thyself. Have the right drug for the right situation. Valium or Quaaludes for waiting. Cocaine for a job, in and out all bright-eyed and blood-rushing. MDMA and chinabone horse for sex—him, not her—and when things go to shit, Demerol or Percocet with a chaser of Jim Beam. Vitamins too, lots of C’s, and your multiples, keep those free radicals under control. A man don’t have his health, he’s got nothing.

He still had fifty caps of Demerol, along with some DMT and some ampicillin, and some bellergal for his ulcer. He had taken them from the pharmacy next to a drop-in clinic in Ypsilanti—just walked in and scooped them up while the nurses bumped into each other and slammed off the walls trying to get the hell out of there—and it was a good thing he had them, because they were all that stood between him and some very serious pain. Very serious. Very.

He spit out some blood one more time, wiped his face carefully, and peeled off the bandage to look at the entrance wound. He figured the SIG was a .32 because if it was anything with more weight, he’d be laid out on a tin table in a room full of cadavers with the top of his skull on a sidetray, his belly wide open from his chin to his pecker, a bunch of federal marshals standing around grinning down at his dumb dead face, butting their smokes out in his eye sockets.

Three rounds out and one good hit. Pretty nice shooting for a chink grocer. Bitch had her shit together okay. The round had punched through the flesh just under his left cheekbone, skidded around the upper jawbone, and hammered itself into bits of lead on the big back molars in his lower jaw. It hurt like hell even under the Demerol, but it probably wouldn’t kill him. The thing was to lay up for a while, stop moving around so much, drop out of sight, keep popping megadoses of vitamin C and ampicillin.

With the bandage on, he just looked like a guy who had lost a fight. The broad here at the Motel 6 had blinked at him, but he’d given her all of his lost-puppy bullshit, come on real brave and quiet, called her ma’am around a mouthful of cotton batten, and shuffled some cash across the desk at her. She’d looked at his Idaho ID—he’d used a laser copier to fake in his own photo and then laminated it—then scribbled his name down: Brian Pinnock, 17780 Blue Lakes Road, Twin Falls, Idaho. She took a hundred in advance and wished him a happy stay.

He put some more action on her, she smiled up at him and he felt some movement in Monster for the first time since the Pick ’N Pay. It came to him that maybe he should do her. She had a tight little body under the Motel 6 jacket, was maybe nineteen, but he could break her in good, get her up to his room, grease her up with some of his Demerol and Jim Beam, show her some real moves. It would take his mind off things.

What he was thinking must have been bubbling up somewhere in his swollen black and yellow face, because she suddenly looked down and away, and Delbert felt a thin streak of anger, like a red wire in his brain. Jesus, you stringy little scrag. You have no idea who you are looking at. This is Delbert Sutter in the fucking flesh; if you knew where I’d been and what I’d done with fifty-seven little veal calves just like you, you’d be on your knees in front of me right now, tugging at my zipper with shaky hands, big fat tears running down your scraggy little cheeks.

But the bitch never looked at him again, so he just grinned down at the top of her honey-blond head, picked up his duffel, and came up here to room 338 to figure out what to do about this world of shit he was in. He wiped his face and shut off the water, flushed the toilet, and turned off the light. He blew out a breath and smelled rot in it.

Delbert went back out into the room and lay down on the bed with the TV remote in his hand. He turned on the set and hunted around for some local news. Paw Paw was a good way out of Detroit, west of Kalamazoo, almost all the way across the thumb toward the Indiana state line, but there had been a lot of heat statewide over the Pick ’N Pay because of the video and the publicity.

They had made a big deal out of the clerk shooting the bad old robber, called her a hero, and they had put his face and name out all over the Northeast. It was a good bet that every trooper and county cop in Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan was driving around with a color shot of Delbert Sutter a.k.a. Boyd Whitman a.k.a. Lucas Shawn stuck in his clipboard. Not that Delbert looked much like his picture right now. He grinned at that, winced, and thought to himself, well hell, it’s an ill wind, as his mother used to say. The bitch.

Anyway it wasn’t the county mounties and state troopers who worried him. He had taken that kind of sucker on lots of times, and they couldn’t shoot for shit, half of them were babyfaced high-schoolers who wet themselves as soon as the pieces came out. Ticket-punchers and chicken-coopers with no sand, and balls the size of Chiclets. No, what was worrying Delbert was the goddamn federales. The Marshals.

Delbert had busted out of Joppatowne by drinking six ounces of powdered coal dust mixed with urine, a very old inmate scam that turned your face gray and made your heart race. That always panicked the prison medics, who rotated out of Joppatowne monthly and never left notes on that kind of stunt. So the inmate was always sent up to Susquehanna Medical in a piece-of-shit biscuit-box Corrections van that had to be about a thousand years old.

As usual, the bored-brainless Joppatowne bulls had him in cord-cuff restraints and army handcuffs, the kind with the hinges, not the chain that you could break if you twisted it just right. But Delbert had swallowed a condom with a machine-made cuff key—prison built—inside it, and he figured he could use the sharpened edge of the key to saw through the cord-cuff restraint, which was ballistic nylon, hard as hell to break but easy to slice. More important, Delbert was ready. He had gone over every move lying there in the kitchen grease-hot air-stale sweat prison stink in the middle of the neverending prison night, worked out every possible angle, using creative visualization, getting himself a positive attitude.

On the thruway ramp he bent over and puked the key up by sticking his finger down his throat—had nothing else down there but six slices of white bread, so the hard part was being quiet. It was funny, he thought; every prisoner transport, they stripped you down, looked up your butt, and down your gut, but they never X-rayed you. Maybe now they would. Too late for these dumb bastards here.

Anyway, once he had the cuffs off, and the restraints, he used what was left of the cord-cuff belt to garrote the shotgun bull through the vent window while the other bull smacked the transport van into a bridge-support trying to get his piece out. By the time everything stopped bouncing around, Delbert clubbed the driver six times with his own Monadnock billy club and stayed around long enough to spend a few minutes with the shotgun bull, who was alive at the start and barely human at the end. That was risky, but you don’t get a chance like that every day, and man does not live by bread alone.

The shotgun bull had gray serge pants without a stripe, and his blue shirt fit okay under a blue wool sweater that Delbert had worn, he’d said, “to keep the chills off,” so all that Delbert had to do was step over the boulevard wall and get into the underbrush, change clothes, and start walking. That part was easy. And dodging the local nimrods and plain gray wrappers, you could do that in a trance. But there was another factor out there, the X factor as Delbert liked to think of it. You had your X factor in every job, and the X factor in the Joppatowne break was its being a federal holding cell.

A break from federal holding cells brought out not only the Maryland Fugitive Pursuit Unit but also the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service. Every state had a takedown unit, but the training at state level varied insanely, and they hardly ever talked to each other. The staff was changing over all the time, and sometimes they even worked the takedown unit only part time, so it wasn’t a professional thing with them. And they all hated the FBI, who anyway were too busy trying to get the CIA to share the glamorous stuff.

But the U.S. Marshals? Hard-core. Some of them, if they weren’t cops, they’d have been great bandits. All they lived for was to bust bad guys. Paid like shit but funded like crazy. A bunch of suburban white guys who pumped iron for fun and spent their weekends at the rifle range or running takedown scenarios in between PTA meetings and tailgate parties. They talked to everybody, and they worked all over the country, and with them it was never a part-time thing. With the Marshals, the takedown thing, that was all they did, and they got real good at it and had no shortage of databases and manpower. What they were, when you came right down to it, they were bounty-hunters who had a reputation for no-knock-bang-bang-here’s-the-warrant-oops-you’re-already-dead takedowns, and that made Delbert nervous.

With that in mind, Delbert got up off the bed and walked over to the window. It was a slider, not sealed. Sealed windows were a bad idea. He had taken an outside room off the ground, but not so far off that he couldn’t drop to his wheels if he had to. He pulled the drapes back and looked down at the roof of the Toyota about twelve feet below him. Then he looked around at the other cars.

It was late in the day, and the lot was filling up with family sedans and salesman specials. No Michigan Power vans, no vans with tinted windows, no road-graders doing anything but grading roads, everything normal, just a regular afternoon in Paw Paw, home of the working stiff and Mrs. Stiff in her bleached-out electrocuted do, and all the little Stiffs in their cheap-ass Wal-Mart togs. If the takedown guys were out there, they were very, very good.

Delbert stepped back from the windows, and suddenly the room got close and hot. Something with too many legs crawled up his spine. Furry things chewed at him from inside his gut. He swayed a bit, and the room went red. He knew this feeling. It was that old lockdown feeling.

He pulled on his black loafers and strapped his ankle holster onto his right ankle. He put his .38 Chief in the ankle holster. He pulled his blue sweater on over a white T, tugged on very new jeans, and put on a heavy sheepskin car coat that he had found lying in the back of a parked car in a Fred Myer car lot outside Battle Creek. He shoved his Taurus into the back of his jeans and tightened the belt to hold it in place. Delbert was losing weight, the SIG-Sauer diet; take a round in the mug and give up solid food for three months. It always worked. He popped two Demerols and a cap of ampicillin. It was time for a drive around, see if he could score here in Paw Paw, also see if he had grown a tail during the morning.

Paw Paw had a winery where they made whatever passed for wine in western Michigan, and farther on down the line there was the usual main street with a Key Bank and a First National and a Buick dealership, lots of red-brick houses under old shade trees bent crazy from the Michigan winters, up to their flanks in ragweed and bunch grass. He stopped across from the Buick dealership, in front of a rat’s-ass little bar called Fred’s. He backed in and sat there for a while, watching the block and the passing cars through the heavily tinted windows of the pickup. Nothing. Nobody gunning him sidelong from a parked van. Nobody not gunning him in that undercover-cop sort of way. Shoppers and their brats. Losers in their shit-box sedans, pussy-whipped hubbies staring straight ahead as the missus read him his rights at the top of her lungs. Brain-dead grunge-rockers cruising the drag in a rusted-out Camaro, staring out the windows with dead eyes and slack mouths, Pearl Jam sticker on the rear window. Pearl Jam? What kind of name was that? Those kids get into the lockup, they’d see more pearl jam than they could handle.

He looked back up the street at the Key Bank, had a moment of fond recollection, then over at the First National. Only two ways out of town, a river blocking him on the left, and the interstate to channel him into. Tricky. Some finesse required.

It could be done, though. That was why Delbert was so successful. He always had that positive attitude. The winner’s edge. A man was nothing without self-esteem. Confidence. The key was liking yourself. Forgive yourself for your mistakes. Acknowledge your successes. Delbert did a lot of that. Plus the creative visualization.

Maybe the First National? Too exposed. The Buick dealership? What would they have? They’d have shit. What was he gonna do with car parts and petty cash? A jewelry store? They’d have cameras and zircon reindeer. Come on now, Delbert. Be open to the possibilities. Free that creative spirit …

Maybe Fred’s here. Yeah, Fred’s. It was a wage-slave bar in a working-stiff town. Any Friday, they’d rake in a couple of grand from the townies. This was what? A Thursday. Lay over one more night, check out of the Motel 6, then come back on a side road, light this place up after midnight tomorrow. Collect two G’s. Pass Go. Put Paw Paw in his rearview mirror. Let’s us have a little look-see. Make some calculations.

He climbed out of the Toyota, and the wet wind kicked him right in the teeth. Winded, staggering, he climbed up the wooden stairs to Fred’s and went inside, where he drank cheap Milwaukee draft for five and a half hours by the Muriel cigar clock on the wall over the door to the kitchen. Nobody but the barkeep spoke to him, and everybody knew each other. Delbert made a big impression, but no one told him that.

At midnight Delbert was back at the Motel 6 feeling little of anything. He parked the Toyota in the lot, which was nearly full now, crammed up with rusted-out foreign shit-boxes, Audis and Hondas mainly, too few Chevettes and Horizons. Damn foreign cars, and this is Michigan, for chrissake! He remembered a bumper sticker he’d read, somewhere in Wyoming or Montana: HUNGRY? OUT OF WORK? EAT YOUR IMPORT. That was the trouble with this country. The work ethic was dead. There was no patriotism. It was all ME ME ME. Yuppie larva. Buttwad nigra gangbangers. Immigrant trash. The country was going downhill fast.

Delbert came in through the lobby looking for Debbie or Kimmie or Tammy or whatever the hell her name was, maybe give her another chance at the Delbert Sutter Experience, but there was some nigger dozer-dyke he’d never seen before sitting behind the counter with her fat black face buried in a copy of People magazine with a picture of Jeffrey Dahmer on the cover. That made Delbert grin; old Jeffrey there, he was about as tough as rice pudding. Back at Deer Lodge, the D-Block Basket Boys would have made him the blue plate special every Friday night. With a side of flies.

He took the stairs to the third floor, and by the time he reached it, he was feeling his teeth again and was thinking about the Demerol, which was in his duffel bag. It was damn hot, and he peeled off his sheepskin coat. Fever, maybe? Get more C’s into you, son. He walked along the hall toward room 338. Christ, this place is silent. No television sets playing in the rooms, no voices behind the doors. They made these places out of balsa wood and cardboard, held them together with duct tape, but here we are, a full house in Paw Paw, and no noise any … shit. Oh shit.

Delbert was now racing up the hall toward the back stairs, had his Taurus out, thumbing down the safety, feet booming on the cheap wooden floor, every footfall a red thunderbolt of pure pain, his brain racing—the dozer-dyke with the People magazine, the silence in the halls, all the sideways looks at Fred’s place, no Tammy or Debbie or whatever the hell her—but where?—someone was shouting—a hard voice, definitely federal—and Delbert picked up speed, now there were footsteps close behind him, heavy and coming fast, and Delbert turned to light up this asshole, the Taurus a stainless-steel blur in the lower arc of his vision, seeing the man in the hall, crouching now, a blue-white cloud of flame in front of him—a series of huge slams wrapped in thunder.

The floor hit Delbert Sutter very hard in what was left of his back—he saw the Taurus flying over his head like a big silver bird—and he thought, well, Delbert, you putz, you really shoulda—

They let the customers back into the Motel 6 by one o’clock in the morning. The citizens were in a party mood. Zenia had bought KFC chicken for everyone. A medevac chopper from Battle Creek was airborne now, carrying what was left of Delbert Sutter. Most of his chest was a wind tunnel. You could hand somebody a Coke through the hole, like they did once in South Bend. Triple tap. Center of the visible mass, just the way they taught you at the range. Watching Sutter’s chest, Luke Zitto knew there was no Kevlar, or he’d have put the rounds into his skull instead.

The local fuzz was everywhere, huffing and puffing about jurisdiction and probable cause. Screw them. It was a righteous takedown. They’d been on Sutter since early in the morning, and he hadn’t seen a thing. Horgan had wanted it done outside Fred’s, but Horgan was a worrier and there was no containment. Besides, they had already cleared the motel and put Zenia behind the counter. Zenia with her face buried in People magazine. That made Luke smile, which took a lot these days.

Well, okay then. One less furball stuck to the skin of the planet. He looked down at his hands. The left one shook a little, but the right was rock steady. His heart was still blipping, but he was in a good place.

And Delbert Sutter was history.

Fine.

Bring on our next contestant.