Miriam takes one last look at the bottle in front of her. More than halfway empty now. She whistles low and slow, and then pulls back the bottle and drinks. And drinks. And drinks. Throat bulging with each gulp. She's already hazy. Her words, already slurring. Might as well go for broke, she figures.

Her throat burns.

But it goes numb fast.

She gasps, catching air, then pitches the bottle over Paul's head. He winces, ducks, and winces again when the bottle pops against the concrete.

"That night," she continues, stifling a little burp, "Ben goes into the bathroom, his head probably full of all the spew that came out of my mean-ass mouth, and he sits down in the shower stall and he peels the sock off of his left foot. Then he sticks the double barrels of a fuckin' shotgun between his teeth – the two barrels forming a sideways eight, what they call a lemniscate, a sign of infinity, what irony, right? – and then he curls his big toe around the double triggers. A tug of the toe. Boom. He was kind enough to do it in the shower so it required as little clean-up as possible for his mother. Nice guy till the bitter, blood-soaked end."

Miriam doesn't stifle the next belch. She vurps whiskey breath. Her eyes water. She tells herself they're just watering because of the whiskey. It is a good lie; Miriam almost buys it.

"The real bite of it is, he left a note. Well, not so much a note as a, I dunno, a postcard. He wrote on a piece of paper in big black marker, 'Tell Miriam I'm sorry for whatever I did.'"

She stares off at nothing, uncharacteristically silent.

TWENTY-ONE

The Suitcase

She throws open the door to the motel (motels, motels, always another motel, another highway, another stop on her coast-to-coast tour of nowhere) and finds Ashley naked, on the bed, his cock in his hand. Miriam can't see the television, but she hears a porny moan, the kind of moan women don't make in real life.

Ashley freaks out, tries to grab for his pants lying in a fabric puddle by the side of the bed. He fails and rolls off the bed, slamming into the floor shoulder-first.

"Shit! You ever hear of knocking? On the door?"

He doesn't put on his pants – he just ducks behind the bed, using it to cover up his nudity.

Miriam marches into the room and flips the blinds closed.

"I paid for this room," she says, then glances over her shoulder. Two blonde trollops with milk-jug breasts are wrapped in a sixty-nine on the tube. They're going at each other like frenzied cats. "And apparently I paid for lesbian porn."

"I thought you were on your date."

"Put on some pants. We have to go."

"Go? What? What did you do?"

Miriam's reached her boiling point. She feels like a cornered rabbit, ready to kick.

"What did I do?" she asks. "Me? That's a ripe one. What did you do is the question we should be asking ourselves, shithead. Why would the FBI be interested in you?"