There it was. It seemed important to Jamie, learning this missing name. As if something were completed. As if named, he might know these men. Odd, he thought: Sammy, Lester and Bishop. Wondered what it was about the driver that kept him on that slight remove, the lacking first name. Some measure of respect perhaps? Maybe Sammy wasn’t the boss of the three after all. Perhaps the silent man. Jamie felt he’d missed something crucial here.

The big Dodge raced down the road, gravel spewing, the headlights a soft wash of color, the color the only warmth in the night.

Sammy put his left hand up, ran it across Jamie’s shoulders, rubbed them through the coat, not roughly. He said, “Pick it up a little, Bishop.”

Then, as the car jumped forward, he grabbed a hard big-twisted handful of Jamie’s jacket and pushed forward, sending Jamie’s head down toward his knees. At the same time Lester did the same on the other side and both men used their other hands to grasp Jamie’s thighs, underneath, just back of his knees. All this in one furious motion that continued as they lifted him up and threw him out of the back of the car.

Face up, in the air. The stars still, distant, a moment suspended. Then down hard to bounce on the back of the Dodge, something in his back or shoulder cracking, and then down harder face first into the road. The diminishing funnel of engine sound from the Dodge the last place he traveled.

A great horned owl high up in a hemlock one tier back from the road had been watching a vole in the high grass the other side of the road. When the automobile broke through the night the vole shrank tight against the earth and the owl tipped up on its talons, the muscles tensing where the wings lifted from the back. Then the automobile was gone and the owl lifted off, a long dive swooping silent that with a single wingbeat carried it over the road and the strange bundle below and on into the grass where it seized up the vole and again a single beat lifted the bird back into the night. Up to a new perch.