‘Look around you,’ he says. We’re sitting in a corner booth in the M&M waiting for Winfred to show. Apart from the usual disparate characters snatching a moment’s refuge from life, the place is empty. Barb, the waitress, hovers by the serving hatch staring vacantly into space. Two truck drivers are simultaneously smoking and forking eggs into their mouths. In the M&M it’s business as usual, it’s all dreams and desperation, washed down with cup after cup of weak percolated coffee.

‘See that guy?’ Duval nods at a gimlet-eyed man sitting alone at a table, mopping up yolk with toast. ‘He’s fifty-two, looks seventy. See his boots? They’re bound with duct tape where they’ve worn through. He lives in a cabin with no heating and no water and looks like he’s a dollar away from destitute. In fact he owns a hundred and eighty thousand acres of deeded land and another three hundred thousand acres in leases.’ He points to another table where an immaculately groomed cowboy studies the menu with the intensity of a college professor editing his lecture notes. ‘That guy is a horse trainer. Good one too, but the locals are scared of him. He’s a wild son of a bitch with two brothers in the state penitentiary and his wife’s lover buried in his backyard. I bet if you were to look in his pickup outside, you’d find a pearl-handled colt forty-five in the front passenger seat and a couple of rifles in the back. You know,’ he adds wryly, ‘for the dangerous business of shoeing a horse.’

I look quizzically at the cowboy’s ramrod-straight back.

‘People fare better on the border when they’re not all they seem. Hogan, however, is exactly who he seems and those who flash their credentials around as readily as he does tend to be stripped of them.’

‘By you?’

‘No, not by me. I have no interest in Hogan. But by someone.’

‘And if not?’

‘Then he’ll make his fortune, sell that log monstrosity of his and upgrade to an expensive white stucco build with wrought-iron fencing, a bougainvillea-filled patio and a house alarm system with armed response in Scotts-dale. He’ll spend his retirement showing off to the rest of the community, congratulating himself on getting out of Houston and realizing too late that his new-found freedom in the desert extends only as far as the power of his air-conditioning unit.’

‘If you ever forsake your life of crime, I think you should consider writing a column.’ I sweep a by-line in the air with my hand: ‘Great Stereotypes of the West.’