“Yup,” the bartender says. “I was about to close before you all rolled in.”

“We won’t keep you too late,” Yuma says. “Promise.”

Bob 1 and Bob 2 are getting ready to shoot pool, lagging for the break. Johnny Kickapoo studies the jukebox. Antonia and Elijah, the leaders of the gang, sit head-to-head at a small round table, apart from and somehow above everybody else. Antonia is tall and thin, with icy blue eyes that tell you nothing unless you know her and blond hair she keeps cut short. Elijah is the biggest, burliest dude in the gang, but also the most graceful. Behind his unruly black beard is the face of a king or a prince from a 500-year-old painting.

Pedro, keeping watch out front, opens the door and pokes his head in. “He’s here,” he says, and steps aside to let George Moore’s man pass. George Moore’s man is a Mexican cowboy in a big straw hat. Everybody watches him walk to Antonia and Elijah’s table.

“You’re to come with me,” he says.

Antonia looks at Elijah, and Elijah looks at Antonia. They’ve been together so long, they don’t need words to make a decision. They stand at the same time.

“Hold down the fort,” Antonia says as she and Elijah follow the man out the door. Johnny drops a dime into the juke and punches a couple of buttons. Bob Wills’s “Take Me Back to Tulsa” comes blaring out so loud, everybody jumps.

Out in the parking lot Antonia and Elijah put on their helmets, climb onto their Harleys, and kick them to life. The rumble of the engines shakes the ground and agitates the very atmosphere, waking every slumbering critter for miles around. Neon ricochets off chrome as the Fiends follow the Mexican’s pickup out of the lot and on down the road. It’s so dark out here in the wilds between San Antonio and Laredo, so desolate, they might as well be racing through a black tunnel.

Ten minutes later the truck’s brake lights flare. There’s no sign for Moore’s ranch. Antonia and Elijah would have zoomed right past the turnoff if the Mexican wasn’t with them. He unlocks a gate and waves the bikes through, then drives through himself and gets out to lock the gate before taking the lead again.

The road is dirt now, and the truck throws up a cloud of dust the bikes’ headlights can’t penetrate. Antonia and Elijah hang back so they can breathe. Eventually they turn off the road, following the pickup down a driveway lined with spectral cottonwoods. The driveway ends at a Spanish-style hacienda with thick walls, covered verandas, and a tile roof. The Fiends park their bikes and kill the engines. The silence that replaces the roar is profound, broken only by a dog grousing in the distance.