Sanders needs help walking to the room. Jesse lays him on the bed and strips off his trousers to examine his leg more closely. Through and through, as he thought: one hole in the front of the thigh, one in the back, both barely bleeding now. He’s in a lot of pain, and Jesse feels that patching him up is part of their bargain. He goes through the man’s first aid kit, but he’ll need more than what’s there to do the job right.

Edgar’s on his bed, watching television. He doesn’t look over when Jesse starts making himself presentable enough to go out.

“You want a hamburger?” Jesse asks him.

“Two Big Macs,” Edgar says. “And French fries.”

“What about you?” Jesse says to Sanders.

“I’m fine.”

Jesse walks to an all-night drugstore for peroxide and gauze and buys a few extra burgers from the McDonald’s next door in case Sanders changes his mind.

Sanders, lying in the bathtub, hisses when Jesse pours peroxide into the bullet holes and bloody froth boils out. By the time Jesse bandages the leg and gets the man back to his bed, Edgar is asleep. Sanders nibbles at a hamburger and is soon sleeping too.

Jesse stretches out on the floor with a pillow. It’s the first chance he’s had to relax in two days, but rest doesn’t come easy. Whenever he closes his eyes, a vicious montage unspools. Him stabbed and shot and stabbing and shooting, guns and knives and blood, rovers collapsing into dust. He and the Fiends fight on the mountain, he and the biker fight at the motel, and Johona dies over and over. It’s light outside before exhaustion finally shuts him down.

The first thing he hears when he wakes is laughter. The television. Edgar’s watching from bed, and Sanders is writing to his wife. The sun is down, he can feel it. He stands and stretches. Besides being parched, he’s doing okay. He drinks three glasses of water and takes a long shower, keeping his mind on the night ahead and not letting it stray into sorrow. He tells Edgar to pack his things and is surprised when he fills his grip without kicking.

He walks to the nearest casino and cases the parking lot. Spotting an old Galaxie 500, he sidles up and jams a screwdriver into the door lock. A few taps with a hammer, a hard twist, and he’s in the driver’s seat. After a bit of work on the ignition cylinder, he touches the starter wire to the battery wires, and the car comes to life.