That time of year the cotton fields were barren. Just huge fields of plain dirt with millions of empty furrows all lined up and marching away over the hills. It makes you sad. Dead-looking oaks, flat gray grass. Ghost dogs. Dust devils. Butterflies and candy wrappers chasing along on the wind. The sad little road. It does make you sad. And this armor-plated truck crawling on the edge of Texas like a bug…And as it climbed up and up, the truck went slower and slower. “I think I can, I think I can…” Until near the top of the grade it wasn’t doing any better than ten, fifteen miles an hour. At that point a General Motors pickup truck full of armed men from a right-wing paramilitary gang called “The Order” swung around from behind, and they held up a sign saying “PULL OVER OR DIE.” (Pause. CASS puts out his cigarette.) They had some big guns. Mean ordnance. M-sixteens and stuff like that, shoot right through a bullet-proof window. The guards pulled over and gave up dozens of sacks of cash totaling just about twenty million dollars…It’s not the money. The money doesn’t count. Only the hugeness and strangeness of the number. Twenty million. Twenty million. It’s like a theory. Twenty million. (Pause.) The robbers departed and split up into three groups. One bunch camped out on Orr Springs Road with ten million bucks. Another bunch went up to their headquarters in eastern Washington, also with several million dollars. And two men took the guns and a few hundred thousand to the Lu Anne Motel. This motel. Our motel. (SALAZAR pauses while he lights another cigarette butt for CASS.) The two guys stayed in this room after the robbery. (Pause.) When they got up the next day they looked out the window and what should they see parked out there but the same Brinks truck they knocked over yesterday. The FBI and the Marshals and the two Brinks guys were checked in here, too, they filled the whole place! Man, those two bad boys tiptoed out of town. They left their guns and the cash in an olive-green duffel bag under this bed, and nobody found it for eighteen months. (Peering under the bed:) It stained the rug green. See?

CASS (also peering): Kind of. Yeah…

Somewhere in here the music stops…

SALAZAR: They call this the Green Room. They really oughta charge extra for this room but they don’t. (Pause.) Right here. We’re right in the middle of the history of crime. That’s the whole feeling I want you to share with me.

CASS: Thank you. (Pause.) That is a fantastically realistic ID you have there.

SALAZAR: Thanks. It was very expensive. It actually is real. All but the picture.

CASS: What happened to the real Agent Salazar?

SALAZAR: I’m asking the questions.

CASS: Yeah?

SALAZAR: Yeah.

CASS: But didn’t I just ask you one? And didn’t you answer me back with something that wasn’t a question? In fact aren’t I just asking a whole string of ’em one-two-three right now?…What happened to him.