An old dog moseyed across the parking lot. If he were a dog, Asher thought, he’d be crawling up under a cool porch somewhere or getting off that hot blacktop. There was something pitiful about the dog. Maybe because he was all alone out there. Asher reckoned he probably hadn’t had a bath his entire life. He was black and white but everything about him had been grayed by dirt. The dog stopped and sniffed at the air—maybe he was out hunting food and too hungry to be lounging around under a porch—and then he turned and set his eyes right on Asher’s. The dog turned and headed toward the little pinewoods and then Asher could see that his right back leg never touched the ground.

Justin’s snoring piped up like a bad muffler and then he snorted and rolled over, his deep breaths hushed by the pillow. In so many ways he was like a little old man.

Asher looked back to the window but the dog was gone. Now he knew he’d be worrying about him the rest of the night.

He wondered if Lydia had listened to her voice mail by now. And Zelda had reported it by now, surely. That meant the law was most certainly after them. He could have picked up the phone and ended this whole thing before it got any worse. But then he’d have to give up Justin. He couldn’t do that.

The dog was back, his limp more pronounced. His tongue lolled out and it seemed to Asher that the dog was lost. Not lost in the sense that he didn’t know where he was, but that he had no idea what his next move might be, as if he had exhausted all of his options for survival.

Asher padded into the bathroom and filled a thin plastic cup with water. He slipped out of the moldy room and onto the sidewalk where a dozen air conditioners leaked thin streams that ran in jagged lines down the concrete. The heat was thick as curtains. Night was fixing to slide over the world and the cicadas were calming down for that hushed time between daylight and darkness, when crickets rosined their bows. That was what happened in the deepest parts of the pinewoods. Out here by the motel there was only the sound of eighteen-wheelers groaning down the interstate, one after another, an endless noise of commerce.