Not that he couldn’t sympathize with that, either. Ever since his run-in with a skinhead piece of shit named Jesse Earl, Danny had suffered lingering trouble with his own vision. Only his left eye, where Jesse had hit him again and again with the butt of an old Ruger Nighthawk. Danny had kept the eye (and a vicious scar as a souvenir), but it was like there was an electrical short in there somewhere, his sight coming and going. It would start at the edge of his peripheral vision, something dark and furious coming at him with great speed, followed by a squall of gray static and a sharp pain, before correcting itself. A light switch flipping off and on again fast inside his head, disorienting, a bit scary. But so far it had affected only that one eye, and he’d gotten used to it. Or rather, he’d learned how to ignore it. Sometimes he’d go two months without an episode, then he might have two in a day. After his surgery and recovery, and long after he was tired of dealing with doctors, he’d decided not to say anything about it, and he hadn’t told the sheriff or Amé, both of whom would have made it a big deal. A serious deal.

To Danny, it was just another problem to manage, one of life’s little fuck-ups, and something he was willing to accept.

Like Eddy Rabbit—it was just the way he saw the world now.

Danny glanced past Eddy’s shoulder, trying to gauge whether the other man was alone in the trailer. He couldn’t see anything, hear anything except a radio, playing some music in there somewhere. He couldn’t make out the song.

“Look, I’m not here to fuck with you. This is business. All business. I talked to Cody at the Comanche, and Mike over there, too. You know Mikey, right? He damn well knows you.”

The Comanche was Murfee’s cattle auction, and faceless guys came and went through there all the time, grabbing seasonal work. And everyone, everywhere, knew a Michael or a Mike or a Mikey . . .

Eddy considered it, trying hard to keep his bouncing eyes on Danny, or a spot on the ground behind him. It was hard to say.

“Money?”

Danny moved slow, keeping his hands more or less visible and away from his body, and pulled a small roll of dirty bills from his jeans. He and Amé had roughed them up in the street in front of her apartment yesterday. It was the sort of money a full-on tweaker might beg, borrow, or steal.

Eddy focused on that. His whole world narrowed down to it. He moved when it moved.

“Mikey’s a piece of shit to talk about me that way. It ain’t fair, man. Today was the day I was really gonna try to go straight, get clean. Goddamn, I’m tryin’.”