All quiet. The hoot of an owl.

“You want to go look for him?” the man says. “We could try and find him.”

Bardem doesn’t move at all. “Do you know where he’d hide something?”

The man shakes his head. “No. But you know him better. Where he lives.” He wipes the sweat from his brow and gimps onto his good leg. “I’m bleedin’ bad. You got a bandage?”

“Are you certain?”

“What?”

“I said, are you certain? You don’t know where he’d hide something.”

“I don’t know.”

Bardem puts his eyes on the man. The smile lingers on his lips.

“I need to see ’bout this leg.” The man steps up to the porch and looks at the trailer again. “You got antibiotics?”

“What good are you?”

The man glances at Bardem fast. “What?”

Bardem leans back in his chair and studies the man. The smile is gone now, but the voice remains untroubled. “I said, what good are you? You don’t know where the briefcase is.”

The man’s fingers tighten on the shotgun, but there’s already a pistol in Bardem’s hand, pulled from his belt and leveled at the man’s head.

“Drop it,” Bardem says.

The man doesn’t move. Bardem watches the panic flare in his eyes. He has seen this panic before.

“I think you understand,” Bardem says, “your chances in this situation.”

The man drops the shotgun. It clatters off the porch and whiffs up a puff of dry dirt. “There’s no need for this.”

“But there is.”

“I could leave—”

“Do you ever tire of hearing your own voice?”

The man’s mouth quivers.

Bardem leans back in the chair, holding the pistol. “Do you know how many people have knowledge of this night? I’ll tell you. Three people. Me. You. And Dahl. That’s too many. I don’t like it.”

“I said I’ll go.”

Bardem looks at the trailer. He lowers the pistol.

“I’ll tell you what,” he says. “We’ll settle this like men. Let’s go for a ride.”

They get into the Land Rover and roll out across the dirt in the dark.

A half hour later, Bardem returns alone.

He sits in the lawn chair. He pulls a cigarette and a lighter from his shirt pocket and lights a Marlboro and smokes. The lit end glows a faint red circle in the dark. There is blood on his ostrich-skin boots.

He drops the cigarette butt and smashes it. He whistles softly.

With a water hose, he washes out the trunk. The rubber mat atop the carpet. He comes back and shifts dirt over the blood on the ground with the side of his boot. Crickets chirp in the distance. He climbs the porch steps to the trailer.