LOST! SIAMESE CAT, 2 YRS OLD

ANSWERS TO THE NAME OF RUTA

SHE IS NOISY BUT FULL OF FUN

LARGE REWARD OFFERED

$ $ $ $ $ $

DIAL 764, WAIT FOR BEEP, GIVE YOUR NUMBER

GOD BLESS YOU FOR HELPING

Who is Ruta? Callahan doesn’t know. All he knows is that she isNOISY but FULL OF FUN. Will she still be noisy when the low men catch up to her? Will she still be full of fun?

Callahan doubts it.

But he has his own problems and all he can do is pray to the God in whom he no longer strictly believes that the men in the yellow coats won’t catch up to her.

Later that day, thumbing on the side of Route 3 in Issaquena County under a hot gunmetal sky that knows nothing of December and approaching Christmas, the chimes come again. They fill his head, threatening to pop his eardrums and blow pinprick hemorrhages across the entire surface of his brain. As they fade, a terrible certainty grips him: they are coming. The men with the red eyes and big hats and long yellow coats are on their way.

Callahan bolts from the side of the road like a chaingang runaway, clearing the pond-scummy ditch like Superman: at a single bound. Beyond is an old stake fence overgrown with drifts of kudzu and what might be poison sumac. He doesn’t care if it’s poison sumac or not. He dives over the fence, rolls over in high grass and burdocks, and peers out at the highway through a hole in the foliage.

For a moment or two there’s nothing. Then a white-over-red Cadillac comes pounding down Highway 3 from the direction of Yazoo City. It’s doing seventy easy, and Callahan’s peephole is small, but he still sees them with supernatural clarity: three men, two in what appear to be yellow dusters, the third in what might be a flight-jacket. All three are smoking; the Cadillac’s closed cabin fumes with it.

They’ll see me they’ll hear me they’ll sense me, Callahan’s mind yammers, and he forces it away from its own panicky wretched certainty, yanks it away. He forces himself to think of that Elton John song — “Someone saved, someone saved, someone saved myli-iife tonight…” and it seems to work. There is one terrible, heart-stopping moment when he thinks the Caddy is slowing — long enough for him to imagine them chasing him through this weedy, forgotten field, chasing him down, dragging him into an abandoned shed or barn— and then the Caddy roars over the next hill, headed for Natchez, maybe. Or Copiah. Callahan waits another ten minutes. “Got to make sure they’re not trickin on you, man,” Lupe might have said. But even as he waits, he knows this is only a formality. They’re not trickin on him; they flat missed him. How? Why?