He’s five years on the road, give or take, only there’s a lot more than one road and maybe, under the right circumstances, five years can be forever.

There is Route 71 through Delaware and apples to pick. There’s a little boy named Lars with a broken radio. Callahan fixes it and Lars’s mother packs him a great and wonderful lunch to go on with, a lunch that seems to last for days. There is Route 317 through rural Kentucky, and a job digging graves with a fellow named Pete Petacki who won’t shut up. A girl comes to watch them, a pretty girl of seventeen or so, sitting on a rock wall with yellow leaves raining down all around her, and Pete Petacki speculates on what it would be like to have those long thighs stripped of the corduroys they’re wearing and wrapped around his neck, what it would be like to be tongue-deep in jailbait. Pete Petacki doesn’t see the blue light around her, and he certainly doesn’t see the way her clothes drift to the ground like feathers later on, when Callahan sits beside her, then draws her close as she slips a hand up his leg and her mouth onto his throat, then thrusts his knife unerringly into the bulge of bone and nerve and gristle at the back of her neck. This is a shot he’s getting very good at.