Korinta kept the car window open so fresh desert air could drive away Sparto's sour cigarette smoke. She kept the radio twanging, and almost forgot about the gun under the seat. The big car cruised smoothly along spacious New Mexico landscapes in subtle earth colors within the strongly inked lines of distant mountain ranges.
Korinta did not fear the scent of danger in exotic locales and the whisper of sudden death on the night wind, parts of the NBI mystique, but she dreamed of their retiring to a tropical place of soft sand and curling ocean water and safety. When Sparto drove, he kept a cold beer between his thighs, remembered the gun under the seat, and smiled whenever he spotted a shapely woman walking slowly on some Route 66 byway. Korinta noticed the same young men and women but sipped at her bottle of Evian and worried more about her own figure and wondered how they, passing strangers gone in a heartbeat behind the hurtling 1998 Ford, kept theirs so nicely slim under those tight jeans. Maybe it was the country music and the cow punching and the rodeos, she thought, not to mention the rich air. At the gas station convenience store she noticed they all seemed to have dirty knuckles and black fingernails. Once, when she asked for cigarettes for Sparto, she got a whiff of the blackish blue gunk in the clerk's nails: old motor oil. Yew.
One late morning a state trooper wearing a cowboy hat followed with wailing sirens and flashing lights. It was a hot day, dry, in the alluvial New Mexico flood plain in which no ocean had stewed with its megasharks and dinofish in a hundred million years. Sunlight beat down with a silent force whose inconsequential content could bleach a folded newspaper in half an hour, a watercolor of Paris quais in half a day, a crocheted pillow showing birds and flowers and simpering maidens in three days. Korinta showed him her papers as she waited by the side of the road. She turned the twanging music, with its slide guitar, down but not off. Sweat beaded on her upper lip, and she tapped her hand nervously on the windowsill of the car. Walking slowly, the sheriff returned waving her documents. His heavy black gun swung stiffly in its leather holster, and his cowboy boots crunched on gravel. Korinta waited with anxiously hopping knee. The policeman leaned over as he handed the papers back. "Are you aware that you have a flickering right taillight?"
"A what?" Terror shot through her gut. What if he found Sparto?
"Taillight, Ma'am. Get out and I'll show you."
She sat frozen, staring at him. She thought of Sparto's gun under the seat.
He slowly pulled down his shining sunglasses. "I said, Ma'am, I'd like you to get out so I can show you." He had small yellow teeth and one brown one. His spit glistened on the brown one, and he turned his head to one side for a second, emitting a squirt of brown liquid. "Otherwise I'll have to write you a ticket."
"That won't be necessary," she said quickly, pushing the door open.
He noticed the flutter of her hands but said nothing. Why? Could he not smell her fear, the sweat lying in her dusty pores, the road grime in her long blonde hair tied back in a pony tail? He wore brown leather gloves and stood with his thumbs hooked in his gunbelt as she got out. The glasses were back up under his eyebrows, and she didn't see his eyes, only a reflection of her own slender figure in white slacks and airy blouse with pastel block prints as she climbed out. It was good to walk after her long sitting, and she followed him stiffly around the car. She was taking a chance, she knew, but this vulnerability was her best defense. "See here?" He spat again to one side, without manners or apology. He pointed with a leather-covered finger. "That's the one. Stay here, and I'll show you."
She did as she was told, standing with arms folded, not even pulling her kerchief up from around her neck to cover her head from the blasting sun. The sheriff, on the other hand, had no doubt grown up in this area and seemed to be baked of the same tough material as the adobe walls that occasionally lined cliffsides in this part of the country. Chewing unhurriedly, he walked around the side of the car as if he owned the road, the desert, the whole world. Nobody was arguing the point, anyway. "There!" she heard him say. The row of red lights came on and sure enough, the middle one in the right bar flickered.
"Thank you," she said.
"You get that fixed at the next opportunity," he said.
"Yessir. Thank you."
"I see from your papers you are from New York. Where are you headed, Ma'am? California?"
"Actually, I'm just headed a few miles from here, to the Western Sunset Arroyo Motel."
He froze. "The what?"
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