The sun had just cleared the mesa to the east, spreading a thin light like gas across the treeless plateau. It was already hot. Mead had walked only an hour from the gully where he'd hidden the car, but his T-shirt and his Denver Bears baseball cap were soaked with sweat. He was still a little drunk from the day before, and now he was paying for it.

Ahead maybe a mile was the open blue-black gulf of Dominguez Canyon against the tans and soft pinks of the uplift beyond. Across the canyon, two arroyos running east and west already caught the full sun. These were Escalante and Dry Fork, which started higher in the escarpment and descended steeply toward the river. The arroyos had no water in them because the summer had been so dry, but he knew there would be water in the river which he could not see yet, and water at the spring at the Shrine of Maria Rivera. He took off his cap and wrung out the sweat and tucked his long hair back so it was not in his eyes. He should have been at work. Ramos, of course, would cover for him, but he ought to have gone in just for the sake of appearance. And he shouldn't have taken Angie's car. That was stealing, he supposed, if you defined stealing in a certain way, but the car had been there and he took it, though his had been there, too. It had been an afunctional synapse. He'd been dazed when everything blew up so suddenly. He was still dazed.

"When you're in trouble," Ramos said, "the best thing to do is drink. We'll go to the Nugget over in Palisade." "I don't want to go to the Nugget."