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washed out of a river, a man who should have been somewhere else and long gone, renamed and reinvented, hidden in the secret places of the Federal Witness Protection Program.
    â€˜Weary’s close enough,’ she answered House finally, and she heard a strange lifeless quality in her voice.

4
    She thinks, I need wheels. She’s never stolen anything in her life, she doesn’t know how to begin. She’s imagining unlocked doors, keys dangling inside, maybe somebody running an errand inside the shopping mall, a forgetful person. Theft’s wrong, but maybe not when your life’s at stake, maybe there’s some kind of forgiveness under special circumstances and God makes allowances.
    She walks up and down and she’s dog-tired and scared because she doesn’t know how long she’s got before they find her. And she’s sweating, she’s melting away under the hot noon sun. It ain’t pleasant, she needs a bath and a shampoo and perfume.
    She stops, pretends she’s fumbling inside her bag, a canvas thing that holds all her sorry belongings. O Jesus, she’s come a long way down from the time she shared the big house in Carefree with Ángel, and the rooms all tiled blue and white, and fans that turned beneath the ceiling. And the greenhouse, the conservatory Ángel called it, where there were rows and rows of green foliage in pots, and the air was scented with herbs. But this is like a memory she stole from somebody else, a memory of mint and coriander.
    She fumbles inside the bag, trying to look busy, because there’s a security guy in a blue uniform standing at the entrance to the mall and gazing out across the parking-lot and his gun shines in his holster. He’s all glinting metal and his sunglasses are mirrors and she knows, she knows , he’s watching her as she moves between the cars and glances in each one, looking for keys. She takes a Kleenex out of her bag and raises it to her forehead, and the security guy shifts his face a little. She wipes sweat from her brow and dumps the used tissue in a trash can.
    People come out of the mall pushing carts. Kids and women, and she remembers Ángel once said, We’ll start a family , but that was before it all went to hell, which happened real fast in the end. Now she listens to the clatter of cart wheels and a kid singing a commercial jingle for some pizza joint and a mother calling out to a stray child, ‘Come back here, Terry. Don’t go wandering away, you hear?’
    She watches the mother catch the kid and lift him inside the shopping cart. The security guy is moving out of the doorway and coming across the lot, and this is exactly what she don’t need. She rummages inside the bag again for something to do, and wonders if she looks like a bum because her hair’s not combed and she don’t have makeup on, or if she looks suspicious. What’s she doing in Farmington, New Mexico anyway? She holds her breath. She hears the guard’s boots on the tarmac; clack, clack, clack. She wonders what he wants. She wonders how long she’s got before they catch her up. You wonder a whole lotta things when you’re scared.
    The guard says, ‘You OK?’
    She looks at him through her grease-smudged sunglasses. ‘Yeah, yeah fine.’
    â€˜I been watching you,’ he says. ‘You look kinda distressed.’
    â€˜Distressed?’ She says the word deezteressed . Her pronunciation, it’s like giving something away. It’s all fear and sunlight and sweat. Ángel used to say, Learn how to talk right . Big shot Ángel, learn how to talk right. I learned how to talk well enough, she thinks. Too well. The sky is coming down on her, blue and heavy, squeezing her dry like an orange in a drought.
    The guard says, ‘You sure you’re OK?’
    â€˜Fine,’ she says. Go away, she thinks. Quit watching me.
    â€˜It’s a hot one,’ the guard says.
    She looks