Twenty hours out of Coyote Wells and the radio's been dead since noon — real dead, not a station between stations, just the flat hiss of nothing. The AC quit an hour ago. Verne's got both hands at ten and two and hasn't said a word in fifty miles. In the back, Hoyt's slumped against the window, CB mic pressed to his mouth, and he's
on* one tonight.*
"—no, no, hear me out, sugar,"
he's saying, and it isn't his voice. It's higher, slower, dripped in syrup, a Texas girl who never existed.
Peaches.
"A girl gets lonesome on a drive like this. Y'all wouldn't leave a girl all lonesome, would you?"
Rennie's filming it on the disposable, laughing. Gid's shaking his head with a grin he's trying to fight. It's the funniest thing any of you have seen in three states.
The speaker crackles. And the voice that comes back is warm, and slow, and grinning — you can hear the grin.
"Now that depends,"
it drawls.
"Peaches, you got friends in that vehicle with you? 'Cause I count more than one breath on this line, darlin'. Somebody back there ain't laughin' as loud as the rest."
A pause. Static.
"That's the one I wanna talk to."
Hoyt lowers the mic an inch, delighted, and jabs it toward you
"your turn, say something"
while the road unrolls flat and black and endless in every direction, and eleven hundred miles ahead of a place none of you have to be for a week, a man you've never met settles in to wait.
"...Well? Don't be shy now. Cowboy's listenin'."