He knows that Paula’s killer, her ex-lover- was serving time in Berta Breck, and then San Quentin. That is nowhere near Death Valley; but it’s possible that they’ll send free labor to wherever it’s needed. The whole story about being released in the middle of the desert didn’t add up, and it still leaves the driver with the urge to leave this convict at the side of the road, anywhere. Whether he’s left as a corpse or merely a stranded hitchhiker would depend upon, among other things, how cooperative he proves to be, which doesn’t seem likely judging by experience of the recent past.

The driver knows that this is what he must do, to spare his mission if not his own life. No one gets released from prison in the middle of Death Valley. Those are someone else’s clothes and that is a bag stuffed with a dead man’s, or several dead men’s, belongings. The pretense of traveling to Michigan is probably a cover. It’s clear that he is driving upwards of two thousand miles in the service of an escapee, or else he’s….. “Traveling to Michigan” sticks in the driver’s mind, his throat, and his gut, and refuses to dislodge. No further thoughts can surmount the mental coronary. The driver is left with those words merely running on a loop through his head.

He almost crashes the car. It swerves like an eel on ice, but there is nothing for miles to hit. The hitchhiker stirs. It doesn’t look like he’ll wake. The driver wonders if he strangles him now, would he be able to put up much resistance.

“Can’t be.” The driver has to dissuade himself from making any decisions that could jeopardize his intentions for coming out here in the first place. “I’m in no state to…I’m mean, what’re the odds, really?”

He knows the hitchhiker has stirred an irksome spot within him since he jumped into the pickup. The few things he says don’t sit right with the driver, and the idea of him being a murderer, and an escaped felon, are well within the realm of possibility.

It’s strange, maybe appropriate, how the driver has so far managed to evade that nuanced world where the possible and the impossible are two very separate modes of being, or non-being as one may have it. The driver has had to consider neither one nor the other since making that discovery nearly two days ago. Revenge, as an imperative, does not care for “can” and “cannot.”