“At’s arright. I got it.”

The hitchhiker dodges cars as he makes his way across the busy main street.

“Crazy somofa…”

He can survive angry gangsters and murderous bikers, but he’s going to get run down by an old man in a Ford. Unbelievable. He looks ridiculous too. The hitchhiker’s other change of clothes was a pristine, starched white shirt and gray slacks, held up high by classic leather suspenders. There was a wide striped tie as well, but he elected to leave that in the bag.

It’s strange to go from an ordinary workingman’s denim jacket and spun-thread trousers to looking like a poncey bank apprentice, straight from the graduating class of some accounting school. The driver recalls the conversation regarding the hitchhiker’s time served. What he said about being sentenced to one jail and then being transferred to another: it sounded too much like the man he was after. The part about working down in Death Valley didn’t add up, though; and now here he is, darting out in front of cars in Omaha, Nebraska, about to treat a stranger to a new set of clothes. The driver asks himself: is that bizarrely formal shirt and suit pants the same courtroom attire that Paula, and her father, faced down from the witness stand when they put her attacker –now murderer- away for the past five years. The driver tells himself that if he was around at the time, he would have blown the son of bitch away right there, from a back row seat in the courtroom, or on the courthouse steps as they dragged that lowlife away.

“What’s stopping ya now?” The question that had been haunting the driver, really since he was first faced with the odd drifter, finally bubbles up into words. True, they’re not eloquent enough to express the tangle of doubt and suspicion the driver knows only as a relentless nausea and a dull, burning throughout his eyes and ears that he has so far been unable to shake. If only he could know for sure, he could act, and be done with this whole ceremony that has managed to stretch itself into a two-day-plus road trip. Feelings are fine -even harrowing, shit-wrenching gut feelings- but the driver wants to feel, most of all, whatever it was the murderer felt that night when he took Paula’s life. If it was elatedness, then he wants the pull of that trigger to be the happiest moment of his life. If it was regret, then the driver will be the most sorrowful son of a bitch to ever fire a gun; if that’s what it takes to make this animal pay.