No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy Page B

bathroom door had been shut. Now it was open. He stepped into the room and fired two loads through the standing door and another through the wall and stepped out again. Down toward the end of the building a light had come on. Chigurh waited. Then he looked into the room once more. The door was blown into shredded plywood hanging off the hinges and a thin stream of blood had started across the pink bathroom tiles.
    He stepped into the doorway and fired two more rounds through the bathroom wall and then walked in with the shotgun leveled at his waist. The man was lying slumped against the tub holding an AK-47. He was shot in the chest and the neck and he was bleeding heavily. No me mate, he wheezed. No me mate. Chigurh stepped back to avoid the spray of ceramic chips off the tub and shot him in the face.
    He walked out and stood on the sidewalk. No one there. He went back in and searched the room. He looked in the closet and he looked under the bed and he pulled all the drawers out into the floor. He looked in the bathroom. Moss’s H&K machinepistol was lying on the sink. He left it there. He wiped his feet back and forth on the carpet to get the blood off the soles of his boots and he stood looking at the room. Then his eye fell on the airduct.
    He took the lamp from beside the bed and jerked the cord free and climbed up onto the dresser and stove in the grate with the metal lampbase and pulled it loose and looked in. He could see the dragmarks in the dust. He climbed down and stood there. He’d got blood and matter on his shirt from off the wall and he took the shirt off and went back into the bathroom and washed himself and dried with one of the bath-towels. Then he wet the towel and wiped off his boots and folded the towel again and wiped down the legs of his jeans. He picked up the shotgun and came back into the room naked to the waist, the shirt balled in one hand. He wiped his bootsoles on the carpet again and looked around the room a last time and left.
             
    When Bell walked into the office Torbert looked up from his desk and then rose and came over and laid a paper down in front of him.
    Is this it? Bell said.
    Yessir.
    Bell leaned back in his chair to read, tapping his lower lip slowly with his forefinger. After a while he put the report down. He didnt look at Torbert. I know what’s happened here, he said.
    All right.
    Have you ever been to a slaughterhouse?
    Yessir. I believe so.
    You’d know it if you had.
    I think I went once when I was a kid.
    Funny place to take a kid.
    I think I went my own self. Snuck in.
    How did they kill the beef?
    They had a knocker straddled the chute and they’d let the beeves through one at a time and he’d knock em in the head with a maul. He done that all day.
    That sounds about right. They dont do it thataway no more. They use a airpowered gun that shoots a steel bolt out of it. Just shoots it out about so far. They put that thing between the beef’s eyes and pull the trigger and down she goes. It’s that quick.
    Torbert was standing at the corner of Bell’s desk. He waited a minute for the sheriff to continue but the sheriff didnt continue. Torbert stood there. Then he looked away. I wish you hadnt of even told me, he said.
    I know, said Bell. I knowed what you’d say fore you said it.
             
    Moss pulled into Eagle Pass at a quarter till two in the morning. He’d slept a good part of the way in the back of the cab and he only woke when they slowed coming off the highway and down Main Street. He watched the pale white globes of the streetlamps pass along the upper rim of the window. Then he sat up.
    You goin across the river? the driver said.
    No. Just take me downtown.
    You are downtown.
    Moss leaned forward with his elbows on the back of the seat.
    What’s that right there.
    That’s the Maverick County Courthouse.
    No. Right there where the sign is.
    That’s the Hotel Eagle.
    Drop me there.
    He paid the driver the fifty dollars they’d