I didnt realize it at the time. When I went down on the border I stopped in a cafe in this town and there were some men in there drinking beer and one of them kept looking back at me. I didnt pay any attention to him. I ordered my dinner and ate. But when I walked up to the counter to pay the check I had to go past them and they were all grinning and he said something that was hard to ignore. Do you know what I did?
-Yeah. I know what you did.
I ignored him. I paid my bill and I had started to push through the door when he said the same thing again. I turned and looked at him. I was just standing there picking my teeth with a toothpick and I gave him a little gesture with my head. For him to come outside. If he would like to. And then I went out. And I waited in the parking lot. And he and his friends came out and I killed him in the parking lot and then I got into my car. They were all gathered around him. They didnt know what had happened. They didnt know that he was dead. One of them said that I had put a sleeper hold on him and then the others all said that. They were trying to get him to sit up. They were slapping him and trying to get him to sit up.
An hour later I was pulled over by a sheriff’s deputy outside of Sonora Texas and I let him take me into town in handcuffs. I’m not sure why I did this but I think I wanted to see if I could extricate myself by an act of will. Because I believe that one can. That such a thing is possible. But it was a foolish thing to do. A vain thing to do. Do you understand?
He shot him in the face. Everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved
drained slowlydown the wall behind him. His mother’s face, his First Communion,
women he had known. The faces of men as they died on their knees before him.
The body of a child dead in a roadside ravine in another country. He lay half headless on
the bed with his arms outflung, most of his right hand missing. Chigurh rose and
picked up the empty casing off the rug and blew into it and put it in his pocket
and looked at his watch. The new day was still a minute away.