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by Cormac McCarthy Pages 1 - 20 (Brought to you by jat impatientreader.com) The book starts with a lawman explaining how he sent a young man to the gas chamber in Alabama. He talks about how he visited the man three times, once on the day of his execution, and how the young man had told him that he had planned to murder someone for a long time, and how he'd do it if he got out again, and how he knew he was going to hell. The lawman thinks about how he didn't want to see anyone like that ever again, but it was nothing compared to what was coming up. In the next scene, we have a deputy and a man named Chigurh handcuffed in a small town jail somewhere. The deputy is calling his sheriff when Chigurh manages get his arms out in front of him and choke the deputy to death. He gets out of the handcuffs, cleans himself up, and takes the deputy's money from his wallet. He then picks up a cattle stun gun the deputy had been carrying and takes the deputy's vehicle. He has evidently gotten arrested just for the purpose of taking the deputy's car. Chigurh stops a man on the highway with the vehicle's siren and when the man gets out of the car, kills him with the cattle stun gun. The next chapter has our main character, Moss, sitting on a ridge above a valley and looking through a pair of binoculars. He has a rifle with him, and he's hunting antelope. He gets set to take a shot and does so, but misses. He follows the path the antelope takes and looks through the binoculars again, where he sees an old dog limping along. Moss continues to walk along the ridge until he gets to a trail leading down into the valley below. He looks down and sees three trucks, and nearby appears to be men lying on the ground. He walks down to the valley and notices that there are bullet holes in the trucks, most put there by automatic weapons. He sees that there is one man still alive in one of the trucks, asking for water. He tells the man he doesn't have water and takes a small machine pistol from him. He looks in the back of the truck and finds packages filled with heroin. Moss wipes his prints from everything he touched and then talks to the man in the truck again, asking him if he has any more clips for his gun. He takes a couple from the man, and goes back to the first truck, where he sees that someone walked away from it, leaving their blood on the grass. He follows the trail along until he finds the last dead man. The man has a heavy briefcase, which Moss can sense has money in it. He opens it, and it has bundles of one-hundred dollar bills. He thinks that his whole life is now in front of him, in the briefcase. He thinks about what to do, and how he probably wouldn't want to try to cross over the terrain he'd just gone across in the dark where a rattlesnake could bite him. Also, he knows that someone is probably going to be coming back for the money, so he doesn't want to be around when that happens. He decides to continue across country until he meets up with the road that he'd driven up on in the early morning. He does this, and gets to his truck in the late afternoon. He takes off and finally gets back to the trailer where he lives. He hides the guns he's taken underneath the trailer, and then goes in with the briefcase. His wife asks him where he's been and what he has in the briefcase. He tells her money, but she doesn't believe him. He goes to get a beer from the refrigerator while she asks for his keys to go out and get cigarettes. Characters: Chigurh - assassin for hire |
