"That what they sound like, up in Alaska?"

"Alaska, by way of Texas."

Marty laughs. "Alaska by way of Texas. Sure, sure."

**

("Truth is," he begins, eyes fixed on the little red camera light, "I felt bad for the kid. He seemed too smart to be doing what he was doing, you know? It started off just asking him a few questions, him and his girlfriends down at the bar, then he was the one who followed up with me. Guess he was a fast learner.")

**

Dusty jeans, sharp knees, thick old wristwatch hanging loose like a bracelet on a bony wrist. He's not a good-looking kid, not as used-up-looking as most of the women but that's not saying a lot. His long, wiry arms might be his only good feature, and he shifts in his seat like he's trying to sell them better when Hart approaches. It's a shame, a damn shame. But there's nothing going on in his eyes, nothing to dim or to bunch up like a cat when his female counterparts tell him Detective Hart is only here for what he might know -- there's only a sinkhole that goes down and down and down.

It turns out, Rustin Cohle knows a lot.

**

("Poor kid. What the fuck did he know? He must have read somewhere that if you're invited to dinner you're supposed to bring flowers --"

For the first time talking about Cohle he sounds almost forgiving.)

**

One of the girls asks him where he goes to school. The other one asks if he has any brothers or sisters. And Rust's not exactly nice about answering, but he's not mean, he mostly just looks like he's going to keel over. Maggie tries to be kind, and to her credit she does all right -- has plenty of experience handling boneheaded teenage boys, which probably explains how she's managed to put up with Marty so long. But she can smell the street on him, as he stares piss-drunk at his dinner plate, confounded, and she knows.

**

A stack of Lubbock public library books with lurid titles, a mattress, a coffeemaker. It's all clean -- cleaner than Marty's room, age sixteen -- but it smells like bleach and a little like sex. A rosary pools up on the edge of a plastic dustjacket.

"I didn't know you were Catholic."

Thinking, hey, that's a start. There's schools and all that for Catholic kids, they don't even have to be locals. And it's just making conversation, sounding out what this shellshocked-looking kid thinks like when he's not staring out the window or into his Coke trying to remember when he last saw Dora Lange.

"I'm not."

"Then what've you got a crucifix for?" He can almost answer it himself -- that it's something, somebody's heirloom little enough to carry around with you, that some kind of john is into that shit probably -- but Rust's interruption is a small mercy, even being as it is annoying as hell. He says he likes to think about Jesus in the garden, what kind of father makes his son human just to make him bleed. What kind of son allows his own crucifixion.

**

"Look at you, you've got worms, you've got lice, you've got -- you got God-knows-what--"

"Why do you think I made it all the way down here? Came out here to die, Hart."

**

It doesn't take any kind of detective to tell the kid's been jumped, the next time they reconvene, after a pay-phone call tells him Rust's been asking some questions of his own out in the sticks. (They don't meet at the bar any more; the bar looks bad enough without the two of them talking over their massive backlog of shit in it, sweating cop and beady-eyed hustler.) His already-crooked nose, the one feature on his face that seems like it should belong on someone less broken-down, is painted with blood, and so's his shirtfront. There's a semen stain on his collar, and the sleeve's been torn loose from its setting almost entirely, peeled back from a scraped shoulder. Marty has seen shirts in better shape than that being used for evidence in murder trials.

They don't say anything, not with Marty driving and Rust in the passenger seat. Silent contemplation. The next day he drives out to the only real department store in town and buys him shirts, four or five snug in plastic -- the smallest reward for his help upwards of a beer, the smallest rawest kindness Marty can think of.

**

"Is that your down payment?"

Arrogant as shit about it, his whole bearing is bubbling over with contempt, with the kind of rottenness that makes everything it touches rotten too. He wouldn't understand human decency, wouldn't understand sympathy if you beat his scrawny ass to death with it. What would he know about goodness? He knows Marty has kids; this is the kind of sneering he gets used to, but it still ruffles him.

Hart doesn't look at him, just keeps walking with the ground crunching stickily beneath his feet, and every step between him and that hillbilly bunny ranch is a little more weight off. He never considers whether anybody ever stopped to stick a creased $100 bill in Cohle's hand and make him feel less like a thing.

**

He didn't take time out of his day to get talked down to by a truck stop cocksucker with an eighth grade education. Some idiot kid who can't pronounce half the big words he's using, even Marty can tell that. He can go on and on about infinite spaces or the way red tastes or Jeffrey Dahmer putting The Exorcist III on the TV and drilling holes in boys' heads, but as soon as Marty tries to talk about something halfway pleasant, sports or what he's up to around the house (what he should be up to, as soon as he's got the time) the kid scoffs at him like he's talking gibberish and steers the conversation back to bullshit conspiracy theories and occult-looking swirls. Well, not occult, exactly, but Mr. Bullshit Philosophy never can explain to Hart's satisfaction what the exact difference is between his own never-ending fretting about religion and everybody else's, except which one he's currently tearing into.

"Great, you're just full of ideas. Why don't I run down to the station and pick up your Junior Detective badge-"

He doesn't really buy it as one continuous theory until Rust shows him his notebook, a big black leather notebook full of smudgy pencil and black ink. And damn it, it's crazy as hell, it's stupid as shit, but it looks for a moment -- sticks, thorns, antlers, spirals -- like the real thing.

**

They've had a few more heart-to-hearts since then. Thank fuck, Marty can talk to anyone, and it's not hard to get the outline of the story out of him. His father sounds like some of the vets Marty's known, some of his dad's old friends, but the kid won't say. Some kind of crazy survivalist, and it ain't hard to imagine why a kid would want out, want to see the world, even without other factors. (From the way the kid's shoulders bunch up when Hart's hand claps him on the shoulder, there are other factors, all right.) Anybody could come out of that wrecked, and by a certain rubric, Rust is a success -- he's got some place to stay, he's got other skills besides hooking, he's a bright kid, by the grace of God he doesn't have any hideous diseases. He doesn't walk or talk like a fag, which might be his best defense against being seen as one. And he sure seems to want to go straight. But as soon as he opens his mouth, you can tell he's fucked in the head.

"You've got to get over this thing of yours. The rest of the world ain't like that, Rust. That's the point. I've seen some terrible shit, but at the end of the day you come home, you've got to find the good. Normal people can't just walk around thinking like that. It'd fuck you over."

"Normal people are only living with their distractions, Work, family, religion, you put it all on like armor, don't even realize how selfish it is. Thinking if you've got enough of it you can stop up the gaps, keep the cold out. It's cowardly."

"I'm not going to argue this with a kid. Thirty-odd years, I know what I'm talking about. Trust me."

Cohle shrugs deeper into his ugly leather jacket despite the weather and stares at the ground.

**

("There were documented accusations of unprofessional behavior. You running around the backcountry, chatting up witnesses with a kid in tow, giving your real partner the brush-off. Overstepping your jurisdiction. Roughing up suspects."

"Christ, he's -- he was a punk kid, what's exactly what he was. He didn't know what the fuck he was doing. He was trying to make sense out of a lot of shit in his life -- Rust ended up connecting a lot of dots just to say he did, that they weren't random after all. He saw a lot. That didn't mean he made sense of it, but he tried."

"Did you and the Cohle boy ever, to your knowledge--"

Marty interrupts him, incensed, before Papania can get another word out.

"Did him and me ever what?"

**

In the truck, Rust drinks out of a brown plastic pharmacy bottle. His skinny brown neck is corded with tendons.

Hart considers his record of prior arrests, wonders if it's worthwhile to get solicitation charges added on like the cherry on top of that shitheap. If not for Hart, he'd probably be as dead as Dora Lange, one way or another. Half-eaten by gators somewhere, aspirating his own puke on the carpeted floor of a Ramada Inn, cut up into little pieces, stripped naked and bled white with a mess of antlers stuck to his head. Lots to be grateful for. Foster system wouldn't take him, school system couldn't keep him in the classroom and out of the library for longer than a week, and there was no chance of finding whatever kind of frozen shithole he'd clawed himself out of. Somewhere under all the bullshit is the raw material for something that might be actually useful -- a protegé, maybe, the son he's never had and that Maggie is nowhere near ready for yet. If he'd quit sucking roadhouse dick for dollars -- get clean, stop doing whatever it is he does when Marty's not around -- he could be something. Nothing great, maybe, but something.

When he is busted, there's not a whole lot Marty can do to help. There aren't a lot of boys hustling around these parts. Not a big market for it, or the cops don't care enough to bust anybody for it, least of all out-of-state kids. When he's in that little room he asks for Marty like he only knows one name. As soon as word gets around, folks are laughing about him. Down at the station the kid is white and furious and not saying anything to anybody.

**

The boy holds up his hands, uneasily close. "I can smell it on you. When you're real close -- like you are now -- I can fuckin' taste it."

"What do you know about what pussy tastes like?", Hart says, when what he means to say is, what do you know about my wife?

**

("That's it, that's what this is about. That's your big theory. That a teenage boy weighing a, a buck-forty soaking wet killed that girl and strung her up like that out in cane country."

"Not necessarily working alone. You said it yourself, he was a quick study.")

**

"I took a chance for you, you ungrateful piece of shit faggot. I took a chance on you and what the fuck do I get--"

The kid can take a punch. So that's something, as Marty pulls back to go after him again, his whole body like a fist. Another swing, he dodges, his knuckles connect against Marty's ribs and Hart slams him like a swat from a black bear. Another dodge. When he goes down it's hard, scrambling on his back, and he kicks against each strike, twists until Hart is squarely on top of him and hitting blindly at whatever he can. The boy tries to protect his face, his hands, but he isn't very good at it.

Marty can't stop, hammering away with the bottoms of his fists and thumping on his chest until Rust's wiry body quits heaving. The kid never says a fucking word.