Ambushing the Ambusher

Excerpt from Friend of the Devil:

"Hamer’s head surveys the street before disappearing again. This time, I slowly count to twenty and when it doesn’t reappear, I step off the front porch and walk very deliberately down the sidewalk in the opposite direction, turning right at the corner and then left at the beginning of the next block. I walk up past the well-to-do homes, walking erect like I belong here, a respected businessman, a gentleman of Del Rio, Texas, and not some low-down desperado with a price on his head. The houses all have their windows open and from every one of them, music from the radio is issuing forth; a mandolin quartet, it sounds like, and a lone guitar marking out a melody that might have once been Wildwood Flower. But they’ve changed it, made it their own song. I wonder who these guys are. No way of telling. Musicians come and go from Del Rio so quickly all the time. Who knows, if Hamer kills me today, before I’m even laid out, one of those mandolin players will suddenly sprout a personality, call himself Tex or Lonesome Bob or something similar, and the Royal Consolidated Chemical Corporation of Chicago, Illinois, will have him shilling for them and they won’t ever give a thought to who might have preceded them any more than I did."

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