FADE IN: EXT. TORRANCE COUNTY SCRUBLAND, NEW MEXICO, PRE-DAWN A long, flat country going dark at the edges. East of Mountainair, east of anything with a name on a state map. The sky here in early June before the sun comes: the Milky Way still occupying the western horizon like something poured and not yet cleared. The horizon itself is a clean line where the mesa ends and the dark begins, no trees to interrupt it, no lights for thirty kilometers in any direction. The scale of the place has a specific quality: not threatening, not romantic, simply factual. There is a great deal of sky and very little underneath it. A coyote crosses the frame left to right. Not hurrying. It passes through the frame the way it has passed through this piece of desert ten thousand mornings, without ceremony, and disappears into the scrub on the far side. Silence. Then the faint compression of gravel under tires, a sound that travels very cleanly in this air, in this dark. Headlights from the south, low and moving, a station wagon traveling a dirt road at the speed of someone who has driven this road before but not for a while. The car knows the road. The road does not know the car anymore. The headlights hold south-to-north. They slow. Turn onto a property lane marked by a single reflective stake driven into the ground at an angle. The car rolls to a stop. 1