"NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN" (2007)

"NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN"

Adapted Screenplay by JOEL COEN & ETHAN COEN

Based on the Novel by CORMAC MCCARTHY

FADE IN:

Snow is falling in a gusting wind. The voice of an old man:

We dissolve to another West Texas landscape. Sun is rising.

We dissolve through more landscapes, bringing us to full day. None of them show people or human habitation.

The last landscape, hard sunbaked prairie, is surveyed in a long slow pan.

The pan has brought into frame the flashing light bars of a police car stopped on the shoulder. A young sheriff's deputy is opening the rear door on the far side of the car.

Close on a pair of hands manacled behind someone's back. A hand enters to take the prisoner by one arm.

Back to the shot over the light bars: the deputy, with a hand on top of the prisoner's head to help him clear the door frame, eases the prisoner into the backseat. All we see of the prisoner is his dark hair disappearing into the car.

The deputy closes the back door. He opens the front passenger door and reaches down for something-apparently heavy-at his feet.

The deputy swings the heavy object into the front passenger seat. Matching inside the car: it looks like an oxygen tank with a petcock at the top and tubing running off it.

The deputy slams the door.

On the door slam we cut to Texas highway racing under the lens, the landscape flat to the horizon. The siren whoops.

THE DEPUTY

Seated in the sheriff's office, on the phone. The prisoner stands in the background. Focus is too soft for us to see his features but his posture shows that his arms are still behind his back.

Behind him we see the prisoner seat himself on the floor without making a sound and scoot his manacled hands out under his legs. Hands in front of him now, he stands.

The prisoner approaches. As he nears the deputy's back he grows sharper but begins to crop out of the top of the frame.

As the deputy reaches forward to hang up, the prisoner is raising his hands out of frame just behind him. The manacled hands drop back into frame in front of the deputy's throat and jerk back and up.

Wider: the prisoner's momentum brings both men crashing backward to the floor, face-up, deputy on top.

The deputy reaches up to try to get his hands under the strangling chain.

The prisoner brings pressure. His wrists whiten around the manacles.

The deputy's legs writhe and stamp. He moves in a clumsy circle, crabbing around the pivot-point of the other man's back arched against the floor.

The deputy's flailing legs kick over a wastebasket, send spinning the castored chair, slam at the desk.

Blood creeps around the friction points where the cuffs bite the prisoner's wrists. Blood is being spit by the deputy.

The prisoner feels with his thumb at the deputy's neck and averts his own face. A yank of the chain ruptures the carotid artery. It jets blood.

The blood hits the office wall, drumming hollowly.

The prisoner walks in, runs the water, and puts his wrists, now freed, under it.

Close on the air tank. One hand, a towel wrapped at the wrist, reaches in to hoist it.

Road rushes under the lens. Point-of-view through a windshield of taillights ahead, the only pair in sight.

A siren bloop.

The car pulls over. A four-door Ford sedan.

The police car pulls over behind.

The prisoner -- his name is Anton Chigurh -- gets out of the police car and slings the tank over his shoulder. He walks up the road to the man cranking down his window, groping for his wallet.

The motorist squints at the man with the strange apparatus.

The man opens his door and emerges.

Chigurh reaches up to the man's forehead with the end of the tube connected to the air tank.

A hard pneumatic sound. The man flops back against the car. Blood trickles from a hole in the middle of his forehead.

Chigurh waits for the body to slide down the car and crumple, clearing the front door. He opens it and hoists the air tank over into the front seat.

Seen through an extreme telephoto lens. Heat shimmer rises from the desert floor.

A pan of the horizon discovers a distant herd of antelope. The animals are grazing.

Reverse on a man in blue jeans and cowboy boots sitting on his heels, elbows on knees, peering through a pair of binoculars. A heavy-barreled rifle is slung across his back. This is Moss.

He lowers the binoculars, slowly unslings the rifle and looks through its sight.

The view through the sight swims for a moment to refind the herd. One animal is staring directly at us, its motion arrested as if it's heard or seen something.

Close on Moss's eyes, one at the sight, the other closed.

He mutters:

He opens the free eye and rolls his head off the sight to give himself stereo.

Close on the hatch-marked range dial on the sight. Moss delicately thumbs it.

He eases the one eye back onto the sight.

Point-of-view through the sight: Moss adjusts to bring the cross-hairs back down to the staring animal.

Moss's finger tightens on the trigger.

Shot: gunbuck swishes the point-of-view upward.

Moss fights it back down.

The point-of-view through the sight finds the beast again, still staring at us.

The sound of the gunshot rings out across the barial.

Short beat.

The bullet hits the antelope: not a kill. The animal recoils and runs, packing one leg.

The other animals are off with it.

He stands and jacks out the spent casing which jangles against the rocks. He stoops for it and puts it in his shirt pocket.

Moss is on foot, rifle again slung over his shoulder, binoculars around his neck. He is looking at the ground.

An intermittent trail of blood.

Moss's pace is brisk. Distances are long.

He suddenly stops, staring.

On the ground is the fresh trail of blood, the glistening drops already dry at the periphery. But this trail is crossed by another trail of blood. Drier.

Moss looks one way along this older trail:

His point-of-view: flatlands. Scrub. No movement.

He looks the other way.

A distant range of mountains. No movement.

He stoops to examine the trail.

He paces it 'til he finds a print clear enough to give him the animal's orientation.

He stands and looks again toward the distant mountains. He brings up the binoculars.

His point-of-view: landscape, swimming into focus, heat waves exaggerated by the compression of the lens.

Panning, looking for the animal.

Movement, very distant. The animal is brought into focus: a black tailless dog, huge head, limping badly, phantasmal by virtue of the rippling heat waves and the silence.

Moss lowers the glass. A moment of thought as he gazes off.

He turns and heads in the direction from which the dog came.

Moss tops a rise. He scans the landscape below.

Not much to see except-distant glints, off something not native to the environment.

Moss brings up the binoculars.

Parked vehicles: three of them, squat, Broncos or other off- road trucks with fat tires, winches in the bed and racks of roof lights.

On the ground near the trucks dark shapes lie still.

Moss is walking cautiously up to the site, unslung rifle at the ready.

Flies drone.

He circles two dead bodies lying in the grass, covered with blood. A gut-shot dog of the same kind we saw limping toward the mountains lies beside them. A sawed-off shotgun with a pistol stock lies in the grass.

The tires and most of the window glass are shot out of the first pickup Moss approaches.

He opens the door and looks inside.

The driver is dead, leaning over the wheel. Moss shuts the door.

He opens the door of the second truck.

The driver, sitting upright, still in shoulder harness, is staring at him.

Moss stumbles back, raising the rifle.

The man does not move. The front of his shirt is covered with blood.

Moss stares at him

On the seat next to the man is an HK machine pistol. Moss looks at it. He looks back at the man. The man is still staring at him. Without lowering his eyes Moss reaches in and takes the pistol.

Moss straightens up out of the truck and slings the rifle back over his shoulder. He snaps the clip off the machine pistol, checks it and snaps it back on.

Moss crosses to the back of the truck and lifts the tarp that covers the truck bed.

A load of brick-sized brown parcels each wrapped in plastic.

He throws the tarp back over the load and crosses back to the open cab door.

A blank look.

The injured man stares, unresponsive. Moss persists:

Moss turns to scan the horizon. He looks at the tire tracks extending back from the truck. He thinks for a beat.

He starts off.

Through the truck's open door:

Moss stops to look out at a new prospect. Flatland, no cover.

He raises the binoculars.

He doesn't see anything. He lowers the glass, thinking.

He raises the glass again.

He sets off.

A POINT-OF-VIEW

Through the binoculars, some time later. One lone shelf of rock throws shade toward us. Heat shimmers in between.

Hard sun makes the rock shadow impenetrable. But there is a booted foot sticking into the sun toe-up like the nub on a sundial.

Moss lowers the binoculars.

He looks at his watch.

11:30.

He sits down.

FAST FADE

THE WATCH

12:30.

Moss lowers the wristwatch and raises the binoculars again.

The shadow has shifted. The foot hasn't moved.

Moss gets up and walks toward it.

Moss arrives at the rock shelf.

The man's body is tipped to one side. His nose is in the dirt but his eyes are open, as if he is examining something quite small on the ground.

One hand holds a .45 automatic.

Next to the body is a boxy leather document case.

Moss looks at the man. He takes the gun, looks at it, sticks it in his belt.

He drags the document case away from the body and opens it.

Bank-wrapped hundreds fill it. Each packet is stamped "$10,000."

Moss stares. He reaches in to rifle the stacks, either to confirm that the bag is full or to estimate the amount.

He stands, looks around, looks back the way he came.

HIS TRUCK

Moss's pickup is parked by a cattleguard off a paved but little-used road.

Moss is just arriving. He throws in the document case, the rifle and the machine pistol, climbs into the cab and slams the door.

Moss's truck pulls into a trailer park that sits alongside the highway on the outskirts of Sanderson, Texas. An old sign with a neon palm tree identifies the park as the Desert Aire.

Moss gets out of the truck next to a double-wide. Lights glow inside. He takes the case and machine pistol, gets down on his back next to the trailer and scoots underneath it.

His point-of-view: plywood and plastic pipes. He pulls some insulation aside and crams the machine pistol up under the pipes.

Moss enters carrying the document case. A twentysomething woman in cutoff jeans and a halter top watches TV. This is Carla Jean.

Moss is crossing to a back bedroom. Before he disappears inside Carla Jean sees the pistol stuck in the back of his waistband.

He emerges without the case or the gun and crosses to the refrigerator. He takes a beer from the refrigerator and peels its pulltab.

He walks back sipping the beer and sprawls on the couch.

We are drifting down toward Moss as he lies in bed next to Carla Jean. He lies still, eyes closed, but he is shaking his head. As the camera stops he opens his eyes, grimacing.

He looks at the bedside clock.

Its LED display: 1:06.

He swings his legs off the bed, looks back at Carla Jean, and pulls the blanket up over her shoulder.

Close on a gallon jug as Moss hold it under the tap, filling it with water.

Carla Jean appears in the doorway, looking sleepy.

Moss turns from the sink, screwing the top onto the jug.

He starts toward the front door.

A MAP

A detailed topographical survey map, illuminated by a flashlight.

Moss is studying it in the cab of his truck.

After a beat he folds the map.

He checks the .45 taken off the corpse with the money.

Wider: the pickup truck parked outside the cattle guard. After a beat, the truck drives over the grate onto the unpaved part of the road, jogging up the uneven terrain.

Through the windshield, the view is pitch black except for the boulders and scrub picked out by the crazily bouncing headlights.

DOOR SLAM

We are close on the water jug slapping against Moss's leg as we pull him through the darkness. The shape of his parked truck is just visible behind him, silhouetted on the crest by the glow of the moon already set.

Walking across the basin to the near truck Moss freezes, noticing:

Its driver's-side door: closed.

Moss scans the horizon. Its only blemish remains his own pickup.

He jogs the few remaining paces to the pickup. He sets down the gallon jug. Softly:

No answer.

He opens the door.

The man's body is still held upright by the shoulder harness but his head, flayed by buckshot, is tipped away.

Moss glances at the bed of the truck.

Empty.

He again looks at the horizon.

Now another pickup stands in silhouette next to his own. Two men are there.

Moss covers behind the dead man's truck. He eases his head out for another look.

Only one man visible now.

Sounds hard to identify. Something airy. Up on the crest his pickup rocks and settles. Its tires are being slashed.

The other pickup's engine coughs to life. Headlights and roof lights go on.

Moss again covers behind the vehicle.

A search-spot sweeps back and forth across the basin tableau of bodies and trucks. After a few trips back and forth something happens to the spot: its weaving light begins to bounce. We can hear the jouncing suspension of the pickup as it trundles down the incline.

But the light tells the perspective of the slowly approaching truck. Moss stays in the lee of his sheltering vehicle as he runs, doubled over, directly away from the light, keeping to the shadow that wipes on and off.

A gunshot. Its impact kicks up dirt just ahead of Moss to his right.

Moss turns to see:

Two jogging men flanking the truck like infantry escorting a tank. One has just halted to fire; the other is now raising his gun.

Moss tacks and sprints and rolls under a second abandoned pickup to his left. Another shot sounds and misses.

Bullets plunk into the metal of the truck body. One bullet skips off the dirt in front of the truck and pings up into the undercarriage.

Moss is elbowing out the far side, next to a body lying by the truck's passenger door.

The firing has stopped: Moss steals a look over the hood:

The pursuing pickup is slowing so that the two gunmen can swing onto the running boards.

The truck accelerates and as it veers around the first abandoned pickup its lights swing off Moss's cover truck.

Moss sprints off, doubled over, at a perpendicular to his previous path. He hits the ground, pressing himself into the earth, head between his forearms.

He elbows away as the truck bears on his former cover.

He tops the small rise and straightens and flat-out runs. We hear the pickup's engine racing and see, behind Moss, its spot sweeping backlight across the crest.

Moss is running towards the declivity of a river gorge. Sky there is pink from unrisen sun.

Moss bears on the gorge, panting.

The pickup bounces up into view on the crest behind him, roof lights blazing. It is pointed off at an angle. Its spotlight sweeps the river plain.

It finds Moss. The truck reorients as it bounces down in pursuit. A muzzle flash precedes the dull whump of the shotgun.

Moss races on toward the river. Another shotgun whump. Moss stumbles, turns to look behind him.

The truck, gaining ground. A man stands up out of the sunroof, one hand on top of the cab, the other holding a shotgun.

Moss is almost to the steep riverbank. Another whump of the shotgun.

Shot catches Moss on the right shoulder. It tears the back of his shirt away and sends him over the crest of the river bank.

Moss airborne, ass over elbows, hits near the bottom of the sandy slope with a loud fhump.

He rolls to a stop and looks up.

We hear a skidding squeal and see dirt and dust float over the lip of the ridge, thrown by the truck's hard stop.

As Moss pulls off his boots we hear voices from the men in the truck.

There is the clank of its tailgate being dropped and sounds of activity on the hollow metal of its bed.

Moss tucks his boots into his belt and runs splashing into the fast-moving water. A look back:

Something shakes the scrub down the steep slope.

Moss backpedals deeper.

Bursting out of the scrub at the foot of the slope: a huge black dog with a large head and clipped ears. It bounds toward Moss.

Moss turns and half stumbles, half dives into the river. Underwater a very dull whump followed by the fizz of buckshot.

Moss breaks the surface of the water, gasping, and looks back:

Figures on the ridge. Below, the dog hitting the water.

Another gunshot from the bank. Where it hits we don't know. River current and Moss's strokes speed him away.

He sweeps around a bend. He finds his feet under him and staggers onto a sandbar and then splashes through some outwash to the far bank.

The pursuing dog's head bobs rhythmically in the water.

Moss pulls the gun from his belt. He takes the clip out and ejects the chamber round.

The dog finds his stumpy legs much closer to the sandbar: his massive head dips and waggles as he lurches out of his swim. He emerges from the river and bounds across the sand.

Moss shakes the gun and blows into the barrel.

The dog splashes through the riverwash that separates him from the human.

Moss reinserts the clip. He chambers a round as the dog runs snarling and as the dog leaps he fires.

Moss fires twice more quickly, not waiting to see whether the first round told.

The dog lands, stopped but not dead. It jerks and gurgles.

He is looking out at the river. His boots are drifting by.

Moss has climbed the far bank and found a seat on a rock. It is now full day. Moss has taken off his shirt and has his neck craned round and his back upper arm twisted toward him. Where the buckshot hit, his arm is purpled and pinpricked. He meticulously picks shirt fiber out from where buckshot packed it into the flesh.

He finishes. He rips swatches from his shirt. He starts wrapping his bare feet as he gazes off.

His point-of-view: a lot of landscape, a highway in the distance. An eighteen-wheeler shimmies along in the heat.

At an isolated dusty crossroad. It is twilight. The Ford sedan that Chigurh stopped is parked alongside the pump.

Chigurh stands at the counter across from the elderly proprietor. He holds up a bag of cashews.

Chigurh tears open the bag of cashews and pours a few into his hand.

A beat.

Chigurh stands chewing cashews, staring while the old man works the register and puts change on the counter.

Beat.

The proprietor turns and coughs. Chigurh stares.

The proprietor looks at him, uncomfortable, looks away.

Chigurh stares, slowly chewing.

Chigurh chews.

A pause.

He continues to stare, chewing.

A beat.

He finishes the cashews and wads the packet and sets it on the counter where it begins to slowly unkink. The proprietor's eyes have tracked the packet. Chigurh's eyes stay on the proprietor.

Chigurh is digging in his pocket. A quarter: he tosses it. He slaps it onto his forearm but keeps it covered.

A long beat.

Chigurh takes his hand away from the coin and turns his arm to look at it.

He hands it across.

He turns and goes.

The proprietor watches him.

It is full night.

Moss is pushing open the door to his trailer. We see Carla Jean inside.

Moss enters and the door closes.

Carla Jean is finishing bandaging his arm.

MOSS

Right now it's midnight Sunday. When the courthouse opens nine hours from now someone's gonna be callin in the vehicle number off the inspection plate on my truck. And around nine- thirty they'll show up here.

Carla Jean stares, thinking.

Carla Jean begins peevishly tossing things into a bag:

POINT-OF-VIEW THROUGH WINDSHIELD

It is night. No other vehicles on this paved road.

Our car turns off and rattles over a cattleguard.

Parked on the other side is a Ramcharger. Its passenger door starts to open.

Outside: Chigurh emerges from his Ford.

The man emerging from the truck wears a Western-cut suit.

THE RAMCHARGER

Bouncing through ungraded terrain.

It stops and discharges the three men-the driver and his partner, both in suits, from either side, and then Chigurh from the middle seat.

They have pulled over at Moss's truck.

He is opening the door and looking at the plate riveted inside.

The man reaches into a pocket and hands over a screwdriver. As Chigurh works it under the plate:

A flashlight beam picks out the dog carcass.

Chigurh plays the flashlight around the scene. Dead bodies on the ground.

Chigurh gives his flashlight to the driver.

He bends down and takes a 9 mm. Glock off of one of the dead bodies and checks the clip. The other man is returning from the truck. He hands Chigurh a small electronic receiver.

Chigurh stands and holds his hand out for his flashlight.

The driver hands it to him. Chigurh shines it in his face and shoots him through the forehead. As the man falls Chigurh pans the light to the other man who has watched his partner drop. He looks up, puzzled, and is shot as well.

A horse trailer is backed up to a small stable with its gate down.

Sheriff Bell, sixties, in uniform, slaps a horse on the ass and gives it a "Hyah!" to send it clattering up the ramp and into the trailer.

His wife, Loretta, appears. She wears a heavy robe and holds a coffee mug.

He is sending a second horse up into the trailer.

Sheriff Bell puts up the gate and pins it. She watches.

The pickup with horse trailer rattles up next to a parked squad car. Just beyond the cattle guard the Ford sedan is blazing. Sheriff Bell gets out of the truck and joins his deputy, Wendell, looking at the car. After a beat of staring:

Sheriff Bell takes his hat off and mops his brow.

Bell stares at the fire.

He walks back toward the trailer.

The two men on horseback pick their way through the scrub approaching Moss's truck. Sheriff Bell is studying the ground.

Wendell is standing in the stirrups, looking up the ridge.

Bell looks up, circling the truck.

Bell sits his horse looking at the slashed tires.

BASIN - DAY

BY THE BODIES

The two lawmen are dismounting.

They walk towards the near truck.

Sheriff Bell stoops to look at casings.

He stands, looking at the truck.

Bell opens the door of the truck. Looks at the dead driver.

He shuts the door softly with two hands.

Wendell is looking at the two corpses close together, wearing suits.

Bell walks back toward the bed of the truck as Wendell appraises:

A gesture toward the scattered bodies.

A nod down at the two men in suits with head wounds.

Bell, at the back of the truck, wets a finger and runs it against the bed and looks at it.

Wendell strolls among the bodies.

Bell is remounting.

AIR TANK

We follow it being toted along a gravel path and up three shallow steps to a trailer door.

A hand rises to knock. Tubing runs out of the sleeve and into the fist clenched to knock. The door rattles under the knock. A short beat.

The hand opens to press the nozzle at the end of the tube against the lock cylinder. A sharp report.

INSIDE

A cylinder of brass from the door slams into the far wall denting it and drops to the floor and rolls.

Reverse on the door. Daylight shows through the lock.

The door swings slowly in and Chigurh, hard backlit, enters.

He sets the tank down by the door. He looks around.

He ambles in. He opens a door.

The bedroom, a messy aftermath of hasty packing.

The main room. Mail is stacked on the counter that separates a kitchen area.

Chigurh flips unhurriedly through the pieces. One of them is a phone bill. He puts it in his pocket.

He goes to the refrigerator. He opens it. He looks for a still beat. He decides.

He reaches out a quart of milk. He goes to the main room sofa and sits. He pinches the spout open and drinks.

He looks at himself in the dead gray-green screen of the facing television.

Chigurh enters. Old plywood paneling, gunmetal desk, litter of papers. A window air-conditioner works hard.

A fifty-year-old woman with a cast-iron hairdo sits behind the desk.

Chigurh looks around the office. He looks at the woman.

A toilet flushes somewhere. A door unlatches. Footsteps in back.

Chigurh reacts to the noise. He looks at the woman. He turns and opens the door and leaves.

Some of the passengers are getting out. Moss is up in the aisle reaching a bag down from the overhead rack. He lifts the document case from the floor where Carla Jean still sits next to the window.

Carla Jean nods at the document case.

Wendell is knocking at its door. Sheriff Bell stands one step behind him.

No answer.

They both look. A beat.

Wendell unholsters his gun but hesitates.

Wendell eases the door open.

The men cautiously enter, Wendell leading.

He lowers his gun and starts to holster it.

Wendell keeps the gun out.

He goes to the bedroom door as Sheriff Bell, seeing the lock cylinder on the floor, stoops and hefts it.

He looks up at the wall opposite the door: the small dent.

Wendell pulls his head out of the bedroom.

Sheriff Bell stands and wanders, looking around.

He is at the counter staring at something.

Sheriff Bell points at the carton of milk.

Wendell is agitated.

Sheriff Bell unhurriedly opens a cabinet. He looks closes it, opens another.

Sheriff Bell takes a glass from the cabinet.

He pours milk into the glass.

He sits on the sofa and takes a sip from the milk.

Wendell stares at him.

Wendell gazes around the trailer, shaking his head.

Sheriff Bell takes another sip.

Moss emerges from the station and goes to a cab.

As he sits in:

RATE CARD

The rates for Charlie Goodnight's Del Rio Motor Court are under its address of Highway 84 East and an ovalled AAA logo:

Single Person $24.00

Double Bed/Couple $27.00

2 Double Bed/Couple $28.00

2 Double Bed/3 People $32.00

Voices play off:

Wider shows that we are in a motel lobby. A woman faces Moss across a Formica counter top She has handed him the framed rate card.

Wide on the room. Twin-bed headboards are fixed to the wall but only the far one has a bed parked beneath it. Moss sits on the bed, phone to his ear. It rings a couple times.

He gives up, hangs up, rises.

Moss stands in front of the mirror, twisted around to examine the buckshot wound. He shrugs his shirt back on.

Holding on the mirror we see him walk back into the main room and stop, looking around. He looks slowly up to the ceiling.

CLOSE ON A SCREW

Being unscrewed. Wider shows us Moss, standing on the bed, unscrewing the vent on an overhead airduct.

He gets down off the bed, unzips his duffle bag and takes the document case out of it. He opens the case, takes out a packet of bills, counts out some money and puts it in his pocket. He refastens the case.

He goes to the window and cuts off a length of the curtain cord. He ties the curtain cord to the handle of the document case. He goes to the closet, leaving the case on the bed.

He reaches into the empty closet, lifts the coat rail off its supports and lets the hangers slide off onto the floor.

The duct hums with a low, airy compressor sound. The galvanized metal stretches away to a distant elbow. The document case is plunked down in the foreground and then gently pushed down the length of the tube by the coat pole. The free end of the cord trails off the handle for retrieval.

THE DUFFLE

Moss unzips it and pulls out the machine pistol and the .45 that he took off the dead man. He lifts the mattress and stashes the machine pistol underneath. He checks the chamber of the .45 and stuffs it in his belt.

THE WINDOW

Moss pulls back one curtain to look out at the lot.

Nothing there disturbs him.

He closes the curtains, crossing one over the other.

He goes out the door, shutting it softly behind him.

PHONE BILL

A pencil taps at a Del Rio number that repeats on the bill. We hear phone-filtered rings.

The rings are cut off by the clatter of a hang-up. The pencil moves to an Odessa number, the only other repeat on the short list of toll calls.

We cut up to Chigurh as he finishes dialing, in the booth of a roadside diner. Dusk.

Phone-filtered rings. Connection; a woman's voice:

The woman's voice is old, querulous:

Chigurh stares for a short beat, then prongs the phone.

Moss is standing in front of a rack of cowboy boots at the back of the store. He looks up at an approaching salesman, a bow-legged old man in a white shirt.

He gathers up a brown paper bag from a pharmacy.

Moss is sitting on the toilet taking off socks with bloody soles. Sneakers sit on the floor. The pharmacy bag sits next to them.

He sprays disinfectant on his feet. He takes out bandages.

Moss is returning. The bowlegged salesman stands in the aisle holding aloft a pair of boots.

It is rolling to a stop in front of Charlie Goodnight's Del Rio Motor Hotel.

Moss fishes for his wallet but stops, looking.

Parked in the street in front of the motel is an offroad truck with roof lights.

The cab rolls slowly up the lot.

His pivoting point-of-view of his room. The window shows a part between the curtains.

Moss reaches a hundred-dollar bill up to the driver.

The driver reaches up for the bill then turns the cab out of the parking lot onto the hiway. Moss turns to look at the receding lights of the motel.

PAVEMENT

Rushing under the lens, lit by headlights.

From high up we see a throughway interchange as Chigurh's Ramcharger takes the right fork of the highway under a green sign for Del Rio.

Chigurh looks down at the passenger seat. On it lies the transponder, powered on but silent. Next to it is a machine pistol with a can-shaped silencer sweated onto the barrel.

The transponder beeps once.

Chigurh looks up. We are approaching a steel bridge. The headlights pick up a large black bird perched on the aluminum bridge rail.

The passenger window hums down.

Chigurh picks up the pistol and levels the barrel across the window frame.

The truck bumps onto the bridge, its tires skipping over the seams in the asphalt. As it draws even the bird spreads its wings and Chigurh fires-a muted thump like a whoosh of air.

From high overhead: the bullet hits the guardrail making it hum as the Ramcharger recedes and the bird lifts into the darkness, heavily flapping its wings.

Morning. Bell sits drinking coffee. Wendell stands in the aisle handing something over.

Bell takes the papers and starts to look at them.

This brings Bell's look up.

A beat during which both men picture it, ended by an arriving waitress.

The Sheriff's distressed look swings on to her.

Moss pushes off from the wall he was leaning against: someone inside the glass double doors is stooping to unlock them.

The clerk is handing a shotgun across the counter.

He pushes the shells across.

ANOTHER COUNTER

A clerk stares at Moss.

He has the shotgun wedged in an open drawer and is sawing off its barrel with a hacksaw.

MINUTES LATER

Moss sits on the bed dressing the barrel with a file.

He puts down the file, looks at the barrel. He slides the forearm back and forward again and lets the hammer down with his thumb. He looks the gun over, appraising, and then opens the box of shells and starts feeding in the heavy waxed loads.

Moss enters carrying a new duffle bag. The same woman is behind the counter.

She inclines her head to look under the counter.

She finds a brochure and hands it across. It shows a car from the fifties parked in front of the hotel in hard sunlight.

Moss unfolds the brochure and studies.

An arcing point of view on the window of Moss's old room. The curtain still slightly open.

A reverse shows Moss crossing the lot from the office carrying his long nylon duffle bag, studying the room. He looks further down the street.

The truck with the roof lights is still parked there.

Two double beds. Moss is listening at the wall. He goes to the bed and unzips the duffle bag and pulls out the sawed- off shotgun. He lays it on the bed. He pulls the tent poles and some duct tape out of the duffle.

CHIGURH

Driving slowly down the street with frequent glances down at the receiver on the seat next to him. The receiver lights ups and bleeps one time.

Chigurh slows and looks around at the buildings that line the two-lane highway.

Moss is standing on a desk chair unscrewing the plate from the overhead airduct. He lays it aside and raises a flashlight and peers into the airduct.

Down the length of the duct we see an elbow junction ten feet away. The end of the document case is just visible sticking out into the elbow.

CHIGURH

The receiver is bleeping slowly as the car creeps along. Up at a distant intersection is Charlie Goodnight's Del Rio Motel.

Moss rips off a length of duct tape. He wraps it around two tent poles placed end-to-end but an inch apart, not butting. He gives the tape several winds.

CHIGURH

He is slowly driving the parking lot, the receiver now in his lap.

The beeping frequency peaks and then starts to fall off. Chigurh puts the truck in reverse and eases back to the peak.

His point-of-view: window with parted curtains.

Moss experiments with the tape-joint, angling then straightening the two poles. Satisfied, he starts taping on a third length of pole.

Chigurh stands across the counter from the clerk who looks at him, waiting.

He is frowning at the rate card.

DOOR

It swings slowly in toward us. Chigurh stands in the doorway. The room-number bangle hangs off the key in the knob.

He stares in for a beat.

He enters slowly and reaches up for the light switch. He doesn't turn it on. He drops his hand. He reaches up again, feeling it.

He looks around the room. He takes the key and closes the door behind him.

MOSS

Moss pulls three wire hangers off the closet rack. He takes them to the bureau and picks up a sidecutter.

CHIGURH

He walks over to the bathroom.

He turns on its light, looks.

He leaves the door open. He goes to a closet, opens it, looks.

He goes to the door of the room but doesn't open it. He stands with his back against it and looks at the room.

The bathroom door.

The closet door.

Chigurh goes to the bed and sits to take off his boots.

MOSS

Moss snips the last of the wire hangers' hooks off with the sidecutter. He wraps the three hooks with duct tape to make a sturdier one.

He wraps more tape to attach this hook to the end of the three-link pole.

CHIGURH

From a bag he withdraws a twelve-gauge automatic shotgun fitted with a silencer big around as a beer can.

He checks the loads.

He picks up the regularly beeping receiver, turns it off, and slips it into his pocket.

He hoists the air tank.

MOSS

He is standing on the chair below the airduct, stooping to pick up the jury-rigged pole leaning nearby. He straightens and feeds the length of the pole into the duct, using the joints to angle it in.

Inside the duct: he watches the pole play in, illuminated by the flashlight he has left resting inside.

STOCKINGED FEET

We track on the feet padding down the exterior walkway.

MOSS

Peering along the airduct, both hands up next to one ear awkwardly maneuvering the pole.

He lays the far, hooked end over the protruding corner of the document case. He pulls.

The pole slides off the case.

CHIGURH

He stands at the door of Moss's first room. He eases an ear against it.

He steps back.

He punches out the lock cylinder with the airgun and kicks in the door, raising the shotgun.

A Mexican in a guyabera reclines on one of the two double beds.

He is scrabbling for a machine pistol on the nightstand.

Chigurh fires three times quickly. The damped blasts have the low resonance of chugs into a bottle.

MOSS

Head still in the airduct, frozen, listening.

CHIGURH

Also frozen, back against the wall outside the room, to one side of the open door.

After a beat he steps back into the open doorway leveling the gun.

Inside the room: no movement. Much of the man on the bed is spattered against the chewed-up headboard.

The bathroom door is ajar, its light on.

A long beat.

Movement in the wedge of light.

Immediately, chugs from the shotgun chew up bathroom door and nearby wallboard.

A cry from inside. A brief chatter of machine pistol.

MOSS'S POV

Along the air vent.

The machine-pistol chatter crosses the cut.

We hear bullets snap through metal. The sound brings on indirect light as holes are punched in the duct somewhere around the bend.

Moss holds still as the galvanized metal faintly thunders. The flashlight resting on it wobbles.

CHIGURH

Gun leveled, at the open door.

Again, no movement.

He advances into the room, gun pointing at the bathroom door. As he advances he swings the gun briefly over at the closet door and fires. The splintered-in door reveals no occupant.

Chigurh angles around the double bed to get a view of that wedge of bathroom floor visible through its door. Blood is pooling out from the right.

Chigurh fires at the baseboard to the right of the door.

Moss makes another attempt to hook the bag. The hook takes.

Moss drags the case inches out into the duct's bend before the hook slides off again.

CHIGURH

He uses the shotgun barrel to push open what's left of the bathroom door.

The mirror over the facing sink gives a view of most of the hidden side of the bedroom/ bathroom party wall. Partial view of a man pressed against the wall, standing in the tub in the corner. From his posture and the one visible hand he seems unarmed.

Chigurh enters the bathroom.

The cornered man is unhurt but terrified. He holds up his hands.

The man on the floor is quite dead. A machine pistol lies in one out-flung hand.

Chigurh looks back up at the survivor.

Chigurh walks unhurriedly to the tub. The man watches him, hands up, vibrating.

Chigurh reaches with his free hand and pulls the shower curtain most of the way round, hiding the man. He angles the nose of the shotgun in and fires.

MOSS

The hook again snags a strap on the case. Moss pulls, carefully.

Chigurh emerges from the bathroom. His socks are sodden with gore. He sits on the bed and peels them off. He rubs the bottom of each foot with the ankle of each sock and drops the socks to the floor.

He rises and opens three bureau drawers, which are empty, and leaves them open.

He pulls open what remains of the closet door. Empty.

He looks under the bed.

He stands, looks around.

He looks up. His look lingers.

Close on the airduct grille: it is dusty. Rub-marks have made four dark bands across the dusty slats. Chigurh's fingers rise into frame and meet the grille, roughly aligning with the finger marks in the dust.

Close on a screwhead: a dime enters and engages the screw and starts turning it.

From inside the duct: fingers reach through the grille and Chigurh's hand pushes it up into the duct, then angles it and withdraws it. Faintly, under the distant airy drone of the compressor, we hear the grate clatter to the floor.

The back of Chigurh's head appears. He aims a flashlight away down the far length of the duct. A beat.

He pivots to face us.

His point-of-view: the length of the duct, empty, with a drag-mark through the middle of the dust.

Back to Chigurh. His look holds.

He ducks out.

In the room: Chigurh steps down from the chair and pulls the receiver from his pocket and turns it on.

It beeps once.

Silence.

Frowning, looking down at the receiver, Chigurh makes a slow sweep with it. The silence holds-snapped off by car steady as we cut to:

Moss, with his duffle bag and document case, sits in the passenger seat of an old station wagon. The driver is an elderly man in a yoked shirt.

After a beat, eyes fixed on the road, the old man shakes his head.

Moss gives him a look. A beat.

He shakes his head again. Silent driving. The old man murmurs:

BOOMING UP

We are looking out as a foreground building slips by and we rise to get an ever-higher perspective on downtown Houston, hazy under a noon sun.

A man standing behind a large desk-behind him, floor-to- ceiling windows-has no small talk for Carson Wells, the man entering.

Carson Wells sits in front of the desk, his manner affable. He rests a booted foot across one knee.

The man gazes. He nods.

The man looks at him, appraising. He nods again and slides a bank card across the table.

Wells rises to take the card and then reseats himself.

Wells shrugs.

A beat.

Wells rises.

He thumps once at his chest.

The man gazes.

Moss is getting out of the station wagon with his duffle and document case.

It is a town square. Among the old buildings is the Hotel Eagle, identified by a neon above the front door.

Moss enters. Behind the front desk an older man sits reading Ring magazine. He has a hand-rolled cigarette.

Moss pushes a hundred along with smaller bills across the desk.

The clerk looks at the hundred-dollar bill without reaching.

Moss is mounting the stairs from the lobby. The carpeted hallway is lined by transom-topped doors. Moss goes to a door halfway down on his left.

Moss enters a room with old oak furniture and high ceilings. He sets the document case next to the bed.

He unzips the duffel and takes out the shotgun which he lays on the bed, and then goes to the window. He parts the curtain to look down.

The street is empty. Mexican music floats up faintly from a bar somewhere not far away.

The room is dark. The music is gone.

We are looking straight down on Moss lying, clothed, on the bed. We are booming straight down toward him.

After a beat he shakes his head. He opens his eyes, grimacing.

He sits up and turns on the bedside lamp.

The shot gun and document case are on the floor by the bed. Moss swings the document case onto the bed and unclasps it and upends the money onto the bed. He feels the bottom of the case, squeezing it with one hand inside and one hand out, looking for a false bottom. He eyeballs the case, turning it over and around.

He starts riffling money packets.

He finds one that binds. It has hundreds on the outside but ones inside with the centers cut out. In the hollow is a sending unit the size of a Zippo lighter.

He holds the sender, staring at it.

A long beat.

From somewhere, a dull chug. The sound is hard to read-a compressor going on, a door thud, maybe something else.

The sound has brought Moss's look up. He sits listening. No further sound.

Moss reaches to uncradle the rotary phone by the bed. He dials 0.

We hear ringing filtered through the handset. Also, faintly, offset, we hear the ring direct from downstairs.

After five rings Moss cradles the phone.

He goes to the door, reaches for the knob, but hesitates.

He gets down on his hands and knees and listens at the crack under the door.

An open airy sound like a seashell put to your ear.

Moss rises and turns to the bed. He piles money back into the document case but freezes suddenly-for no reason we can see.

A long beat on his motionless back. We gradually become aware of a faint high-frequency beeping, barely audible. Its source is indeterminate.

Moss clasps the document case, picks up his shotgun and eases himself to a sitting position on the bed, facing the door.

He looks at the line of light under it.

The beeps approach, though still not loud. A long wait.

At length a soft shadow appears in the line of light below the door. It lingers there. The beeping-stops.

A beat. Now the soft shadow becomes more focused. It resolves into two columns of dark: feet planted before the door.

Moss raises his shotgun toward the door.

A long beat.

Moss adjusts his grip on the shotgun and his finger tightens on the trigger.

The shadow moves, unhurriedly, rightward. The band of light beneath the door is once again unshadowed.

Quiet. Moss stares.

The band of light under the door.

Moss stares.

Silently, the light goes out.

Something for Moss to think about. He stares.

The hallway behind the door is now dark. The door is defined only from his side, by streetlight-spill through the window.

Moss stares. He shifts, starts to rise, doesn't. A beat.

A report -- not a gunshot, but a stamping sound, followed by a pneumatic hiss.

It brings a dull impact and Moss recoils, hit.

He winces, feeling his chest.

The door is shuddering creakily in.

It is all strange. Moss gropes in his lap and picks something up. The lock cylinder.

The creaking door comes to rest, ajar.

Moss fires. The shotgun blast roars in the confined space and for an instant turns the room orange. The chewed-up door wobbles back against the jamb and creakily bounces in again. Moss has already risen and is hoisting the document case.

FROM OUTSIDE HIS WINDOW

Moss finishes draping his shotgun by its strap across his back and climbs out onto the ledge with the document case. He swings the document case out and drops it.

The bracketing for the hotel's sign gives Moss a handhold. He grabs it as inside the room the door is kicked open. Moss swings down as, with a muted thump, orange muzzleflash strobes the room.

Moss drops.

Moss lands and grabs the document case and straightens. He is at the hotel entrance, standing in the light coming through the etched glass of the double doors.

He looks at his own shadow thrown onto the street. He plunges through the doors into the lobby as a gun thumps and crackling shot chews the sidewalk.

Moss hurries across the lobby. A glance to one side:

A booted foot sticks out from behind the front desk.

Moss slows approaching the stairway. He risks a look around the stairway wall.

Ascending balusters fade off into the blackness of the second- story hallway.

Moss sags. He looks back across the lobby at the front door.

He unhitches his shotgun. He remains still for a moment holding the shotgun, back against the protected side of the wall.

He quickly swings out and with shotgun aimed up the stairs he crosses to the back lobby.

He quietly pushes open the back door.

OUTSIDE

Moss emerges into a shallow service alley, dark and dirty.

He is at a run when we hear soft tock and a garbage can in front of him snaps and wobbles.

He turns looking up, backpedaling. Another tock accompanies a muzzleflash in a dark second-story window.

Moss fires his shotgun: loud. Chips fly off the brickface and the window shatters.

Moss rounds the alley corner. He stops and squats.

Wide: dark, deserted downtown Eagle Pass, Moss a lone figure resting at a corner.

Close on Moss panting. He takes stock, painfully feeling at his upper chest where the lock hit, then touching gingerly at his side, beneath the ribs, newly bloody. He sighs.

He listens. No noise. He gets to his feet with the document case in one hand and shotgun in the other. He waits a beat, back against the wall.

He swings out and fires the shotgun into the alley and then spins back and runs a short block and rounds the next corner and stops to rest.

He waits for his breath to slow. He brings up the shotgun and readies himself.

He swings out to look back around the corner.

The street is empty.

He waits, at the ready for whatever might emerge from the alley mouth a short block away.

Long beat. Stillness.

A panicky thought brings his look and the shotgun swinging back around: the man could round the block the other way.

Empty street.

Two empty streets: Moss doesn't know which way to cover, which way to go.

He stands looking each way, trying to devise a plan. No basis for a plan.

Quiet hesitation.

Now, a sound: engine noise.

An old pickup rounds a corner two blocks up. It rattles toward him.

Moss lowers the shotgun. He keeps it to the hidden side of his body.

The pickup dutifully stops at a flashing red traffic light.

It comes on through the intersection.

Moss strides out into the street. He swings the shotgun up and gives the driver a raised palm to halt.

The truck stops and Moss opens the passenger door and swings the case in and climbs in after.

The driver, an older man, gapes at him, frightened.

The windshield stars.

A quick second round pushes part of the windshield in.

Rounds come in without pause, cracking sheet metal, blowing the cab's rear window into the truckbed, twisting the rear- view.

A round seems to have caught the driver in the throat: a gurgling scream as he claws at his windpipe, blowing out blood.

Moss, quicker to react, has already ducked below the dash.

A snap of the driver's head and a new freshet of blood from a shot to the head. The screams turn to low gurgles.

Moss, jammed almost in to the driver's lap, frantically gropes for the shift.

He throws the pickup into drive and stamps at the accelerator, driving blind as bullets continue to pour in.

He raises his head enough to see his side-view. It shows sluing, bouncing, empty street, rough guide for steering.

A tremendous jounce up onto the curb then off it, the driver's body swaying in its restraint.

The passenger side window shatters: we are passing the gunman.

Now Moss sits up to steer looking out front. Behind him through the shot-out back window the dark street is suddenly punctured by muzzleflash. It comes, for the first time, with a report: the low chug of the muted shotgun.

Rattle of shot against sheet metal.

Moss floors the gas to roar into a turn. The street sweeping out of view behind him produces one more chugging muzzleflash.

The pickup bounces but Moss, sitting fully up, can now steer.

He goes half the length of the block and then yanks the wheel hard, braking. The pickup smashes a parked car and jacks around to a halt.

Moss emerges from the pickup with his shotgun and goes to the sidewalk and backtracks. He covers behind a parked car.

He sits leaning back against the car, waiting.

His point-of-view: his own reflection in the facing storefront, a lot of the driver's blood on him.

He sinks lower.

A long beat.

Footsteps. They approach without hurry.

A gritty boot turn at the corner. The footsteps come closer still.

They pass and recede toward the pickup.

We cut to Chigurh approaching the pickup, shotgun held at ease across his body.

He slows.

Moss: he hears the slowing steps. He tightens his grip on his shotgun and tenses.

Chigurh: slowing further, he sees:

Bloody boot prints outside the passenger door.

Moss rises.

Chigurh is turning.

He dives as, behind him, Moss fires.

Shot peppers two parked cars -- the one Moss rammed and the one behind.

Chigurh dived between them: hit or not?

Moss advances down the middle of the street. He angles his head: anything under the cars?

He fires twice. Buckshot claws up the pavement and the car bodies and tires, and the cars sink hissing to their rims.

Moss crosses to the far curb, still advancing. No one behind the cars.

He looks up and down the street.

Nothing to see.

He goes to the pickup truck, driver's side. He opens the door and reaches over the driver's corpse for his lap belt.

Deserted.

The pickup truck rattles into frame.

Moss emerges. He hoists out the case. He leaves the shotgun.

It is very quiet.

He looks around.

The Rio Grande bridge.

Moss walks unsteadily toward it, pressing his free hand to his side.

A thought stops him. He turns.

His bloody boot prints point at him like comic book clues.

His shoulders sag.

Minutes later. Moss heads down the right-hand walkway in stockinged feet, boots tucked into his belt.

He turns and looks back toward the U.S. side.

Empty walkway.

He proceeds on. Three youths are approaching from the Mexican side. Fart types, they are laughing and walking unsteadily.

As they approach they gape at Moss, covered with blood.

The lead boy, holding a beer, wears a light coat.

The three boys stare at him.

At length:

Moss unpeels bills from a moist wad. The top one is bloody.

Moss does.

The youth starts to peel them.

MINUTES LATER

The boys are receding. Moss pours the beer over his head, rubbing blood away.

He opens his shirt. He inspects the wounds in his midriff, entrance and exit. Pulsing blood laps weakly out. He shrugs off his shirt, wraps it around his waist and knots it.

He starts to put on the new shirt. Something stops him. He pauses.

He vomits into the roadbed.

He straightens slowly and puts on the new shirt.

He looks out.

He is not yet over the river: wind stirs the cane on the bank.

He looks up: Chain-link fence encloses the walkway to a height of about twelve feet, curling inward at the top.

He looks down the walkway. The three boys are distant figures.

He looks up the walkway.

A few paces up a light pole stanchion stands flush to the guardrail that separates road and walkway.

He goes to the stanchion and uses it to hoist himself onto the guardrail, his free hand holding the case.

Standing on top of the curved metal rail and holding the post for balance, he kneebends down and up and heaves the case.

It sails clear of the chain-link fence. A short beat and we hear a thump.

Moss pants for a moment, recovering from the strain of the toss. He eases himself off the guardrail and goes to the fence and looks at the bank below. One gnarled tree stands out in the cane. The case, wherever it landed, is not visible.

There is a lighted guardshack at the end of the walkway. Inside, a uniformed guard.

Moss walks unsteadily up. He tilts the beer bottle in salute at the guard.

The guard impassively lets him proceed.

In black, an insanely cheerful mariachi song.

Fade in on the mariachis. We are looking steeply up at them, dutch-angled. They beam down at us, energetically thumping their oversized guitars and bajo sextos.

We boom woozily up and start to un-dutch.

Reverse on Moss struggling to a sitting position on the park bench where he'd been lying. A public square.

Back to the mariachis. Beaming, singing.

Their smiles gradually fade.

The playing falls off to silence.

In the silence, birds chirp. The musicians are looking quizzically down.

Moss's arm swings up in the foreground, extending a bloody hundred-dollar bill.

On Moss. His coat has swung open to expose his bloody midriff. His look up is glazed.

The mariachis stare. Moss waggles the bill.

We are close on a patch of its front seat. Day. The pickup is parked. The piece of upholstery we are looking at has blood soaked into it.

On the sound of the door opening we cut wider. We are in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart. Chigurh, climbing in, tosses a brown paper bag onto the passenger side. He has a dark towel wrapped around one leg. As he slides behind the wheel the wrapped part of his leg slides over the bloodstain.

TRAVELING POINT OF VIEW

A small-town main street. We are driving past a pharmacy.

Chigurh, looking.

He parks.

He takes a scissors from the Wal-Mart bag and a box of cotton. He opens the box and cuts a little disc out of the cardboard.

He takes a new shirt out of the bag and begins to cut through one sleeve.

SHOOTING PAST A PARKED CAR

Chigurh limps toward us. He holds a coat hanger bent straight with the balled-up shirtsleeve hooked at one end.

Chigurh arrives, looks up and down the street.

He unscrews the gas cap, feeds the coat hanger in to soak the shirt, pulls it back out. He tapes the cardboard disc over the open gas tank. He unhooks the wet shirtsleeve and jams it up over the disk. He lights it and exits.

INSIDE THE PHARMACY - DAY

A beat pulling Chigurh limping up the aisle, and then the car explodes out front. The plate glass storefront blows in.

The few people inside rush out; Chigurh doesn't react.

The pharmacy counter in back is deserted. Chigurh lifts a hinged piece of counter to enter and starts looking through the stock.

He pulls out a packet of syringes, Hydrocodone tablets, penicillin.

Chigurh dumps the pharmaceuticals into the bathroom sink.

In the room outside he sits on the bed and takes off his boots. He unknots the towel from around his leg and stands and unbuttons his pants and starts cutting from the crotch down with a heavy scissors. One thigh is a mess of clotted blood and torn fabric.

BATH

Chigurh lowers himself into bath water that quickly turns pink. He laves water over his bloody thigh. There is a dark red hole, one half inch across, pulsing blood into the bath water Torn pieces of fabric from his pants are embedded in the bleeding skin.

A SHAVING MIRROR

We are looking at the wound in a magnifying mirror. Forceps enter and pluck a tiny piece of blood-soaked fabric from the skin.

RUNNING WATER

A bathroom tap. The forceps enter. They are rinsed, shaken off.

Wider: Chigurh sits on the closed toilet with the mirror sitting on the edge of the tub, angled toward the wound. Chigurh works on cleaning it.

The main room. The TV is on now. Chigurh enters from the bathroom with his leg bandaged. He sits on the bed and tears open the packaging of a syringe.

He plunges it into an ampule of penicillin.

He injects himself.

Sheriff Bell sits writing in a large leatherette checkbook. He projects:

A raised female voice from the front office:

VOICE Sheriff I found out everything there was to find. Those vehicles are titled and registered to deceased people.

Molly, the secretary, appears at the doorway.

VOICE ...The owner of that Blazer died twenty years ago. Did you want me to see what I could find out about the Mexican ones?

He holds out the checkbook.

Sheriff Bell is putting things away.

He rises.

Molly trails him into the front office.

A loud truck-by from the street outside. Sheriff Bell's eyes track the passing vehicle.

Sanderson outskirts.

Sheriff Bell passes a flatbed truck with a flapping tarp and briefly blurps his siren to pull it over. He parks on the shoulder in front of the truck and then walks back to the driver who watches his approach, chewing gum with blithe unconcern.

A MINUTE LATER

Both men are at the back of the truck.

Bell whips the tarp back to expose eight corpses wrapped blue sheeting bound with tape.

The driver is still smiling.

Sheriff Bell pulls the tarp down and ties it. The driver watches without helping.

Sheriff Bell cinches the knot tight.

Moss, in bed, stirs at an off screen voice:

VOICE I'm guessin'... this is not the future you pictured for yourself when you first clapped eyes on that money.

Moss blearily focuses on:

A fancy crocodile boot.

His look rises from the boot, crossed on his visitor's knee, up to the man's face.

Carson Wells smiles at him from the bedside chair.

Wells is surprised.

He nods, impressed.

Wells sits back and studies Moss.

Wells sits smiling at him.

A beat.

Wells' smile stays in place.

Moss stares at him. A beat.

Another beat.

Moss doesn't respond.

He rises.

Sheriff Bell rises from a booth, taking off his hat.

She sits. He sits.

Bell looks at her. After a beat:

She shakes her head, shrugs.

Indicates between his own eyes.

He takes a sip of coffee, leaving room for Carla Jean to argue if inclined.

She does not.

Sheriff Bell hands a card across.

She takes the card. Sheriff Bell sips.

He holds thumb and forefinger a couple inches apart.

Another beat. Carla Jean stares at him.

Late Day.

Carson Wells grabs a light pole stanchion to hoist himself onto the guardrail. He stands atop it, eyeing the chain-link fence across the walkway.

He climbs down and crosses to the fence and looks down:

The brown, sluggish water of the Rio Grande.

LOOKING DOWN THE WALKWAY

Carson Wells enters frame and recedes down the walkway. When he draws even with the next stanchion he looks down through the fence:

Cane on the riverbank, and one gnarled tree.

Twilight. Carson Wells enters the hotel and crosses the lobby.

Carson Wells appears around the corner and we pull him as he mounts the stairs. When he is about halfway up a figure -- focus does not hold him -- rounds the corner behind and silently follows, holding a fat-barreled shotgun loosely at his side.

After a few steps Carson Wells stops, frowning, cued by we don't know what. Focus drops back as he turns. Chigurh raises the shotgun.

Chigurh sits into a chair drawn up to face the armchair where Carson Wells sits.

Wells wipes his mouth with his hand.

A beat.

Another beat.

Chigurh looks at him equably. Wells holds his look.

The phone rings.

Wells looks at the phone. Chigurh hasn't moved.

Wells looks at Chigurh, waiting for a decision.

The low chug of the shotgun.

Aside from his finger on the trigger, Chigurh hasn't moved. He sits staring at Wells's remains for a beat.

Now his look swings onto the phone. He watches it ring twice more.

He picks it up and listens without speaking.

After a beat:

Another beat.

A longer beat.

Moss doesn't answer. Chigurh gives him a beat, and then:

MEXICAN HOSPITAL WARD - NIGHT

We intercut Moss, in his hospital robe, at a public phone on the ward. He stands tensed with the phone to his ear. Finally:

A beat.

No answer.

Chigurh cocks his head, noticing something on the floor. He adjusts to sit back and raise his boots onto the bed.

On the floor where his feet were, blood is pooling out from Wells's chair.

A beat.

Moss slams the phone onto its hook, then slams it twice more for good measure.

Chigurh, in the hotel room, cradles his phone.

Sheriff Bell sits at his usual booth, but with an unaccustomed look: reading glasses. He has been looking at a newspaper but is now peering over his glasses up at Wendell who apparently interrupted his reading.

Wendell nods.

He rattles the paper.

He looks through his glasses at the paper.

He peers over his glasses at Wendell who respectfully shakes his head and tsks.

Sheriff Bell rattles the paper again.

Wendell bites back a smile. Sheriff Bell gazes at him over his glasses for a long beat, deadpan.

He goes back to the paper.

Moss, a coat thrown over his hospital robe, is standing before a uniformed INS official on the Rio Grande bridge.

The official, who looks like a marine drill instructor, is chewing. He chews for a long beat, staring at Moss.

He finally spits tobacco juice and pats his lower lip with a handkerchief.

The official stares at him, chewing, sour.

The clerk who earlier sold him the boots:

Moss is walking up in his boots and overcoat and hospital robe.

We are looking across the Rio Grande. Moss appears over the near edge of the river bank, newly clothed, and holding the document case.

As he reaches the top of the bank he frowns and twists his neck, responding to an irritation. He feels around with his free hand inside the back of the shirt collar. A sharp yank.

His hand comes away with a small tag.

The document case is resting on a small foreground counter.

Moss is at a pay phone, one hand holding the phone to his ear, the other resting on the case.

The voice on the phone is old, female, and querulous:

VOICE She don't want to talk to you.

VOICE Do you know what time it is?

VOICE I told her what was going to happen, didn't I. Chapter and verse. I said: This is what will come to pass. And now it has come to pass --

Scuffing sounds, a sharp "Mama!", and then, into the phone:

OFFICE HALLWAY - DAY

A LOCK CYLINDER

It blows in. The hole shows a brightly lit cinderblock wall behind.

The door swings open and the air tank is swung in and deposited on carpet.

Wider: Chigurh enters the carpeted hallway from the cinderblock stairwell, holding the tricked-out shotgun.

The hallway is white wallboard, doors opening off it at long intervals. Chigurh stands still and listens. Nothing but the hum of ventilation.

He walks quietly to the one open door twenty feet away.

He enters.

The man who hired Carson Wells is behind his desk, in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows. He looks up from papers, slipping off his reading glasses. On seeing the shotgun he opens a desk drawer and starts to rise.

Chung -- the shotgun blast knocks him back. Shot pits but doesn't break the window.

A man in a suit rises and turns from the chair opposite the desk, very slowly, as if to advertise that he is not a threat.

Chigurh ignores him and rounds the desk to look at the man gurgling on the floor.

After a beat, still looking down at the man he has shot:

A long beat.

Chigurh finally looks up at him.

Chigurh inclines his head toward the pocked glass of the picture window.

He still has not moved, one hand still touching the armrest.

Chigurh looks at him.

The man stares at him for a beat.

EYES IN A REAR-VIEW MIRROR

Eyes in a weathered face shift back and forth between road and mirror, where they give nodding acknowledgment to the passenger.

Wider shows Carla Jean and her mother in the back of the moving cab.

She holds up thumb and forefinger curled to make an 0.

The cab is stopped outside the depot. Carla Jean and her mother and the driver are at the trunk struggling over bags.

As Carla Jean goes to the station a man emerges from a car pulled up behind. He is a well-dressed Mexican of early middle age.

Carla Jean is at a phone booth.

After a short wait, a pickup and a filtered:

SHERIFF BELL'S OFFICE - DAY

We intercut Sheriff Bell in his office.

CHIGURH

A driving point-of-view approaching Chigurh, who leans against his Ramcharger, its hood up, stopped on the shoulder on the opposite side of the road.

Reverse shows a man in an El Camino. Chickens in stacked cages squawk and flutter in the bed.

The man slows and rolls his window down to lean out.

MINUTES LATER

The man has pulled his vehicle over nose-to-nose with Chigurh's. He is rummaging in the car behind the seat. His voice comes out muffled:

The man emerges with jumper cables.

He hands one pair of leads to Chigurh.

He takes off his hat and draws a sleeve across his brow, thinking.

He turns with his pair of leads to clamp them onto his battery. On his back:

He turns back around to face Chigurh who stands there, still holding his pair of leads.

Chigurh is looking at him blandly.

The man stares at him.

COIN SLOT

Quarters are fed in. Wider as Chigurh unholsters the wand at a self-service car wash.

He sprays the spatter-pattern rust-colored stain off the roof of the cab of the El Camino.

Water drums as he sprays chicken feathers out of the bed.

Moss is turning the key in his room door, a new vinyl gun bag slung over his shoulder.

At the cut the roar of a plane climbing overhead recedes. Out of it, a voice:

Moss looks.

A woman sunbathes at the central court swimming pool. A lot of hard light.

The woman is pretty in a roadhouse-veteran sort of way. Her voice carries a flat echo, slapping off the surface of the pool.

Moss slings the bag into the room onto the bed and then turn and leans against a veranda post.

Moss holds up his left hand to show the ring.

A beat. Lapping water.

Building jet roar from another climbing plane.

The woman laughs. Before the plane overwhelms it:

SHERIFF BELL

Driving.

As he drives he refers to one side of the road, a commercial strip, looking for something. We hear the fading roar of a large airplane.

The tock tock of distant gunfire brings his look around. A beat. Another tock. The chatter of machine-gun fire. Another single shot.

Sheriff Bell stamps the accelerator and hits his siren.

Point-of-view racing toward the motel: a pickup with a rack of roof lights roars out. Tire squeals, machine-gun chatter and dog barks. The truck turns toward us, then slews around and speeds away, fishtailing.

Point-of-view turning into the central court: a man is crawling on his belly along the veranda toward the street.

Sheriff Bell skids to a halt and gets out. We hear screams, a child crying.

Sheriff Bell jogs toward the crawling man, one hand on his holstered gun.

Behind the man on the veranda is his abandoned machine pistol. He is a Mexican in a guyabera.

Sheriff Bell yells at a scared face in a cracked door:

He is still jogging. A glance to the side:

Rough point-of-view of a woman's body, belly-down at the lip of the pool, head and upper torso in the water.

Rough point-of-view forward: an open room door. Booted feet stick out.

Sheriff Bell arrives. Moss is face-up, mostly inside the room. The new gun bag is next to him. The gun is in hand. He is still.

Voices. Sheriff Bell glances off.

Night. The entrance is blocked by police vehicles.

People stand around in knots. Sheriff Bell is talking to the local sheriff. A door slam attracts his look.

Carla Jean has gotten out of the far side of a cab. On the near side the driver is leaning in to help her mother out. After a couple of rocking attempts she has enough inertia to come to her feet outside the vehicle.

Carla Jean is advancing slowly toward Sheriff Bell, taking in the scene.

Sheriff Bell steps toward her.

Her eyes track his hand as he raises it to his hat. He takes it off.

Looking down a long corridor flanked by a wall of stainless steel drawers. At the far end stands Bell, hat in hand, staring down into an open drawer just in front of him. A long beat.

The local sheriff, Roscoe Giddins, stands smoking under the port cochere in front of the hospital. Sheriff Bell emerges from the building.

A long beat.

He puts his hat back on.

The two men start walking.

A walking beat.

COFFEE SHOP - EL PASO - NIGHT

Roscoe and Sheriff Bell face each other over coffee.

A beat.

The two men are walking out.

They have reached Sheriff Bell's cruiser and he sits in.

Roscoe closes the door for Sheriff Bell.

He is walking away.

Sheriff Bell sits thinking in the cruiser. He makes no move for the ignition.

A long beat.

Now very late, empty of onlookers and emergency vehicles.

Sheriff Bell's cruiser pulls up just inside the courtyard. He cuts his engine.

Sheriff Bell sits looking at the motel.

Very quiet. After a long beat he gets out of the car. He pushes its door shut quietly, with two hands.

He looks up the veranda.

The one door, most of the way up, has yellow tape across it. Its loose ends wave in a light breeze.

Sheriff Bell looks up the street.

Nothing much to attract his attention.

Sheriff Bell steps up onto the veranda. He takes slow, quiet steps.

We intercut his point-of-view, nearing the door marked by police tape.

As he draws close to the door he slows.

The yellow tape is about chest high. Above it is the lock cylinder. It has been punched hollow.

Sheriff Bell stands staring at the lock.

Very quiet. The chick, chick, of the tape-ends against the door frame.

Still.

INSIDE

Chigurh is still also. Just on the other side of the door, he stands holding his shotgun.

From inside, the tap of the breeze-blown tape is dulled but perceptible. It counts out beats.

Chigurh is also looking at the lock cylinder.

The curved brass of its hollow interior holds a reflection of the motel room exterior. Lights and shapes. The curvature distorts to unrecognizability what is reflected, but we see the color of Sheriff Bell's uniform.

The reflection is very still. Then, slow movement.

OUTSIDE

Sheriff Bell finishes bringing his hand to his holstered gun. It rests there.

Still once again.

His point-of-view of the lock. The reflection from here, darker, is hard to read.

INSIDE

Chigurh, still.

OUTSIDE

Sheriff Bell, his hand on his holstered gun. A long beat.

His hand drops.

He extends one booted toe. He nudges the door inward.

As the lock cylinder slowly recedes, reflected shapes scramble inside it and slide up its curve. Before the door is fully open we cut around:

FROM INSIDE

The door finishes creaking open. Sheriff Bell is a silhouette in the doorway.

A still beat.

At length Sheriff Bell ducks under the chest-high police tape to enter.

The worn carpet has a large dark stain that glistens near the door. Sheriff Bell steps over it, advancing slowly. The room is dimly lit shapes.

There is a bathroom door in the depth of the room. Sheriff Bell advances toward it. He stops in front of it.

He toes the door. It creaks slowly open.

The bathroom, with no spill light from outside, is pitch black.

Sheriff Bell reaches slowly up with one hand. He gropes at the inside wall.

The light goes on: bright. White tile. Sheriff Bell squints. A beat.

He takes a step in.

He looks at the small window.

He looks at the window's swivel-catch, locked.

Sheriff Bell emerges from the bathroom. He sits heavily onto the bed.

He looks around, not for anything in particular. His look catches on something low, just in front of him:

A ventilation duct near the baseboard. Its opening is exposed; its grille lies on the floor before it.

Sheriff Bell stares.

At length he leans forward. He nudges the grille aside. On the floor, a couple of screws. A coin.

A CAT

Licking itself on a plank floor, stiffened leg pointing out.

It suddenly stops and looks up, ears perked.

A frozen beat, and then it bolts.

The camera booms up to frame the barren west Texas landscape outside the window of this isolated cabin. A pickup truck is approaching, trailing dust. The cat reenters frame outside, running across the rutted gravel in front of the house as the pickup slows.

Ellis, an old man in a wheelchair, has one clouded eye.

Sheriff Bell enters.

Sheriff Bell stares at him.

Sheriff Bell lifts an electric percolator off the counter.

Sheriff Bell pours some.

He taps a cigarette ash into a mason jar lid on the table in front of him.

A beat.

A beat.

Sheriff Bell shrugs.

A beat.

The two men look at each other. Ellis shakes his head.

After a beat, a fast fade.

In black we hear the chink-chink-chink of chain being played out and the hum of a motor.

We cut to a dark foreground shape being lowered in sync with the clinking sound. As it drops it clears a tombstone Progressively revealed:

The name, Agnes Kracik.

Her dates: 1922-1980.

The inscription: Beloved Mother.

Off that we cut to Carla Jean, standing by in a black dress and dark veil.

A parched square of grass in front of the house. A rusty station wagon pulls into the driveway and stops. Carla Jean gets out.

Carla Jean enters and puts on the kettle. She opens the cupboard looking for something.

KITCHEN - LATER

Carla Jean sits at the kitchen table drinking tea. She looks out the window.

Across the street kids are running through a sprinkler that chugs in the yard.

BEDROOM DOOR

The door opens and Carla Jean enters holding her hat and veil. She throws the light switch and stops, hand frozen, looking into the room.

After a beat:

Chigurh sits at the far end of the room in the late-afternoon shadows.

Chigurh nods at the bed and Carla Jean sits down, hugging her hat and veil.

A beat.

Minutes later.

A beat.

The front door swings open and Chigurh emerges.

He pauses with one hand on the jamb and looks at the sole of each boot in turn.

He goes to the pickup in the driveway.

He is driving.

His point-of-view: coming upon an empty intersection, his light green.

Back to Chigurh.

He just starts to turn his head to the right.

A huge crash.

Chigurh's pickup has been T-boned by an old crate of a pickup. Both vehicles slide to a halt amid broken glass in the middle of the intersection.

The windshield of the truck that ran the light is mostly gone. The driver is draped dead on the wheel.

After a beat the door of Chigurh's truck is pushed open. He staggers out, heavily favoring one leg where the jeans are shredded and bloody at the thigh. One arm is also bloody and hangs limp. Blood runs down his face from a scalp wound.

He staggers to a lawn and sits.

He looks up.

Two teenage boys have come out of somewhere. They goggle at him.

The two boys look at each other. They look back.

Boy 2 unbuttons his shirt.

Chigurh uses his teeth to clamp the shirt and rips it and wraps a swatch around his head. He twists the rest of the shirt into a sling and puts the limp arm in.

The two boys look at each other.

Boy 2, the one now wearing a T-shirt, ties it.

Chigurh pulls a bill clip from his pocket and draws a bill out with his teeth. He holds it out to the boy.

Wide on Chigurh limping off.

We can just hear the boys, small:

Loretta pours Sheriff Bell and then herself morning coffee.

A beat.

Sheriff Bell sips his coffee.

A beat.

Loretta takes a sip.

They both sip.

We cut to night, and snow. It is the image that the movie began with. Continuing in voice over:

The rider passes as described, horses' hooves drumming and scattering divots of earth and snow.

The rider recedes and the image fades, the horn bearing fire going last.