How It All Goes Down
- Sheriff Italics, whoever he is, wonders "if law enforcement work is more dangerous now than what it used to be or not" (2.1.1).
- The Sheriff recalls a time when he got shot by some rando riding in the back of a pickup truck.
- The shotgun-wielding crazy person drove off, so the Sheriff just drove his cruiser, now with a shattered windshield, to the café for coffee.
- In conclusion, the Sheriff has no idea if law enforcement work is more dangerous now or not, but people do seem to be getting crazier.
- Sheriff Bell gets an urgent call: a cat is stuck in a tree.
- Bell gets an urgent-er call on the radio: there's a body in a trunk.
- That's a little more important than a stuck cat, so Bell goes to check it out.
- The language and dialogue here is very vague, but it seems like the man in question is the one Chigurh killed in the first chapter, so the vehicle must be the police cruiser Chigurh stole and abandoned.
- Bell and his colleague Torbert decide to keep this whole thing low key, probably because a dead body in a stolen police cruiser will get all sorts of unnecessary attention.
- Torbert drives off with the body still in the trunk, and Bell goes to the office in Sonora.
- There's yellow tape across the parking lot. Uh oh.
- The Sheriff goes inside and his superior, Lamar, is there.
- This is the crime scene for the deputy killed by Chigurh in the last chapter.
- Lamar, who calls the Sheriff by his name, Ed Tom, has a feeling "we're looking at somethin we really aint never even seen before" (2.2.75). This is all very, very bad news.
- Between the last chapter and this one, Llewelyn Moss has managed to catch a bus back to his trailer park.
- There, he continues to not tell his wife what's going on. We do at least find out her name: Carla Jean.
- Llewelyn tells Carla Jean to pack up and move to Odessa with her mother.
- Carla Jean knows it has something to do with all the money—she looked in the satchel—but she doesn't know where the money came from. Llewelyn still won't tell her. He only tells her to pack and get moving.
- Chigurh crosses the Pecos River, but even crazed killers need to stop for gas.
- In the station, Chigurh acts super creepy to the guy behind the counter, forcing him to call a coin toss and implying that the stakes are… his life.
- The man calls heads and gets it right, so Chigurh lets him keep it. "It's your lucky coin" (2.4.88), he says.
- Chigurh leaves and later meets some unnamed drug runners to inspect all the dead bodies in the desert… the ones Llewelyn came across earlier.
- The live men seem to be the ones who shot at Llewelyn earlier. They give Chigurh a brief description of Llewelyn.
- Chigurh pries the ID plate off Llewelyn's truck; then he shoots the men in their heads. Bang bang he shoots them down bang bang.