CALICHE Written as an original screenplay. All characters and events depicted are fictional. Any resemblance to real persons living or dead is coincidental. FADE IN: EXT. I-10 WEST OF SAN ANTONIO, LATE AFTERNOON Flat country. The sky takes up two thirds of the frame. In the lower third: blacktop, the white line, and a decade-old Ford F-150 doing a steady seventy-three in the right lane. The land on both sides is scrub and rock and dry grass gone the color of old newspaper. A hawk sits on a power line post and watches the truck pass without moving. COLE DRYDEN (57) drives with both hands on the wheel. He is lean in the way a man gets lean when the last ten years have been mostly work and mostly alone. His face has the settled quality of a person who has stopped arranging it for other people. There are two gray lines at his temples that were not there four years ago. On the passenger seat: a real estate agent's business card. A manila folder of county property