“I’m sorry you was shot.”

 

Preacher’s eyes lifted from the girl’s face to the kitchen, where Jesus and his wife were washing dishes in a pan of greasy water, their backs to Preacher. “I was in a car accident. Nobody shot me,” he said.

 

She touched the cast with the ends of her fingers. “We got ice now. I’ll put it on your foot,” she said.

 

So Jesus had opened his mouth in front of his wife and daughter, Preacher thought. So the little girl could tell all her friends a gringo with two bullet holes in him was paying money to stay at their house.

 

What to do? he asked himself, staring at the ceiling.

 

Late that afternoon he had a feverish dream. He was firing a Thompson submachine gun, the stock and cylindrical magazine turned sideways so the recoil would jerk the barrel horizontally rather than upward, directing the angle of fire parallel to the ground rather than above the shapes he saw in the darkness.

 

He awoke abruptly into the warm yellow glare of the room and wasn’t sure where he was. He could hear flies buzzing and a goat’s bell tinkling and smell the odor of water that had gone sour in a cattle pond. He picked up a damp cloth from a bowl on his nightstand and wiped his face with it. He sat on the side of the mattress, the blood draining down into his foot, waiting for the images in his dream to leave his mind.

 

Through the kitchen doorway he could see Jesus and his wife and little girl eating at their kitchen table. They were eating tortillas they’d rolled pickled vegetables inside, their faces leaning over their bowls, crumbs falling from their mouths. They made him think of Indians from an earlier era eating inside a cave.

 

Why’d Jesus have to blab in front of the kid? Preacher wondered. Maybe he plans to blab to a much wider audience anyway, maybe to the jefe and his khaki-clad half-breed dirtbags down at the jail.

 

Preacher could feel the coldness of the .45’s frame protruding from under the mattress. His crutches were propped against a wood chair in the corner. Through the window he could see the tan compact Hugo had ordered delivered for his use.

 

The veterinarian was coming back that evening. The veterinarian and Jesus and his wife and the little girl would all be in the house at one time.

 

This crap was on Hugo Cistranos, not him, Preacher thought. Just like the gig behind the stucco church. It was Hugo who’d blown it. Preacher hadn’t invented how the world worked. The coyote’s ability to dig the gopher out of its burrow was hardwired into the coyote’s brain. A hundred-million-year-old floodplain disappearing into infinity contained only one form of meaningful artifact: the mineralized bones of all the mammals, reptiles, and birds that had done whatever was necessary in order to survive. If anyone doubted that, he needed only to sink the steel bucket on a backhoe into one of those ancient riverbeds that looked like calcified putty in the sunset.

 

Jesus brought Preacher his supper at dusk.

 

“What time is the vet going to be here?” Preacher asked.

 

“No is vet. Es médico, boss. He gonna be here soon.”

 

“Answer the question: When will he be here?”

 

“Maybe fifteen minutes. You like the food okay?”

 

“Hand me my crutches.”

 

“You getting up?”

 

Preacher’s upturned face looked like the edge of a hatchet.

 

“I’ll get them, boss,” Jesus said.

 

Jesus’s wife had hand-washed Preacher’s trousers and shirt and socks and underwear, replaced his coins and keys and pocketknife in the pockets, and hung them neatly on the wood chair by the wall. Preacher worked his way to the chair, gathered up his clothes, and sat back down on his mattress. Then he slowly dressed himself, keeping his mind empty of the events that would take place in the house within the next few minutes.

 

He had not tucked in his shirt, allowing it to hang outside his trousers. Through the front window, he saw the veterinarian’s paint-skinned truck clattering over the ruts in the road, churning a cloud of fine white dust in the air. Preacher slid the .45 from under his mattress and pushed it inside the back of his belt, then pulled his shirt over the grips. The veterinarian parked in back and cut the engine, just as the rooster tail of dust from his truck broke across the front of the house and drifted through the screens. Preacher lifted himself onto his crutches and began working his way toward the kitchen, where Jesus and his wife and little girl sat at the table, waiting for the veterinarian, who clutched a sweating six-pack of Coca-Cola.

 

The veterinarian was unshaved and wore a frayed suit coat that was too tight on him and a tie with stains on it and a white shirt missing a button at the navel. He suffered from myopia, which caused him to squint and to furrow his brow, and as a consequence the villagers looked upon him as a studious and educated man worthy of respect.

 

“You look very good in your clean clothes, seńor. Do you not want me to change your bandages? I brought you more sedatives to help you sleep,” the veterinarian said to Preacher.

 

The veterinarian was framed against the screen door, the late red sun creating a nimbus around his uncut hair and the stubble on his jowls.

 

Preacher steadied his weight and eased his right hand from the grip on the crutch. He moved his hand behind him slowly, so as not to lose his balance, his knuckles touching the heaviness of the .45 stuck down in his belt. “I don’t think I’ll need anything tonight,” he said.

 

They all stared at him in the silence, the bare lightbulb overhead splintering into yellow needles, reducing the differences in their lives to pools of shadow at their feet. Now, now, now, Preacher heard a voice in his head saying.

 

“Rosa made you some peanut-butter cookies,” Jesus said.

 

Was that the little girl’s name or the name of the wife? “Say again?”

 

“My little girl made you a present, boss.”

 

“I’m diabetic. I cain’t eat sugar.”

 

“You want to sit down? You look like you’re hurting, boss.”

 

Preacher’s right hand opened and closed behind his back. He sucked in slightly on his bottom lip. “How far up the dirt road to the highway?”

 

“Ten minutes, no more.”

 

Preacher swallowed drily and slid his palm over the grips of the .45. Then his stare broke, and he felt a line of tension like a fissure divide the skin of his face in half. He pulled his wallet from his back pocket and labored on the crutches to the kitchen table. He splayed open the wallet and began counting a series of bills onto the table. “There’s eleven hundred dollars here,” he said. “You educate that little girl with it, you buy her decent clothes, you get her teeth fixed, you send her to a doctor and not to some damn quack, you buy her good food, and you burn a candle at your church in thanks you got a little girl like this. You understand me?”

 

“You don’t got to tell me those things, boss.”

 

“And you get her a grammar book, too, plus one for yourself.”

 

Preacher worked his wallet into his pocket and thumped across the floor on his crutches and out the screen into the yard, under a purple and bloodred sky that seemed filled with the cawing of carrion birds.

 

He fell behind the wheel of the Honda and started the engine. Jesus came out the back screen of his house, a can of Coca-Cola in his hand.

 

“Some guys just don’t know how to leave it alone,” Preacher said under his breath.

 

“Boss, can you talk to Rosa? She’s crying.”

 

“About what?”

 

“She heard you talking in your sleep. She thinks you’re going to hell.”

 

“You just don’t get it, do you?”

 

“Get what, boss?”

 

“It’s right yonder, all around us, in the haze of the evening. We’re already there,” Preacher said, gesturing at the darkening plain.

 

“You one unusual gringo, boss.”

 

 

WHEN HACKBERRY HOLLAND woke inside a blue dawn on Saturday morning, he looked through his bedroom window and saw the FBI agent Ethan Riser in his backyard, admiring Hack’s flower beds. The FBI agent’s hair was as thick and white as cotton, the capillaries in his jaws like pieces of blue and red thread. The iridescent spray from Hackberry’s automatic sprinklers had already stained Riser’s pale suit, but his concentration on the flower beds seemed so intense he was hardly aware of it.

 

Hackberry dressed in a pair of khakis and a T-shirt and walked barefoot onto the back porch. There were poplar trees planted as a windbreak at the bottom of his property, and inside the shadows they made on the grass he could see a doe and her fawn watching him, their eyes brown and moist inside the gloom.

 

“You guys get up early in the morning, don’t you?” he said to the FBI agent.

 

“I work Sundays, too. Me and the pope.”

 

“What do you need, sir?”

 

“Can I buy you breakfast?”

 

“No, but you can come inside.”

 

While the agent sat at his kitchen table, Hackberry started the coffeemaker and broke a half-dozen eggs in a huge skillet and set two pork chops in the skillet with them. “You like cereal?” he said.

 

“No, thanks.”

 

At the stove, Hackberry poured a bowlful of Rice Krispies, then added cold milk and started eating them while the eggs and meat cooked. Ethan Riser rested his chin on his thumb and knuckle and stared into space, trying not to look at his watch or show impatience. His eyes were ice-blue, unblinking, marked by neither guile nor doubt. He cleared his throat slightly. “My father was a botanist and a Shakespearean actor,” he said. “In his gardens he grew every kind of flower Shakespeare mentions in his work. He was also a student of Voltaire and believed he could tend his own garden and separate himself from the rest of the world. For that reason, he was a tragic man.”

 

“What did you want to tell me, sir?” Hackberry said, setting his cereal bowl in the sink.

 

“There were two sets of prints on the Airweight thirty-eight the road gang supervisor gave you. We matched one set to the prints of Vikki Gaddis we took from her house. The other set we matched through the California driver’s license database. They belong to a fellow by the name of Jack Collins. He has no criminal record. But we’ve heard about him. His nickname is Preacher. Excuse me, are you listening?”

 

“I will be as soon as I have some coffee.”

 

“I see.”

 

“You take sugar or milk?” Hackberry said.

 

Ethan Riser folded his arms and looked out the window at the deer among the poplar trees. “Whatever you have is fine,” he said.

 

“Go ahead,” Hackberry said.

 

“Thank you. They call him Preacher because he thinks he may be the left hand of God, the giver of death.” Ethan Riser waited, his agitation beginning to show. “You’re not impressed?”

 

“Did you ever know a sociopath who didn’t think he was of cosmic importance? What did this guy do before he became the left hand of God?”

 

“He was a pest exterminator.”

 

Hackberry began pouring coffee into two cups and tried to hide his expression.

 

“You think it’s funny?” Riser said.

 

“Me?”

 

“You said you were at Pak’s Palace. I did some research. That was a brick factory where Major Pak hung up GIs on the rafters and beat them with clubs for hours. You were one of them?”

 

“So what if I was or wasn’t? It happened. Most of those guys didn’t come back.” Hackberry scraped the eggs and meat out of the skillet onto a platter. Then he set the platter on top of the table. He set it down harder than he intended.

 

“We hear this guy Preacher is a gun for hire across the border. We hear he doesn’t take prisoners. It’s a free-fire zone down there. More people are being killed in Coahuila and Nuevo León than in Iraq, did you know that?”

 

“As long as it doesn’t happen in my county, I’m not interested.”

 

“You’d better be. Maybe Collins has already killed Pete Flores and the Gaddis girl. If he’s true to his reputation, he’ll be back and brush his footprints out of the sand. You hearing me on this, Sheriff?”

 

Hackberry blew on his coffee and drank from it. “My grandfather was a Texas Ranger. He knocked John Wesley Hardin out of his saddle and pistol-whipped him and put him in jail.”

 

“What’s that mean?”

 

“Mess with the wrong people and you’ll get a shitpile of grief, is what it means.”

 

Ethan Riser studied him, just short of being impolite. “I heard you were a hardhead. I heard you think you can live inside your own zip code.”

 

“Your food’s getting cold. Better eat up.”

 

“Here’s the rest of it. After nine-eleven, Immigration and Naturalization merged with Customs and became ICE. They’re one of the most effective and successful law enforcement agencies we have under Homeland Security. The great majority of their agents are professional and good at what they do. But there’s one guy hereabouts who is off the leash and off the wall.”

 

“This guy Clawson?”

 

“That’s right, Isaac Clawson. Years ago two serial predators were working out of northern Oklahoma. They made forays up into Kansas, the home of Toto and Dorothy and the yellow brick road. I won’t describe what they did to most of their victims because you’re trying to eat your breakfast. Clawson’s daughter worked nights at a convenience store. These guys kidnapped both her and her fiancé from the store and locked them in the trunk of a car. Out of pure meanness, they set fire to the car and burned them alive.”

 

“You’re telling me Clawson’s a cowboy?”

 

“I’ll put it this way: He likes to work alone.”

 

Hackberry had set down his knife and fork. He gazed out the back door at the poplar trees. The sky was dark, and dust was blowing out of a field, the tips of the poplars bending in the wind.

 

“You okay, Sheriff?”

 

“Sure, why not?”

 

“You were a corpsman at the Chosin?”

 

“Yep.”

 

“The country owes men and women like you a big debt.”

 

“Not to me they don’t,” Hackberry said.

 

“I had to come here this morning.”

 

“I know you did.”

 

Ethan Riser got up to leave, then paused at the door. “Love your flowers,” he said.

 

Hackberry nodded and didn’t reply.

 

He wrapped the uneaten pork chops in foil and placed them in the icebox, then put on a gray sweat-ringed felt hat and in the backyard scraped the eggs off the platter for his bird dog and two barn cats that didn’t have names and a possum that lived under the house. He went back in the kitchen and took a sack of corn out of the icebox and walked down to the poplar trees and scattered the corn in the grass for the doe and her fawn. The grass was tall and green in the lee of the trees, channeled with the wind blowing out of the south. Hackberry squatted down and watched the deer eat, his face blanketed with shadow, his eyes like those of a man staring into a dead fire.

 

 

 

 

 

6

 

NICK DOLAN FELT he might have dodged a bolt of lightning. Hugo Cistranos had not shown up at the club or followed him to his vacation home on the Comal River. Maybe Hugo was all gas and flash and Afghan hash and would just disappear. Maybe Hugo would be consumed by his own evil, like a candle flame cupping and dying inside its own wax. Maybe Nick would finally get a break from the cosmic powers that had kept him running on a hamster wheel for most of his life.

 

Just outside the city limits of San Antonio, Nick lived in a neighborhood of eight-thousand-to-ten-thousand-square-feet homes, many of them built of stone, the yards cordoned off by thick green hedges, the sidewalks tree-shaded. The zoning code was strict, and trucks, trailers, mobile homes, and even specially outfitted vehicles to transport the handicapped could not be parked on the streets or in driveways overnight. But Nick cared less about the upscale, quasi-bucolic quality of his neighborhood than he did about the latticework enclosure and patio he had built with his own labor behind his house.

 

The palm trees that towered overhead had come from Florida, their root balls wrapped in wet burlap, the excavations they were dropped into sprinkled with dead bait fish and bat guano. The grapevine that wound through the latticework had been transplanted from his grandfather’s old home in New Orleans. The flagstones had been discovered during the construction of an overpass and brought by a friendly contractor to Nick’s house, four of them chiseled with a seventeenth-century Spanish coat of arms. His hedges flowered in spring and bloomed until December. In the center of his patio were a glass-topped bamboo table and bamboo chairs, all of it shaded by Hong Kong orchid trees rooted inside redwood barrels that had been sawed in half.

 

In the cooling of the day, Nick loved to sit at the table in fresh white tennis togs, a glass of gin and tonic and cracked ice in his hand, an orange slice inserted on the lip of the glass, and read a book, a best seller whose title he could drop in a conversation. The breeze was up tonight, the lavender sky flickering with heat lightning, the freshly clipped ends of the flowers in his hedge like thousands of pink and purple eyes couched among the leaves. Nick had smoked only nineteen cigarettes that day, a record. He had many things to be thankful for. Maybe he even had a future.

 

Inside the fragrance of his enclosure, he felt himself drowsing off, the weight of his book pulling itself from his hand.

 

His head jerked up, his eyes opening suddenly. He rubbed the sleep out of his face and wondered if he was having a bad dream. Hugo Cistranos was standing above him, grinning, his forearms thick and scrolled with veins, as though he had been wrist-curling a barbell. “Looks like you got quite a sunburn on the river,” he said.

 

“How’d you get in my yard?”

 

“Through the hedge.”

 

“Are you nuts coming here like this?”

 

Nick’s scalp constricted. He had just done it again, admitting guilt and complicity about things he hadn’t done, indicating he and Hugo had a relationship of some kind, one based on shared experience.

 

“Didn’t want to embarrass you at the club. Didn’t want to ring the bell and disturb your family. What’s a guy to do, Nicholas? We’ve got mucho shit-o to work through here.”

 

“I don’t owe you any money.”

 

“Okay, you owe it to my subcontractors. Put it any way you want. The vig is running as we speak. My chief subcontractor is Preacher Jack Collins. He’s a religious fanatic who did the hands-on work behind the church. Nobody knows what goes on inside his head, and nobody asks. I just delivered him his Honda and paid his medical expenses. Those services are all on your tab, too, Nicholas.”

 

“I don’t use that name.”

 

“No problemo, Nick-o. Know why I had to pay Preacher’s medical expenses? Because this broad here put two holes in him.”

 

Hugo placed a four-by-five color photograph on the glass tabletop. Nick stared down at the face of a girl with recessed eyes, her chestnut hair curled at the tips. “Ever see this cutie?” Hugo asked.

 

Nick’s scalp constricted again. “No,” he replied.

 

“How about this kid?” Hugo said, placing another photo next to the girl’s. A soldier in a United States Army dress uniform, an American flag on a staff as a backdrop, stared up at Nick.

 

“I never saw this person, either,” Nick said, studiously not letting his eyes drift back to the girl’s photograph.

 

“You said that pretty quick. Take another look.”

 

“I don’t know who they are. Why are you showing these pictures to me?”

 

“Those are two kids who can bring a lot of people down. They have to go off the board, Nick. People got to get paid, too, Nick. That means I’m about to be your new business partner, Nick. I’ve got the papers right here. Twenty-five percent of the club and the Mexican restaurant and no claim on anything else. It’s a bargain, little buddy.”

 

“Screw you, Hugo,” Nick said, his face dilating with the recklessness of his own rhetoric.

 

Hugo opened a manila folder and sorted through a half-inch of documents, as though giving them final approval, then closed the folder and set it on the table. “Relax, finish your drink and have a smoke, talk it over with your wife. There’s no rush.” He looked at his wristwatch. “I’ll send a driver for the papers, say, tomorrow afternoon, around three. Okay, little buddy?”

 

 

NICK HAD HOPED he would never see the girl named Vikki Gaddis again. His nonnegotiable rules for himself as the operator of a skin joint and as the geographically removed owner of escort services in Dallas and Houston had always remained the same: You paid your taxes, and you protected your girls and never personally exploited them.

 

Nick’s rules had preempted conflicts with the IRS and purchased for him an appreciable degree of respect from his employees. About eighteen months back, he had run a want ad in the San Antonio newspapers for musicians to play in the Mexican restaurant he had just built next to his strip club. Five days later, when he was out in the parking lot on a scalding afternoon, Vikki Gaddis had driven off the highway in a shitbox leaking smoke from every rusted crack in the car body. At first he thought she was looking for a job up on the pole, then he realized she hadn’t seen the ad but had been told he needed a folksinger.

 

“You’re confused,” Nick said. “I’m opening a Mexican restaurant. I need some entertainment for people while they’re eating dinner. Mexican stuff.”

 

He saw the disappointment in her eyes, a vague hint of desperation around her mouth. Her face was damp and shiny in the heat. Heavy trucks, their engines hammering, were passing on the highway, their air brakes hissing. Nick touched at his nose with the back of his wrist. “Why don’t you come on in the restaurant and let’s talk a minute?” he said.

 

Nick had already hired a five-piece mariachi band, one complete with sombreros and brocaded vaquero costumes, beer-bellied, mustached guys with brass horns that could crack the tiles on the roof, and he had no need of an Anglo folksinger. As he and the girl walked out of the sun’s glare into the air-conditioned coolness of the restaurant, the girl swinging her guitar case against her hip, he knew that an adulterer had always lived inside him.

 

She wore white shorts and a pale blue blouse and sandals, and when she sat down in front of his desk, she leaned over a little too far and he wondered if he wasn’t being played.

 

“You sing Spanish songs?” he said.

 

“No, I do a lot of the Carter Family pieces. Their music made a comeback when Johnny Cash married June. Then the interest died again. They created a style of picking that’s called ‘hammering on and pulling off.’”

 

Nick was clueless, his mouth hanging open in a half-smile. “You sing like Johnny Cash?”

 

“No, the Carters were a big influence on other people, like Woody Guthrie. Here, I’ll show you,” she said. She unsnapped her guitar case and removed a sunburst Gibson from it. The case was lined with purplish-pink velvet, and it glowed with a virginal light that only added to Nick’s confused thoughts about both the girl and the web of desire and need he was walking into.

 

She fitted a pick on her thumb and began singing a song about flowers covered with emerald dew and a lover betrayed and left to pine in a place that was older than time. When she chorded the guitar, the whiteness of her palm curved around the neck, and she depressed a bass string just before striking it, then released it, creating a sliding note that resonated inside the sound hole. Nick was mesmerized by her voice, the way she lifted her chin when she sang, the muscles working in her throat.

 

“That’s beautiful,” he said. “You say these Carter guys were an influence on Woody Herman?”

 

“Not exactly,” she replied.

 

“I already got a band, but maybe come back in a couple of weeks. If it doesn’t work out with them—”

 

“You have an opening for a food server?” she asked, putting away her guitar.

 

“I got two more than I need. I had to hire the cook’s sisters, or she was gonna walk on me.”

 

The girl snapped the locks on her case and raised her eyes to his. “Thanks, you’ve been real nice,” she said.

 

An image was forming in his mind that turned his loins to water. “Look, I got a place next door. Slap my face if you want. The money’s good, the girls working for me don’t have to do anything they don’t want to, I throw drunks and profane guys out. I try to keep it a gentlemen’s club even if some bums get in sometimes. I could use a—”

 

“What are you saying?”

 

“That I got an opening or two. That maybe you’re in a tight spot and I can help you out till you find a singing job.”

 

“I’m not a dancer,” she said.

 

“Yeah, I knew that,” he said, his face small and tight and burning. “I was just letting you know my situation. I only got so many resources. I got kids of my own.” He was stuttering, and his hands were shaking under the desk, his words nonsensical even to himself.

 

She was getting up, reaching for the handle on her guitar case, the back of one gold thigh streaked with a band of light.

 

“Ms. Gaddis—”

 

“Just call me Vikki.”

 

“I thought maybe I was doing a good deed. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

 

“I think you’re a nice man. I enjoyed meeting you,” she said. She smiled at him, and in that moment, in order to be twenty-five again, Nick would have run his fingers one at a time through a Skilsaw.

 

Now, as he sat amid trellises and latticework that were green and thick with grapevine grown by his grandfather, an honest and decent man who had sold shoestrings from door to door, he tried to convince himself the girl in the photo was not Vikki Gaddis. But it was, and he knew it, and he knew her face would live in his sleep the rest of his life if Hugo killed her. And what about the soldier? Nick had recognized the elongated blue and silver combat infantryman badge on his chest. Nick could feel tears welling into his eyes but couldn’t decide if they were for himself or for the Thai women machine-gunned by somebody named Preacher Collins or for Vikki Gaddis and her boyfriend.

 

He lay down in the middle of his lawn, his arms and legs spread in the shape of a giant X, a weight as heavy as a blacksmith’s anvil crushing his chest.

 

 

WHEN HACKBERRY LOOKED out his office window and saw a silver car with a mirror wax job coming hard up the street, blowing dust and newspaper into the air, the sun bouncing off the windshield like the brassy flash of a heliograph, he knew that either a drunk or an outsider who couldn’t read speed limit signs or government trouble was about to arrive in the middle of his afternoon, free curbside delivery.

 

The man who got out of the car was as tall as Hackberry, his starched white shirt form-fitting on his athletic frame, his shaved and polished head gleaming under an afternoon sun that looked like a yellow flame. A dark-skinned man with a haircut like a nineteenth-century Apache’s sat hunched over in the backseat, both arms pulled down between his legs, as though he were trying to clutch his ankles. The dark-skinned man’s eyes were slits, his lips purple with either snuff or bruises, the back of his neck pocked with acne scars.

 

Hackberry put on a straw hat and stepped outside into the shade of the sandstone building that served as his office and the jail. The man with the shaved head held up his ID. The lidless intensity in his eyes and the tautness in his facial muscles made Hackberry think of a banjo string wound tightly on a wood peg, the tension climbing into a tremolo. The man said, “Isaac Clawson, ICE. I’m glad you’re in your office. I don’t like to chase a local official around in his own county.”

 

“Why is Danny Boy Lorca on a D-ring?”

 

“You know him?” Clawson said.

 

“I just used his name to you, sir.”

 

“What I mean is, do you know anything about him?”

 

“About once a month he walks from the beer joint down to the jail and sleeps it off. He lets himself in and out.”

 

“He’s the drinking buddy of Pete Flores. He says he doesn’t know where Flores is.”

 

“Let’s have a talk with him,” Hackberry said. He opened the back door of the sedan and leaned inside. The smell of urine welled into his face. There was a skinned place on Danny Boy’s right temple, like a piece of fruit that had been rubbed on a carrot grater. There was a dark area in his wash-faded jeans, as though a wet towel had been pressed into his groin.

 

“Have you seen Pete Flores around?” Hackberry said.

 

“Maybe two weeks back.”

 

“Y’all were drinking a little mescal together?”

 

“He was eating in Junior’s diner on the four-lane. That’s where his girlfriend works at.”

 

“We think some guys are trying to hurt him, Danny. You’d be doing Pete a big favor if you helped us find him.”

 

“I ain’t seen him since what I just told you.” Danny Boy’s eyes slid off Hackberry’s and fastened on Clawson’s, then came back again.

 

Hackberry straightened up and closed the door. “I think he’s telling the truth,” he said.

 

“You psychic with these guys?”

 

“With him I am. He doesn’t have any reason to lie.”

 

Clawson took off his large octagonal glasses and wiped them with a Kleenex, staring down the street, a deep wrinkle between his eyes. “Can we go inside?”

 

“It’s full of cigarette smoke. What’d you do to Danny Boy?”

 

“I didn’t do anything to him. He’s drunk. He fell down. When I picked him up, he started to swing on me. But I didn’t do anything to him.” Clawson opened the back door and used a handcuff key to free Danny Boy from the D-ring inset in the floor, then wrapped his fingers under Danny Boy’s arm and pulled him from the backseat. “Get going,” he said.

 

“You want me to hang around, Sheriff?” Danny Boy said.

 

“Did I tell you to get out of here?” Clawson said. He pushed Danny Boy, then kicked him in the butt.

 

“Whoa,” Hackberry said.

 

“Whoa what?” Clawson said.

 

“You need to dial it down, Mr. Clawson.”

 

“It’s Agent Clawson.”

 

Hackberry was breathing through his nose. He saw Pam Tibbs at the office window. He turned to Danny Boy. “Go down to Grogan’s and put a couple on my tab,” he said. “The operational word is ‘couple,’ Danny.”

 

“I don’t need a drink. I’m gonna get something to eat and go back to my place. If I hear anything on Pete, I’ll tell you,” Danny Boy said.

 

Hackberry turned and started back toward his office, ignoring Clawson’s presence. He could hear the flag popping in the breeze and the flag chain tinkling against the metal pole.

 

“We’re not done,” Clawson said. “Last night somebody made two nine-one-one calls from a pay phone outside San Antonio. I’ll play you part of it.”

 

He removed a small recorder from his pants pocket and clicked it on. The voice on the recording sounded like that of a drunk man or someone with a speech defect. “Tell the FBI there’s a whack out on a girl name of Vikki Gaddis. They’re gonna kill her and a soldier. It’s about those Thai women that got murdered.” Clawson clicked off the recorder. “Know the voice?” he said.

 

“No,” Hackberry said.

 

“I think the caller had a pencil clenched between his teeth and was loaded on top of it. Can you detect an accent?”

 

“I’d say he’s not from around here.”

 

“Here’s another piece of information: One of our forensic guys went the extra mile on the postmortem of the Thai females. They had China white in their stomachs, balloons full of it, the purest I’ve ever seen. Some of the balloons had ruptured in the women’s stomachs prior to mortality. I wonder if you stumbled into a storage area rather than a graveyard.”

 

“Stumbled?”

 

“English lit wasn’t my strong suit. You want to be serious here or not?”

 

“I don’t buy that the place behind the church was a storage area. That makes no sense.”

 

“Then what does?”

 

“I’ve been told of your personal loss, sir. I think I can appreciate the level of anger you must have to deal with. But you’re not going to verbally abuse or put your foot on anybody in this county again. We’re done here.”

 

“Where do you get off talking about my personal life? Where do you get off talking about my daughter, you sonofabitch?”

 

Just then the dispatcher Maydeen stepped outside and lit a cigarette. She wore a deputy’s uniform and had fat arms and big breasts and wide hips, and her lipstick looked like a flattened rose on her mouth. “Hack doesn’t let us smoke in the building,” she said, smiling from ear to ear as she inhaled deep into her lungs.

 

 

PREACHER JACK COLLINS paid the cabdriver the fare from the airstrip to the office-and-condo building that faced Galveston Bay. But rather than go immediately into the building, he paused on his crutches and stared across Seawall Boulevard at the waves folding on the beach, each wave rilling with sand and yellowed vegetation and dead shellfish and seaweed matted with clusters of tiny crabs and Portuguese men-of-war whose tentacles could wrap around a horse’s leg and sting it to its knees.

 

There was a storm breaking on the southern horizon like a great cloud of green gas forked with lightning that made no sound. The air had turned the color of tarnished brass as the barometer had dropped, and Preacher could taste the salt in the wind and smell the shrimp that had been caught inside the waves and left stranded on the sand among the ruptured blue air sacs of the jellyfish. The humidity was as bright as spun glass, and within a minute’s time it glazed his forearms and face and was turned into a cool burn by the wind, not unlike a lover’s tongue moving across the skin.

 

Preacher entered a glass door painted with the words REDSTONE SECURITY SERVICE. A receptionist looked up from her desk and smiled pleasantly at him. “Tell Mr. Rooney Jack is here to see him,” he said.

 

“Do you have an appointment, sir?”

 

“What time is it?”

 

The receptionist glanced at a large grandfather clock, one whose face was inset with Roman numerals. “It’s four-forty-seven,” she said.

 

“That’s the time of my appointment with Mr. Rooney. You can tell him that.”

 

Her hand moved toward the phone uncertainly, then stopped.

 

“That was just my poor joke. Ma’am, these crutches aren’t getting any more comfortable,” Preacher said.

 

“Just a moment.” She lifted the phone receiver and pushed a button. “Mr. Rooney, Jack is here to see you.” There was a beat. “He didn’t give it.” Another beat, this one longer. “Sir, what’s your last name?”

 

“My full name is Jack Collins, no middle initial.”

 

After the receptionist relayed the information, there was a silence in the room almost as loud as the waves bursting against the beach. Then she replaced the receiver in the cradle. Whatever thoughts she was thinking were locked behind her eyes. “Mr. Rooney says to go on up. The elevator is to your left.”

 

“He tell you to call somebody?” Preacher asked.

 

“I’m not sure I know what you mean, sir.”

 

“You did your job, ma’am. Don’t worry about it. But I’d better not hear that elevator come up behind me with the wrong person in it,” Preacher said.

 

The receptionist stared straight ahead for perhaps three seconds, picked up her purse, and went out the front door, her dress switching back and forth across her calves.

 

When Preacher stepped out of the elevator, he saw a man in a beige suit and pink western shirt sitting in a swivel chair behind a huge desk, framed against a glass wall that looked out onto the bay. On the desk was a big clear plastic jar of green-and-blue candy sticks, each striped stick wrapped in cellophane. His hips swelled out at the beltline and gave the sense that he was melting in his swivel chair. He had sandy hair and a small Irish mouth that was downturned at the corners. His skin was dusted with liver spots, some of them dark, almost purple around the edges, as though his soul exuded sickness through his pores. “Help you?” he said.

 

“Maybe.”

 

Down on the beach, swimmers were getting out of the water, dragging their inner tubes with them, a lifeguard standing in his elevated chair, blowing a whistle, pointing his finger at a triangular fin whizzing through a swell at incredible speed.

 

“Can I sit down?” Preacher said.

 

“Yes, sir, go right ahead,” Arthur Rooney said.

 

“Should I call you Artie or Mr. Rooney?”

 

“Whatever you want.”

 

“Hugo Cistranos work for you?”

 

“He did. When I had an investigative agency in New Orleans. But not now.”

 

“I think he does.”

 

“Sir?”

 

“Do I need to speak louder?”

 

“Hugo Cistranos is not with me any longer. That’s what I’m saying to you. What’s the issue, Mr. Collins?” Artie Rooney cleared his throat as though the last word had caught in his larynx.

 

“You know who I am?”

 

“I’ve heard of you. Nickname is Preacher, right?”

 

“Yes, sir, some do call me that with regularity, friends and such.”

 

“We just moved into this office. How’d you know I was here?”

 

“Made a couple of calls. Know that song ‘I Get Around’ by the Beach Boys? I get around, albeit on crutches. A woman put a couple of holes in me.”

 

“Sorry to hear about that.”

 

“Some other people and I got stuck with a piece of wet work. Supposedly, it was initiated by a little fellow who runs a skin joint for middle-aged titty babies. Supposedly, this little fellow doesn’t want to come up with the money to pay his tab. His name is Nick Dolan. Know who I’m talking about?”

 

“I’ve known Nick for thirty-five years. He had a floating casino in New Orleans.”

 

Preacher chewed on a hangnail and removed a piece of skin from his tongue. “I got to thinking about this little fellow, the one with the titty-baby joint about halfway between Austin and San Antone. Why would a fellow like that have a bunch of Asian women shot to death?”

 

Artie Rooney had crossed one leg over his knee and propped one hand stiffly on the edge of his desk, his stomach swelling over his belt. “You’re talking about that big slaughter down by the border? I’m not up on that, Mr. Collins. To be frank, I’m a little lost here.”

 

“I’m not a mister, so don’t call me that again.”

 

“I didn’t mean to be impolite or insult you.”

 

“What makes you think you have the power to offend me?”

 

“Pardon?”

 

“You have a hearing problem? Why is it you think you’re so important I care about your opinion of me?”

 

Rooney’s eyes drifted to the elevator door.

 

“I wouldn’t expect the cav’ry if I were you,” Preacher said.

 

Rooney picked up his phone and pushed a button. After a few seconds, he replaced the receiver without speaking into it and leaned back in his chair. He rested his elbow on the arm of the chair, his chin on his thumb and forefinger, his pulse beating visibly in his throat. There was a bloodless white rim around the edge of his nostrils, as though he were breathing refrigerated air. “What’d you do with my secretary?”

 

“A little Mexican girl across the river said I might have to go to hell. You want me to tell you what I did?”

 

“To the girl? You did something to a little girl is what you’re telling me?” Rooney’s hand seemed to flutter at his mouth, then he lowered it to his lap.

 

“I think you worked some kind of scam on this Dolan fellow. I’m not sure what it is, exactly, but it’s got your shit-prints on it. You owe me a lot of money, Mr. Rooney. If I’m going to hell, if I’m already there, in fact, how much you reckon my soul is worth? Don’t put your hand on that phone again. You owe me a half million dollars.”

 

“I owe you what?”

 

“I’ve got a gift. I can always tell a coward. I can always tell a liar, too. I think you’re both.”

 

“What are you doing? Stay away from me.”

 

Out on the beach, a mother up to her hips in the water was scooping her child from a wave, running with it up the incline, her dress ballooning around her, her face filled with panic.

 

“Don’t get up. If you get up, that’s going to make it a whole lot worse,” Preacher said.

 

“What are you doing with that? For God’s sakes, man.”

 

“My soul is going to be in the flames because of you. You invoke God’s name now? Put your hand on the blotter and shut your eyes.”

 

“I’ll get you the money.”

 

“Right now, in your heart, you believe what you’re saying. But soon as I’m gone, your words will be ashes in the wind. Spread your fingers and press down real hard. Do it. Do it now. Or I’ll rake this across your face and then across your throat.”

 

With his eyes tightly shut, Artie Rooney obeyed the man who loomed above him on crutches. Then Preacher Jack Collins laid the edge of his barber’s razor across Rooney’s little finger and mashed down on the back of the razor with both hands.

 

 

 

 

 

7

 

NICK HAD HEARD of blackouts but was never quite sure what constituted one. How could somebody walk around doing things and have no memory of his deeds? To Nick, the terms “blackout” and “copout” seemed very similar.

 

But after Hugo Cistranos had left Nick’s backyard, telling him he had until three o’clock the next afternoon to sign over 25 percent of his strip joint and restaurant, Nick had gone downstairs to the game room, bolted the door so the children wouldn’t see him, and gotten sloshed to the eyes.

 

When he woke in the morning on the floor, sick and trembling and smelling of his own visceral odors, he remembered watching a cartoon show around midnight and fumbling with a deadbolt. Had he been sleepwalking? He stood at the bottom of the stairwell and stared up the stairs. The door was still locked. Thank God neither his wife nor the children had seen him drunk. Nick didn’t believe a father or husband could behave worse than one who was dissolute in front of his wife and children.

 

Then he saw his car keys on the Ping-Pong table and began to experience flashes of clarity inside his head, like shards of a mirror recon structing themselves behind his eyes, each one containing an image that grew larger and larger and filled him with terror: Nick driving a car, Nick in a phone booth, Nick talking to an emergency dispatcher, headlights swerving in front of his windshield, car horns blowing angrily.

 

Had he gone somewhere to make a 911 call? He went upstairs to shower and shave and put on fresh clothes. His wife and children were gone, and in the silence he could hear the wind rattling the dry fronds of his palm trees against the eaves. From the bathroom window, the sunlight trapped inside his swimming pool wobbled and refracted like the blue-white flame of an acetylene torch. The entire exterior world seemed superheated, sharp-edged, a garden of cactuses and thorn bushes, scented not with flowers but with tar pots and diesel fumes.

 

What had he done last night?

 

Dropped the dime on Hugo? Dropped the dime on himself?

 

He sat at his breakfast table, eating aspirin and vitamin B, washing it down with orange juice straight out of the carton, his forehead oily with perspiration. He went into his office, hoping to find relief in the deep, cool ambience and solitude of his bookshelves and mahogany furniture and the dark drapes on the windows and the carpet that sank an inch under his feet. A bright red digital 11 was blinking on his message machine for his dedicated phone-and-fax line. The first message was from his wife, Esther: “We’re at the mall. I let you sleep. We have to talk. Did you go out in the middle of the night? What the hell is wrong with you?”

 

The other messages were from the restaurant and the club:

 

“Cheyenne says she’s not going on the pole the same time as Farina. I can’t deal with these bitches, Nick. Are you coming in?”

 

“Uncle Charley’s Meats just delivered us seventy pounds of spoiled chicken. That’s the second time this week. They say the problem is ours. They off-loaded on the dock, and we didn’t carry it in. I can’t put it in the box, and it’s smelling up the whole kitchen.”

 

“Me again. They were pulling each other’s hair in the dressing room.”

 

“The code guy was here. He says we have to put a third sink in. He says he found a dead mouse in the dishwasher drain, too.”

 

“Nick, there were a couple of guys in here last night I had trouble with. One guy had navy tats and a beard like a fire alarm. He said he was gonna be working for us. I kicked them out, but they said they’d be back. I thought maybe you needed a heads-up. Who is this asshole?”

 

“Hey, it’s me. There’s some flake on top of the toilet tank in the women’s can. I had Rabbit clean the shitters spotless early this morning. Farina was in there ten minutes ago. When she came out, she looked like she’d packed dry ice up her nose. Nick, babysitting crazy whores is not in my curriculum vitae. She wants your home number. You want me to give it to her? I can’t process these kinds of problems.”

 

Nick held down the delete button and erased every message on the machine, played and unplayed alike.

 

It was seventeen minutes to one o’clock. Hugo’s driver would be at the house at three P.M. to pick up the signed documents that would make Hugo Cistranos his business partner. The 25 percent ownership ceded to Hugo would of course be only the first step in the cannibalization of everything Nick owned. Nick sat in the darkness, his ears filled with a sound like wind blowing in a tunnel.

 

He had never confessed to anyone the fear he had felt in the schoolyard in the Ninth Ward. The black kids who took his lunch money from him, who shoved him down on the asphalt, seemed to target him and no one else as though they recognized both difference and weakness in him that they exorcised in themselves by degrading and forcing him to go hungry through the lunch hour and the rest of the afternoon, somehow freeing themselves of their own burden.

 

But why Nick? Because he was a Jew? Because his grandfather had adopted an Irish name? Because his parents took him to temple in a neighborhood full of simpletons who would later believe The Passion of the Christ was solid evidence that his people were guilty of deicide?

 

Maybe.

 

Or maybe they smelled fear on his skin the way a barracuda smells blood issuing from a wounded grouper.

 

Fear, the acronym for “fuck everything and run,” he thought sadly. That had been the history of his young life. And still was.

 

He punched his wife’s cell phone number into the console on his desk.

 

“Nick?” her voice said through the speakerphone.

 

“Where are you?” he said.

 

“Still at the mall. We’re about to have lunch.”

 

“Drop the kids at the country club and come home. We’ll pick them up later.”

 

“What is it? Don’t lie to me, either.”

 

“I need to show you where some things are.”

 

“What things? What are you talking about?”

 

“Come home, Esther.”

 

After he hung up, he wondered if his need was as naked as it sounded. He sat in a deep, stuffed leather chair and rested his forehead on his fingertips. It had been raining the night he met Esther twenty-three years ago. She was waiting for the streetcar under the steel colonnade at the corner of Canal and St. Charles Avenue, in front of the Pearl, where she worked as a night cashier after studying all day in the practical nursing program at UNO. There were raindrops in her hair, and in the neon glow of the restaurant’s windows, she made him think of a multicolored star in a constellation.

 

“There’s a storm blowing off Lake Pontchartrain. You shouldn’t be out here,” he had said to her.

 

“Who are you?” she replied.

 

“I’m Nick Dolan. You heard of me?”

 

“Yeah, you’re a gangster.”

 

“No, I’m not. I’m a gambler. I run a cardroom for Didoni Giacano.”

 

“That’s what I said. You’re a gangster.”

 

“I like ‘white-collar criminal’ better. Will you accept a ride from a white-collar criminal?”

 

She had on too much lipstick, and when she twisted her mouth into a button and fixed her eyes speculatively on Nick’s, his heart swelled in a way that made him take a deep breath.

 

“I live Uptown, just off Prytania, not far from the movie theater,” she said.

 

“That’s what I thought. You are definitely an Uptown lady,” he said. Then he remembered his car was in the shop and he had taken a cab to work. “I don’t exactly have my car with me. I’ll call a cab. Could I borrow a dime? I don’t have any coins.”

 

It was 1:26 P.M. when Nick heard Esther pull into the driveway and unlock the front door. “Where are you?” she called.

 

“In the office.”

 

“Why are you sitting in the dark?” she said.

 

“Did you lock the front?”

 

“I don’t remember. Did you go somewhere last night? Did you get into some trouble? I looked at the car. There’re no dents in it.”

 

“Sit down.”

 

“Is that a gun?” she said, her voice rising.

 

“I keep it in the desk. Esther, sit down. Please. Just listen to me. Everything we own is in this file case. It’s all alphabetized. We have a half-dozen equity accounts at Vanguard, tax-free stuff at Sit Mutuals, and two offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands. All the treasury bonds are short-term. Interest rates are in the dumps right now, but by next year gas prices will drive bonds down and rates up, and there’ll be some good buys out there.”

 

“I think you’re having a nervous breakdown.”

 

He got up from his chair and took both of her hands in his. “Sit down and listen to me like you’ve never listened before. No, no, don’t talk, just listen, Esther.”

 

She sat on the big square dark red leather footstool by the leather chair and watched his face. He sat back down, leaning forward, his gaze fixed on her shoes, his hands still clasping hers.

 

“I got involved with some evil men,” he said. “Not just lowlifes but guys that got no parameters.”

 

“Which guys?”

 

“One was a button man for the Giacanos. His name is Hugo Cistranos. He used to work for Artie Rooney. He’s for hire, on the edge of things. Hugo is kind of like a virus. Money has got germs on it. You do business, sometimes you pick up germs.”

 

“What’s this guy got to do with the restaurant or the nightclub?”

 

“Hugo did something really bad, something I didn’t think even Hugo would do.”

 

“What does that have to do with you?” she said, cutting him off, maybe too conveniently, maybe still not wanting to know how many pies Nick had a finger in.

 

“I tell you about it, you become a party to it. Hugo says it’s on me. He says I ordered him to do it. He’s trying to blackmail us. He might kill me, Esther.”

 

She was breathing faster, as though his words were using up the oxygen in the room. “This man Hugo is claiming he killed somebody on your orders?”

 

“More than one.”

 

“More than—”

 

“I have to deal with it this afternoon, Esther. By three o’clock.”

 

“Someone may kill you?”

 

“Maybe.”

 

“They’ll have to kill me, too.”

 

“No, this is the wrong way to think. You have to take the children to the river. Hugo has no reason to hurt you or them. We mustn’t give him any reason to do that.”

 

“Why does he want to kill you if he wants to blackmail you?”

 

“Because I’m not going to pay him anything.”

 

“What else are you planning, Nick?”

 

“I’m not sure.”

 

“I see it in your face. That’s why you have the gun.”

 

“Go to the river with the children.”

 

“They’ll have to walk in my blood to hurt our family. You understand that?” she said.

 

 

AT THREE P.M. sharp, Nick walked out to the curb and waited. His neighborhood was marbled with shadows from the rain clouds that had moved across the sun. A blue Chrysler came around the corner and approached him slowly, the tires clicking with gravel embedded in the treads, like the nails on a feral animal, the driver’s face obscured by a dark green reflection of trees on the windshield. The Chrysler pulled to the curb, and the driver, a man with a wild orange beard, put down the passenger window. “Howdy,” he said.

 

“I tried to call Hugo and save you a trip, but he’s not answering his cell,” Nick said. “You got another number for him?”

 

“I’m supposed to be picking up some signed contracts,” the driver said, ignoring the question. His teeth were wide-set, his complexion florid, like that of a man with perpetual sunburn, his wrists relaxed on the crosspiece of the steering wheel. He wore shined needle-point boots and a long-sleeve print shirt tucked inside beltless white golf slacks; the hair on his chest grew onto the ironed-back lapels of his shirt. “No signed contracts, huh?”

 

“No signed contracts,” Nick said.

 

The driver looked into space, then opened his cell phone and dialed a number. “It’s Liam. He wants to talk to you. No, he doesn’t have them. He didn’t say why. He’s standing right here in front of his house. That’s where I am now. Hugo, talk to the guy.”

 

The driver leaned over and handed Nick the cell phone through the window, smiling, as though the two of them were friends and had mutual interests. Nick put the cell phone to his ear and walked into his yard between two lime trees bursting with fruit. He could feel the humidity and heat rising from the St. Augustine grass into his face. He could hear a bumblebee buzzing close to his head. “I haven’t said no to your offer, but I need a sit-down before I finalize anything.”

 

“It’s not an offer, Nicholas. ‘Offer’ is the wrong word.”

 

“You used the name of this guy Preacher. He’s the guy who’s supposed to give me cold sweats, right? If he’s a factor, he should be there, too.”

 

“Be where?”

 

“At the sit-down. I want to meet him.”

 

“If you meet Jack Collins, it’ll be about two seconds before you become worm food.”

 

“You’re saying you can’t control this guy? I’m supposed to give you twenty-five percent of two businesses so I can be safe from a guy you can’t control?”

 

“You’re not giving me anything. You owe me over a hundred thou. I owe that to other people. If you don’t pay the vig, the vig falls on me. I don’t pay other people’s vig, Nick.”

 

“Was your driver at my club last night?”

 

“How would I know?”

 

“A guy answering his description got thrown out. He was shooting off his mouth with my manager. He claimed he was going to be working there. You want the sit-down or not? You called this guy Collins a religious nut. If I get to him first, I’ll tell him that.”

 

There was a long pause. “Maybe your wife gave you a blow job this morning and convinced you you’re not a pitiful putz. The truth is otherwise, Nick. You’re still a pitiful putz. But I’ll call Preacher. And I’ll also have those transfers of title rewritten. Forget twenty-five percent. The new partnership will be fifty-fifty. Give me some shit and it will go to sixty-forty. Guess who will get the forty.”

 

Hugo hung up.

 

“Got everything worked out?” the driver of the Chrysler said through the window.

 

 

PETE AND VIKKI got exactly sixteen miles up a dark highway when the car Pete’s cousin had sold him on credit dropped the crankshaft on the asphalt, sparks grinding under the frame as the car slid sideways into soil that exploded around them like soft chalk.

 

When Pete called, the cousin told him the car came with no guarantees and the cousin’s car lot did not have a complaint window for people with buyer’s remorse. He also indicated he and his wife were leaving with the kids early in the morning for a week of rest and relaxation in Orlando.

 

Vikki and Pete removed two suitcases and Vikki’s guitar and a bag of groceries from the car and stood by the roadside, thumbs out. A tractor-trailer rimmed with lights roared past them, then a mobile home and a prison bus and a gas-guzzler packed with Mexican drunks, the top half of the car cut off with an acetylene torch. The next vehicle was an ambulance, followed by a sheriff’s cruiser, both of them with sirens on.

 

Two minutes later, a second cruiser appeared far down the road, its flasher rippling, its siren off. It came steadily out of the south, a bank of low mountains behind it, the stars vaporous and hot against a blue-black sky. The cruiser seemed to slow, perhaps to forty or forty-five miles per hour, gliding past them, the driver holding a microphone to his mouth, his face turned fully on them.

 

“He’s calling us in,” Pete said.

 

“Maybe he’s sending a wrecker,” Vikki said.

 

“No, he’s bad news.” Pete widened his eyes and wiped at his mouth. “I told you, he’s stopping.”

 

The cruiser pulled to the right shoulder and remained stationary, its front wheels cut back toward the center stripe, the interior light on.

 

“What’s he doing?” Vikki said.

 

“He’s probably got a description of us on his clipboard. Yep, here he comes.”

 

They stared numbly into the cruiser’s approaching headlights, their eyes watering, their hearts beating. The air seemed clotted with dust and bugs and gnats, the roadway still warm from the sunset, smelling of oil and rubber. Then, for no apparent reason, the cruiser made a U-turn and headed north again, its weight sinking on the back springs.

 

“He’ll be back. We have to get off the highway,” Pete said.

 

They crossed to the other side of the asphalt and began walking, glancing back over their shoulders, their abandoned car with all their household possessions dropping behind them into the darkness. A half hour later, a black man wearing strap overalls with no shirt stopped and said he was headed to his home, seventy miles southwest. “That’s pert’ exactly where we’re going,” Pete said.

 

They paid a week’s advance rent, twenty dollars per day, at a motel on a stretch of side road that resembled a Hollywood re-creation of Highway 66 during the 1950s: a pink plaster-of-Paris archway over the road, painted with roses; a diner shaped like an Airstream trailer with a tin facsimile of a rocket on top; a circular building made to look like a bulging cheeseburger with service windows; a drive-in movie theater and a miniature golf course blown with trash and tumbleweed, the empty marquee patterned with birdshot; a red-green-and-purple neon war bonnet high up on the log facade of a beer joint and steak house; three Cadillac car bodies buried seemingly nose-first in the earth, their fins slicing the wind.

 

“This is a pretty neat place, if you ask me,” Pete said, sitting on the side of the bed, looking through the side window at the landscape. He was barefoot and shirtless, and in the soft light of morning, the skin along his shoulder and one side of his back had the texture of lampshade material that has been wrinkled by intense heat.

 

“Pete, what are we going to do? We don’t have a car, we’re almost broke, and cops are probably looking for us all over Texas,” Vikki said.

 

“We’ve done all right so far, haven’t we?” Pete began talking about his friend Billy Bob Holland, a former Texas Ranger who had a law practice in western Montana. “Billy Bob will he’p us out. When I was little, my mother used to bring home men, usually late at night. Most of them were pretty worthless. This one guy was more worthless than all the rest put together and then some. One night he smacked both me and my mom around. When Billy Bob found out about it, he rode his horse into the beer joint and threw a rope on the guy and drug him out the front door into the parking lot. Then he kicked him into next week.”

 

“Your lawyer friend can’t help a fugitive. All he can do is surrender you.”

 

“Billy Bob wouldn’t do that.”

 

“We have to get your disability check.”

 

“That’s kind of a problem, isn’t it?” Pete stood up and propped one arm against the wall, gazing out the window, his upper torso shaped like a V. “That check should have come yesterday. It’s just sitting there in the box. The government always gets it there on the same date.”

 

“I can ask Junior to get it and send it to us,” she said.

 

“Junior doesn’t quite look upon me as a member of his fan club.”

 

Vikki was sitting at the small desk by the television set. She stared emptily at the decrepit state of their room—the water-stained wallpaper, the air-conditioning unit that rattled in the window frame, the bedspread that she feared to touch, the shower stall blooming with mold. “There’s another way,” she said.

 

“To turn ourselves in?”

 

“We haven’t done anything wrong.”

 

“I tried it already. That one won’t flush,” he said.

 

“You tried to turn us in?”

 

“I called a government eight hundred number. They switched me around to a bunch of different offices and finally to a guy with Immigration and Customs. He said his name was Clawson.”

 

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

 

“It didn’t go too well. He said he wanted to meet me, like somehow all this was between him and me and we were buds or something. He had a voice like a robot. You know what’s going on when people talk like robots? They don’t want you to know what they’re thinking.”

 

“What’d you tell him, Pete?”

 

“That I was by the church when the shooting started. I told him the guy who was paying me three hundred dollars to drive the truck was named Hugo. I told him I feel like a damn coward for running away while all those women were being killed. He said I needed to come in and make a statement and I’d be protected. Then he said, ‘Is Ms. Gaddis with you? We can he’p her, too.’

 

“I said, ‘She’s not a part of this.’ He says, ‘We know about the characters at the truck stop, Pete. We think they either killed her or she put a hole in one of them. Maybe she’s dead and lying unburied someplace. You need to do the right thing, soldier.’”

 

Pete sat back down on the bed and began drawing his shirt up one arm, the network of muscles in his back tightening like whipcord.

 

“What’d you say?”

 

“I told him to kiss my ass. When people try to make you feel guilty, it’s because they want to install dials on you. It also means they’re gonna sell you down the river the first chance they get.”

 

“Can the FBI trace a cell phone call?” she asked.

 

“They can locate the tower it bounces off of. Why?”

 

“I’m going to call Junior.”

 

“I think that’s a bad idea. Junior makes a lot of noise, but Junior looks after Junior.”

 

“You only get thirty percent disability. It’s hardly enough to pay the rent. What are we supposed to do? This all started in a bar where you were drinking with idiots who soak their brains in mescal. For three hundred dollars, you put our lives in the hands of people who are morally insane.”

 

She saw the injury in his face. She turned away, her eyes closed, tears squeezing onto her eyelashes. Then, in her inability to control even the tear ducts in her face, she began hammering the tops of her thighs with her fists.

 

 

THAT AFTERNOON, WHILE Pete slept, Vikki walked down the road and used the pay phone to call Junior collect at the diner. She told him about the disability check and about their financial desperation. She also told him that the man Junior had sold milk to had tried to kidnap and possibly kill her.

 

“Maybe that’s more information than I need to know,” he said.

 

“Are you serious? That guy was in your diner. A guy with an orange beard was there, too. I think he was part of it.”

 

“The check’s at the mailbox in front of that shack y’all were living in?” Junior said.

 

“You know where we were living. Stop pretending.”

 

“The sheriff was here. So were some federal people. They thought maybe you were dead.”

 

“I’m not.”

 

“Did you shoot that guy who came here to buy milk?”

 

“Are you going to help us or not?”

 

“Isn’t this called aiding and abetting or something?”

 

“You are really pissing me off, Junior.”

 

“Give me your address.”

 

She hesitated.

 

“Think I’m gonna turn you in?” he said.

 

She gave him the address of the motel, the name of the town, and the zip code. With each word she spoke, she felt like she was taking off a piece of armor.

 

After she hung up, she went to the bar and asked the bartender for a glass of water. The combination steak house and beer joint was a spacious place, cool and dark, with big electric floor fans humming away, the heads of stuffed animals mounted on the debarked and polished log walls. “I put some ice and a lime slice in it,” the bartender said.

 

“Thank you,” she replied.

 

“You look kind of tuckered out. You visiting here’bouts?”

 

She gulped from the iced drink and blew out her breath. “No, I’m a Hollywood actress on location. You need a waitress?”

 

 

PAM TIBBS WALKED from the dispatcher’s cage into Hackberry’s office, tapping with one knuckle on the doorjamb as she entered.

 

“What is it?” Hackberry said, looking up from some photos in a manila folder.

 

“There’s a disturbance at Junior’s diner.”

 

“Send Felix or R.C.”

 

“The disturbance is with that ICE agent, Clawson.”

 

Hackberry made a sucking sound with his teeth.

 

“I’ll take it,” Pam said.

 

“No, you won’t.”

 

“Are those the photos of the Thai women?” she said. When he didn’t answer, she said, “Why are you looking at those, Hack? Say a prayer for those poor women and stop sticking pins in yourself.”

 

“Some of them are wearing dark clothes. Some of them are wearing what were probably the best clothes they owned. They weren’t dressed for hot country. They thought they were going somewhere else. Nothing at that crime scene makes sense.”

 

Pam Tibbs gazed at the street and at the shadows of clouds moving across the cinder-block and stucco buildings and broken sidewalks. She heard Hackberry getting up from his chair.

 

“Is Clawson still at the diner?” he asked.

 

“What do you think?” she replied.

 

It took them only ten minutes to get to the diner, the flasher bar rippling, the siren off. Isaac Clawson’s motor pool vehicle was parked between the diner and the nightclub next door, both rear doors open. Junior was handcuffed in the backseat, wrists behind him, while Clawson stood outside the vehicle, talking into a cell phone.

 

“Hack?” she said.

 

“Would you give it a rest?”

 

She pulled up behind Clawson’s vehicle and turned off the engine. But she didn’t open the door. “That guy called you a sonofabitch. He’ll never do that in my presence again,” she said.

 

Hackberry put his hat back on and got out on the gravel and walked toward Isaac Clawson. To the south, he could see heat waves rippling off the hardpan, dust devils spinning in the wind, the distant ridge of mountains etched against an immaculate blue sky. He wore a long-sleeve cotton shirt snap-buttoned at the wrists, which was his custom at the office, regardless of the season, and he felt loops of moisture already forming under his armpits.

 

“What’s the problem?” he said to the ICE agent.

 

“There is no problem,” Clawson replied.

 

“How about it, Junior?” Hackberry said.

 

Junior wore white trousers and a white T-shirt and still had a kitchen apron on. The sideburns trimmed in a flare on his cheeks were sparkling with sweat. “He thinks I know where Vikki Gaddis is.”

 

“Do you?” Hackberry asked.

 

“I run a diner. I don’t monitor the lives of kids who cain’t stay out of trouble.”

 

“Everybody tells me you had more than an employer’s interest in Vikki,” Clawson said. “She’s broke and on the run and has no family. I think you’re the first person she would come to for help. You want to see her dead? The best way to accomplish that is to keep stonewalling us.”

 

“I don’t like your sexual suggestions. I’m a family man. You watch your mouth,” Junior said.

 

“Could I speak to you a moment, Agent Clawson?” Hackberry said.

 

“What you can do is butt out,” Clawson replied.

 

“How about a little professional courtesy?” Pam Tibbs said.

 

Clawson looked at her as though noticing her for the first time. “Excuse me?”

 

“Our department is working in cooperation with yours, right?” she said.

 

“And?” Clawson said.

 

Pam looked away and hooked her thumbs in her gun belt, her mouth a tight seam, her eyes neutral. Hackberry walked into the shade, removing his hat, blotting his forehead on his sleeve. Clawson brushed at his nose, then followed. “All right, say it,” he said.

 

“You taking Junior in?” Hackberry said.

 

“I think he’s lying. What would you do?”

 

“I’d give him the benefit of the doubt, at least for the time being.”

 

“Benefit of the doubt? You found nine dead women and girls in your county, and you’re giving a man who may be an accomplice to fugitive flight the benefit of the doubt? It’s going to take me a minute or two to process that.”

 

“Humiliating a man like Junior Vogel in front of his customers and employees is not going to get you what you want. Back off a little bit. I’ll come back and talk to him later. Or you can come back and we’ll talk to him together. He’s not a bad guy.”

 

“You seem to have a long history in the art of compromise, Sheriff Holland. I accessed your file at the Department of Veterans Affairs.”

 

“Really? Why would you do that, sir?”

 

“You were a POW in North Korea. You gave information to the enemy. You were put in one of the progressive camps for POWs who cooperated with the enemy.”

 

“That’s a lie.”

 

“It is? I had a different impression.”

 

“I spent six weeks in a hole in the ground in wintertime under a sewer grate that was manufactured in Ohio. I knew its place of origin because I could see the lettering embossed on the iron surface. I could see the lettering because every evening a couple of guards urinated through the grate and washed the lettering clean of mud. I spent those weeks under the grate with only a steel pot to relieve myself in. I also saw my best friends machine-gunned to death and their bodies thrown into an open latrine. However, I don’t know if the material you found at the VA contained those particular details. Did you come across that kind of detail in your research, sir?”

 

Clawson looked at his watch. “I’ve had about all of this I can take,” he said. “It’s against my better judgment, but I’m going to kick your man loose. I’ll be back. You can count on it.”

 

“Turn around, you pompous motherfucker,” Pam Tibbs said.

 

“Say that again?” Clawson said.

 

“You learn some manners or you’re going to wish you were cleaning chamber pots in Afghanistan,” Pam said.

 

Hackberry put on his hat and walked away, forming a pocket of air in one jaw.

 

 

ACROSS THE HIGHWAY, at an open-air watermelon stand, a man wearing black jeans and unpolished black hobnailed boots and wideband suspenders and a Grateful Dead T-shirt, the fabric washed so many times it was ash-gray, sat at a plank table in ninety-six-degree shade, the wind popping the canvas tarp above his head. A top hat rested crown-down beside him on the bench. He carved the meat out of his watermelon rind with his pocketknife and slipped each chunk off the back of the blade into his mouth, watching the scene by the side of Isaac Clawson’s vehicle play itself out.

 

When the people across the highway had gone their separate ways, he put on his hat and walked away from the watermelon stand to use his cell phone. His swollen lats and long upper torso and short legs gave him the appearance of a tree stump. A moment later, he returned to the table, wadded up his melon rinds in damp newspaper, and stuffed the newspaper and the rinds in a trash barrel. A cloud of blackflies swarmed out of the barrel into his face, but he seemed to give them little notice, as though perhaps they were old friends.

 

 

 

 

 

8

 

THE SALOON WAS old, built in the nineteenth century, the original stamped-tin ceiling still in place, the long railed bar where John Wesley Hardin and Wild Bill Longley drank still in use. Preacher Jack Collins sat in the back against a wall, behind the pool table, under a wood-bladed fan. Through a side window he could see a clump of banana trees, their fronds beaded with drops of moisture that looked as heavy and bright as mercury. He watched the waiter bring his food from a service window behind the bar. Then he shook ketchup and salt and pepper and Louisiana hot sauce on the fried beef patty and the instant mashed potatoes and the canned string beans that constituted his lunch.

 

He raised his eyes slightly when the front door opened and Hugo Cistranos entered the saloon and walked out of the brilliant noonday glare toward Preacher’s table. But Preacher’s expression was impassive and showed no recognition of the events taking place around him, not even the arrival of his food at the table or the fact that Hugo had stopped at the bar and ordered two draft beers and was now setting them on the table.

 

“Hot out there,” Hugo said, sitting down, sipping at his beer, pushing the second glass toward Preacher.

 

“I don’t drink,” Preacher said.

 

“Sorry, I forgot.”

 

Preacher continued eating and did not ask Hugo if he wanted to order.

 

“You eat here a lot?” Hugo said.

 

“When they have the special.”

 

“That’s the special you’re eating now?”

 

“No.”

 

Hugo didn’t try to sort it out. He looked at the empty pool table under a cone of light, the racked cues, a hard disk of pool chalk on a table, the cracked red vinyl in the booths, a wall calendar with a picture of the Alamo on it that was three years out of date, the day drinkers humped morosely over their beer glasses at the bar. “You’re an unusual kind of guy, Jack.”

 

Preacher set his knife on the edge of his plate and let his eyes rove over Hugo’s face.

 

“What I mean is, I’m glad you’re willing to work with me on this problem I’m having with Nick Dolan,” Hugo said.

 

“I didn’t say I would.”

 

“Nobody wants you to do anything you don’t want to, least of all me.”

 

“A sit-down with the owner of a skin joint?”

 

“Dolan wants to meet you. You’re the man, Jack.”

 

“I have a hole in my foot and one in my calf. I’m a gimp. Sitting down with a gimp is going to make him pay the money he owes you? You cain’t handle that yourself?”

 

“We’re gonna take fifty percent of his nightclub and his restaurant. Ten percent of it will be yours, Jack. That’s for the late payment I owed you. Later, we’ll talk about the escort services Nick owns in Dallas and Houston. Five minutes after we sit down, his signature is going to be on that reapportionment of title. He’s a sawed-off fat little Jew putting on a show for his wife. Believe me, you’ll make him shit his pants. Let’s face it, you know how to give a guy the heebie-jeebies, Jack.”

 

Hugo salted his beer and drank from the foam. He wore a Rolex and a pressed sport shirt with a diamond design on it. His hair had just been barbered, and his cheeks were glowing with aftershave. He did not seem to notice the tightness around Preacher’s mouth.

 

“Where’s the sit-down?” Preacher asked.

 

“A quiet restaurant somewhere. Maybe in the park. Who cares?”

 

Preacher cut a piece of meat and speared string beans onto the tines of his fork and rolled the meat and string beans in his mashed potatoes. Then he set down the fork without eating from it and looked at the row of men drinking at the bar, slumped on their stools, their silhouettes like warped clothespins on a line.

 

“He plans to pop both of us,” Preacher said.

 

“Nicholas Dolan? He’ll probably have to wear adult diapers for the sit-down.”

 

“You got him scared, and you want him even more scared?”

 

“With Nick Dolan, it’s not a big challenge.”

 

“Why do cops use soft-nose ammunition?” Preacher asked.

 

“How should I know?”

 

“Because a wounded or scared enemy is the worst enemy you can have. The man who kills you is the one who’ll rip your throat out before you know he has his hand on you. The girl who blinded me with wasp spray and pumped two holes in me? Would you say that story speaks for itself?”

 

“Thought I’d let you in on a good deal, Jack. But everything I say seems to be the wrong choice.”

 

“We’re going to talk to Dolan, all right. But not when he’s expecting it, and not because you want to take control of his business interests. We’ll talk to Dolan because you screwed things up. I think you and Arthur Rooney have been running a scam of some kind.”

 

“Scam? Me and Arthur? That’s great.” Hugo shook his head and sipped from his beer, his eyes lowered, his lashes long like a girl’s.

 

“I paid him a visit,” Preacher said.

 

A smile flickered on Hugo’s face, the skin whitening around the edges of his mouth. “No kidding?”

 

“He’s got a new office there in Galveston, right on the water. You haven’t talked to him?” Preacher picked up his fork and slipped the combination of meat and string beans and potatoes into his mouth.

 

“I broke off my connections with Artie a long time ago. He’s a welcher and a pimp, just like Dolan.”

 

“I got the impression maybe you weren’t ’jacking the Asian women for Dolan. You just let Dolan think that way so you could blackmail him and take over his businesses. It was yours and Rooney’s gig from the jump.”

 

“Jack, I’m trying to get your money to you. What do I have to do to win your faith? You’re really hurting my feelings here.”

 

“What time does Dolan close his nightclub?”

 

“Around two A.M.”

 

“Take a nap. You look tired,” Preacher said. He started to eat again, but his food had gone cold, and he pushed his plate away. He picked up his crutches and began getting to his feet.

 

“What did Artie tell you? Give me a chance to defend myself,” Hugo said.

 

“Mr. Rooney was trying to find his finger on the floor. He didn’t have a lot to say at the time. Pick me up at one-fifteen A.M.”

 

 

PETE FLORES DID not dream every night, or at least he did not have dreams every night that he could remember. Regardless, each dawn he was possessed by the feeling he had been the sole spectator in a movie theater where he had been forced to watch a film whose content he could not control and whose images would reappear later, in the full light of day, as unexpectedly as a windowpane exploding without cause.

 

The participants in the film he was forced to watch were people he had known and others who were little more than ciphers behind a window, bearded perhaps, their heads wrapped with checkered cloths, cutouts that appeared like a tic on the edge of his vision and then disappeared behind a wall that was all at once just a wall, behind which a family might have been sitting down to a meal.

 

Pete had read that the unconscious mind retains a memory of the birth experience—the exit from the womb, the delivering hands that pull it into a blinding light, the terror when it discovers it cannot breathe of its own accord, then the slap of life that allows oxygen to surge into its lungs.

 

In Pete’s film, all of those things happened. Except the breech was the turret in an armored vehicle, the delivering hands those of a dust-powdered sergeant with a First Cav patch on his sleeve who pulled Pete from an inferno that was roasting him alive. Once more on the street, the sergeant leaned down, clasping Pete’s hand, trying to drag him away from the vehicle.

 

But even as broken pieces of stone were cutting into Pete’s buttocks and back, and machine-gun belts were exploding inside his vehicle, he knew his and the sergeant’s ordeal was not over. The hajji in the window looked like he had burlap wrapped around the bottom half of his face. In his hands was an AK-47 with two jungle-clipped banana magazines protruding from the stock. The hajji hosed the street, lifting the stock above his head to get a better angle, the muzzle jerking wildly, whanging rounds off the vehicle, hitting the sergeant in at least three places, collapsing him on top of Pete, his hand still clasped inside Pete’s.

 

When Pete woke from the dream the third day in the motel, the room was cold from the air conditioner, blue in the false dawn, quiet inside the hush of the desert. Vikki was still asleep, the sheet and bedspread pulled up to her cheek. He sat on the side of the bed, trying to focus on where he was, shivering in his skivvies, his hands clamped between his knees. He stared through the blinds at a distant brown mountain framed against a lavender sky. The mountain made him think of an extinct volcano, devoid of heat, dead to the touch, a geological formation that was solid and predictable and harmless. Gradually, the images of a third-world street strewn with chunks of yellow and gray stone and raw garbage and dead dogs and an armored vehicle funneling curds of black smoke faded from his vision and the room became the place where he was.

 

Rather than touch her skin and wake her, he held the corner of Vikki’s pajama top between the ends of his fingers. He watched the way the air conditioner moved the hair on the back of her neck, the way she breathed through her mouth, the way color pooled in her cheeks while she was sleeping, as though the warmth of her heart were silently spreading its heat throughout her body.

 

He did not want to drink. Or at least he did not want to drink that day. He shaved and brushed his teeth and combed his hair in the bath room with the door closed behind him. He dressed in a clean pair of jeans and a cotton print shirt and slipped on his boots and put on his straw hat and carried his thermos down to the café at the traffic light.

 

He put four teaspoons of sugar in his coffee and ate an order of toast spread with six plastic containers of jelly. A Corona beer sign on the wall showed a Latin woman in a sombrero and a Spanish blouse reclining on a settee inside an Edenic garden, marble columns rising beside her, a purple mountain capped with snow in the background. Down the counter, a two-hundred-pound Mexican woman with a rear like a washtub was bent over the cooler, loading beer a bottle at a time, turning her face to one side, then the other, each time she lowered a bottle inside. She wiped her hands on a dish towel and removed Pete’s dirty plate from the counter and set it in a sink of greasy water.

 

“Those bottles pop on you sometimes?” he asked.

 

“If the delivery man leaves them in the sun or if they get shook up in the case, they will. It hasn’t happened to me, though. You want more coffee?”

 

“No, thanks.”

 

“There’s no charge for a warm-up.”

 

“Yes, ma’am, I’ll take some. Thank you.”

 

“You put a lot of sugar in there, huh?”

 

“Sometimes.”

 

“You want me to fill your thermos?”

 

He’d forgotten he had brought it with him, even though it stood right by his elbow. “Thanks, I’m good,” he said.

 

She tore a ticket off a pad and put it facedown by his cup. When she walked away, he felt strangely alone, as though a script had been pulled preemptively from his hands. He could hear the bottles clinking inside the cooler as she resumed her work. He paid the cashier for his coffee and toast, and gazed out the front door at the sun lighting the landscape, breaking over arid mountains that seemed transported from Central Asia and affixed to the southern rim of the United States.

 

He walked back to the service counter. “It’s gonna be a hot one. I might need one of those singles with lunch,” he said.

 

“I don’t have any cold ones,” the Mexican woman said.

 

“I’ll put it on top of the air conditioner at the motel,” he said. “Fact is, better give me a couple.”

 

She put two wet bottles in a paper bag and handed them to him. The top of Pete’s shirt was unbuttoned, and the woman’s eyes drifted to the shriveled tissue on his shoulder. “You was in Iraq?”

 

“I was in Afghanistan, but only three weeks in Iraq.”

 

“My son died in Iraq.”

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

“It’s six-thirty in the morning,” she said, looking at the bottles in his hand.

 

“Yes, ma’am, it is.”

 

She started to speak again but instead turned back to her work, her eyes veiled.

 

He walked back to the motel and stopped by the desk. Outside, he heard an eighteen-wheeler shifting gears at the traffic light, metal grinding. “We got any mail?” he said to the clerk.

 

“No, sir,” the clerk said.

 

“What time does the mailman come?”

 

“Same time as yesterday, ’bout ten.”

 

“Guess I’ll check by later,” Pete said.

 

“Yes, sir, he’ll sure be here by ten.”

 

“Somebody else couldn’t have misplaced it, stuck it in the wrong box or something?”

 

“Anything I find with y’all’s name on it, I promise I’ll bring it to your room.”

 

“It’ll be from a man named Junior Vogel.”

 

“Yes, sir, I got it.”

 

Outside, Pete stood in the shadow of the motel and looked at the breathtaking sweep of the landscape, the red and orange and yellow coloration in the rocks, the gnarled trees and scrub brush whose root systems had to grow through slag to find moisture. He slapped a mosquito on the back of his neck and looked at it. The mosquito had been fat with blood and had left a smear on his palm the size of a dime. Pete wiped the blood on his jeans and began walking down the two-lane road that looked like a displaced piece of old Highway 66. He walked past the miniature golf course and angled through the abandoned drive-in theater, passing through the rows of iron poles that had no speakers on them, row after row of them, their function used up and forgotten, surrounded by the sounds of wind and tumbleweed blowing through their midst.

 

He walked for perhaps twenty minutes, up a long sloping grade to a plateau on which three table sandstone rocks were set like browned biscuits one on top of another. He climbed the rocks and sat down, his legs hanging in space, and placed the bag with the two bottles of beer in it by his side. He watched a half-dozen buzzards turning in the sky, the feathers in their extended wings fluttering on the warm current of air rising from the hardpan. Down below, he watched an armadillo work its way toward its burrow amid the creosote brush, the weight of its armored shell swaying awkwardly above its tiny feet.

 

He reached into his pocket and took out his Swiss Army knife. With his thumb and index finger, he pulled out the abbreviated blade that served as both a screwdriver and a bottle opener. He peeled the wet paper off the beer bottles and set one sweating with moisture and spangled with amber sunlight on the rock. He held the other in his left hand and fitted the opener on the cap. Below, the armadillo went into its burrow only to reappear with two babies beside it, all three of them peering out at the glare.

 

“What are you guys up to?” Pete asked.

 

No answer.

 

He uncapped the bottle and let the cap tinkle down the side of the rocks onto the sand. He felt the foam rise over the lip of the bottle and slide down his fingers and the back of his hand and his wrist. He looked back over his shoulder and could make out the screen of the drive-in movie and, farther down the street, the steak house and beer joint where Vikki had used another last name and taken a job as a waitress, the money under the table. He wiped his mouth with his hand and could taste the salt in his sweat.

 

At the foot of the table rocks, the polished bronze beer cap seemed to glow hotter and hotter against the grayness of the sand. It was the only piece of litter as far as he could see. He climbed down from the rocks, his beer bottle in one hand, picked up the cap, and thumbed it into his pocket. The armadillos stared up at him, their eyes as intense and unrelenting as black pinheads.

 

“Are you guys friendlies or Republican Guard? Identify yourself or get shot.”

 

Still no response.

 

Pete reached for the bottle of beer on top of the rocks, then approached the burrow. The adult armadillo and both babies scurried back inside.

 

“I tell you what,” he said, squatting down, a bottle in each hand. “Anybody that can live out here in this heat probably needs a couple of brews a lot worse than I do. These are on me, fellows.”

 

He poured the first beer down the hole, then popped off the cap on the second one and did the same, the foam running in long fingers down the burrow’s incline. “You guys all right in there?” he asked, twisting his head sideways to see inside the burrow. “I’ll take that as an affirmative. Roger that and keep your steel pots on and your butts down.”

 

He shook the last drops out of both bottles, stuck the empties in his pockets, and hiked back to town, telling himself that perhaps he had just walked through a door into a new day, maybe even a new life.

 

At ten A.M. exactly, he went down to the motel office just as the mailman was leaving. “Did you have anything for Gaddis or Flores?” he said.

 

The mailman grinned awkwardly. “I’m not supposed to say. There was a bunch of mail for the motel this morning. Ask inside.”

 

Pete opened the door and closed it behind him, an electronic ding going off in back somewhere. The clerk came through a curtained doorway. “How you doing?” he said.

 

“I’m not sure.”

 

“Sorry, I didn’t see nothing in there for y’all.”

 

“It’s got to be here.”

 

“I looked, believe me.”

 

“Look again.”

 

“It’s not there. I wish it was, but it’s not.” The clerk studied Pete’s face. “Your rent is paid up for four more nights. It cain’t be all that bad, can it?”

 

 

THAT NIGHT VIKKI took her sunburst Gibson to work with her and played and sang three songs with the band. The next morning there was no mail addressed to her or Pete at the motel office. Pete used the pay phone at the steak house to call Junior Vogel at his home.

 

“You promised Vikki you were gonna pick up my check and send it to us,” he said.

 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

 

“You damn liar, what’d you do with my check? You just left it in the box? Tell me.”

 

“Don’t call here again,” Junior said, and hung up.

 

 

AT TWO A.M. Nick Dolan watched his remaining patrons leave the club. He used to wonder where they went after hours of drinking and viewing half-naked women perform inches away from their grasp. Did their fantasies cause them to rise throbbing and hard in the morning, unsated, vaguely ashamed, perhaps angry at the source of their dependency and desperation, perhaps ready to try an excursion into the dark side?

 

Was there a connection between what he did and violence against women? A female street person had been raped and beaten by two men six blocks from his club, fifteen minutes after closing time. The culprits were never caught.

 

But eventually, out of his own ennui with the subject, Nick had stopped thinking about his patrons or worrying about their deeds past or present, in the same way a butcher does not think about the origins and history of the gutted and frozen white shapes hanging from meat hooks in his subzero locker. Nick’s favorite admonition to himself remained intact and unchallenged: Nick Dolan didn’t invent the world.

 

Nick drank a glass of milk at the bar while his girls and barmaids and bartenders and bouncers and janitors said good night and one by one went outside to their cars and their private lives, which he suspected were little different from anyone else’s, except for the narcotics his girls often relied upon.

 

He locked the back door, set the alarm, and locked the front door as he went out. He paused in front of the club and surveyed the parking lot, the occasional car passing on the four-lane, the great star-strewn bowl of sky overhead. The wind was balmy blowing through the trees, the clouds moonlit; there was even a promise of rain in the air. The .25 auto he had taken from his desk rested comfortably in his trousers pocket. The only vehicle in the parking lot was his. For some reason the night struck him as more like spring than late summer, a time of new beginnings, a season of tropical showers and farmers’ markets and baseball training camps and a carpet of bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush just over the rise on the highway.

 

But for Nick, spring was special for another reason: No matter how jaded he had become, spring still reminded him of his youthful innocence and the innocence his children had shared with him.

 

He thought of the great green willow tree bending over the Comal River behind his property, and the way his children had loved to swim through its leafy tendrils, hanging on to a branch just at the edge of the current, challenging Nick to dive in with them, their faces full of respect and affection for the father who kept them safe from the world.

 

If only Nick could undo the fate of the Thai women. What did the voice of Yahweh say? “I am the alpha and omega. I am the beginning and the end. I am He who maketh all things new.” But Nick doubted that the nine women and girls whose mouths had been packed with dirt would give him absolution so easily.

 

He walked across the parking lot to his car, watching the tops of the trees bend in the wind, the moon like silver plate behind a cloud, his thoughts a tangled web he couldn’t sort out. Behind him, he heard an engine roar to life and tires ripping through gravel down to a harder surface. Before he could turn around, Hugo’s SUV was abreast of him, Hugo in the passenger seat, a kid in a top hat behind the wheel.

 

“Get in, Nick. Eat breakfast with us,” Hugo said, rolling down the window.

 

A man Nick didn’t know sat in the backseat, a pair of crutches propped next to him.

 

“No, thanks,” Nick replied.

 

“You need to hop in with us, you really do,” Hugo said, getting out of the vehicle and opening the back door.

 

The man who sat in back against the far door was watching Nick in tently now. His hair was greased, the part a neat gray line through the scalp, the way an actor from the 1940s might wear his hair. His head was narrow, his nose long, his mouth small and compressed. A newspaper was folded neatly in his lap; his right hand rested just inside the fold. “I’d appreciate you talking to me,” the man said.

 

The wind had dropped, and the rustling sounds in the trees had stopped. The air seemed close, humid, like damp wool on the skin. Nick could hear his pulse beating in his ears.

 

“Mr. Dolan, do not place your hand in your pocket,” the man said.

 

“You’re the one they call Preacher?” Nick asked.

 

“Some people do.”

 

“I don’t owe you any money.”

 

“Who said you did?”

 

“Hugo.”

 

“That’s Hugo, not me. What are you carrying in your pocket, Mr. Dolan?”

 

“Nothing.”

 

“Don’t lie.”

 

“What?”

 

“Don’t be disingenuous, either.”

 

“I don’t know what that word means.”

 

“You’ll either talk to me now, or you’ll see me or Bobby Lee later.”

 

“Who’s Bobby Lee?”

 

“That’s Bobby Lee there,” Preacher said, indicating the driver. “He may be a descendant of the general. You told Hugo you wanted to meet me. Don’t demean yourself by pretending you didn’t.”

 

Nick could hear a brass band marching through his head. “So now I’ve met you. I’m satisfied. I’m going home now.”

 

“I’m afraid not,” Preacher said.

 

Nick felt as though a garrote were tightening around his chest, squeezing the blood from his heart. Face it now, when Esther and the kids aren’t with you, a voice inside him said.

 

“You say something?” Preacher asked.

 

“Yeah, I have friends. Some of them are cops. They come here sometimes. They eat free at my restaurant.”

 

“So where does that leave us?”

 

Nick didn’t have an answer. In fact, he couldn’t keep track of anything he had said. “I’m not a criminal. I don’t belong in this.”

 

“Maybe we can be friends. But you have to talk to me first,” Preacher said.

 

Nick set his jaw and stepped inside the SUV, then heard the door slam behind him. The kid in the top hat floored the SUV onto the service road. The surge of power in the engine caused Nick to sway against the seat and lose control of the safety strap he was trying to snap into place. Preacher continued to look at him, his hazel eyes curious, like someone studying a gerbil in a wire cage. Nick’s hand brushed the stiff outline of the .25 auto in his side pocket.

 

Preacher knocked on his cast with his knuckles. “I got careless,” he said.

 

“Yeah?” Nick said. “Careless about what?”

 

“I underestimated a young woman. She looked like a schoolgirl, but she taught me a lesson in humility,” Preacher said. “Why’d you want to meet me?”

 

“Y’all are trying to take over my businesses.”

 

“I look like a restaurateur or the operator of a strip joint?”

 

“There’s worse things.”

 

Preacher watched the countryside sweeping by. He closed his eyes as though temporarily resting them. A moment later, he reopened them and leaned forward, perhaps studying a landmark. He scratched his cheek with one finger and studied Nick again. Then he seemed to make a decision about something and tapped on the back of the driver’s seat. “The road on the left,” he said. “Go through the cattle guard and follow the dirt track. You’ll see a barn and a pond and a clapboard house. The house will be empty. If you see a car or any lights on, turn around.”

 

“You got it, Jack,” the driver said.

 

“What’s going on?” Nick said.

 

“You wanted a sit-down, you got your sit-down,” Hugo said from the front passenger seat.

 

“Take the pistol out of your pocket with two fingers and put it on the seat,” Preacher said. Half of his right hand remained inside the fold of the newspaper on his lap. His mouth was slightly parted, his eyes unblinking, his nose tilted down.

 

“I don’t have a gun. But if I did, I wouldn’t give it to you.”

 

“You’re not a listener?” Preacher said.

 

“Yeah, I am, or I wouldn’t be here.”

 

“You were planning to shoot both me and Hugo if you could catch us unawares. You treated me with disrespect. You treated me as though I’m an ignorant man.”

 

“I never saw you before. How could I disrespect you?” Nick replied, avoiding Preacher’s initial premise.

 

Preacher sucked on a tooth. “You attached to your family, Mr. Dolan?”

 

“What do you think?”

 

“Answer my question.”

 

“I have a good family. I work hard to provide for them. That’s why I don’t need this kind of shit.”

 

“You true to your vows?”

 

“This is nuts.”

 

“I believe you’re a family man. I believe you planned to take out me and Hugo even if you had to eat a bullet. You’d eat a bullet for your family, wouldn’t you?”

 

Nick felt he was being led into a trap, but he didn’t know how. Preacher saw the confusion in his face.

 

“That makes you a dangerous man,” Preacher said. “You’ve put me in a bad spot. You shouldn’t have done that. You shouldn’t have patronized me, either.”

 

Nick, with his heart sinking, saw the driver’s eyes look at him in the rearview mirror. The tips of his fingers inched away from the outline of the .25 to the edge of his pocket. He glanced at Preacher’s right hand, partially inserted inside the folded newspaper. The paper was turned at an angle, pointed directly at Nick’s rib cage.

 

The SUV turned off the service road and passed through a break in a row of slash pines and thumped across a cattle guard onto farmland spiked with weeds and cedar fence posts that had no wire on them. Nick could see moonlight glowing on a pond, and beyond the pond, a darkened house with cattle standing in the yard. He folded his arms on his chest, burying his hands in his armpits to stop them from shaking. The driver, Bobby Lee, looked at Nick in the mirror again, a dent in each of his cheeks, as though he were sucking the saliva out of his mouth.

 

“I knew it’d come to this,” Nick said.

 

“I don’t follow you,” Preacher said.

 

“I knew one of you bastards would eventually blindside me. You’re all the same—black pukes from the Desire, Italian punks from Uptown. Now it’s an Irish psychopath who’s a hump for Hugo Cistranos. None of y’all got talent or brains of your own. Every one of you is a pack animal, always figuring out a way to steal what another man has worked for.”

 

“Do you believe this guy?” the driver said to Hugo.

 

“I don’t steal, Mr. Dolan,” Preacher said. “But you do. You steal and market the innocence of young women. You create a venue that makes money off the lust of depraved men. You’re a festering sore in the eyes of God, did you know that, Mr. Dolan? For that matter, you’re an abomination in the eyes of your own race.”

 

“Judaism isn’t a race, it’s a religion. That’s what I’m talking about. All of you are ignorant. That’s your common denominator.”

 

Bobby Lee had already cut the headlights and was slowing to a stop by the pond. The open end of the newspaper in Preacher’s lap was still pointed at Nick’s side. Nick thought he was going to be sick. Hugo pulled open the back door and ran his hand along Nick’s legs. His face was so close that Nick could feel Hugo’s breath on his skin. Hugo slipped the .25 auto from Nick’s pocket and aimed it at the pond.

 

“This is a nice piece,” he said. He released the magazine and worked the slide. “Afraid to carry one in the chamber, Nicholas?”

 

“It wouldn’t have done me any good,” Nick said.

 

“Want to show him?” Hugo said to Preacher.

 

“Show me what?” Nick said.

 

Preacher tossed the newspaper to the floor and got out on the other side of the vehicle, pulling his crutches after him. The newspaper had fallen open on the floor. There was nothing inside it.

 

“Tough luck, Nicholas,” Hugo said. “How’s it feel to lose to a guy holding a handful of nothing?”

 

“Bobby Lee, open up the back. Hugo, give me his piece,” Preacher said.

 

“I can take care of this,” Hugo said.

 

“Like you did behind that church?”

 

“Take it easy, Jack,” Hugo said.

 

“I said give me the piece.”

 

Nick could feel a wave of nausea permeate the entirety of his metabolism, as though he had been systemically poisoned and all his blood had settled in his stomach and every muscle in him had turned flaccid and pliant. For just a moment he saw himself through the eyes of his tormentors—a small, pitiful fat man whose skin had become as gray as cardboard and whose hair glowed with sweat, a little man whose corpulence gave off the vinegary stink of fear.

 

“Walk with me,” Preacher said.

 

“No,” Nick said.

 

“Yes,” Bobby Lee said, pressing a .45 hard between Nick’s shoulder blades, screwing it into the softness of his muscles.

 

The cows in the yard of the farmhouse had strung shiny green lines of feces around the pond. In the moonlight Nick could see the cows watching him, their eyes luminous, their heads haloed with gnats. An unmilked cow, its swollen udder straining like a veined balloon, bawled with its discomfort.

 

“Go toward the house, Mr. Dolan,” Preacher said.

 

“It ends here, doesn’t it?” Nick said.

 

But no one spoke in reply. He heard Hugo doing something in the luggage area of the SUV, shaking out a couple of large vinyl garbage bags and spreading them on the carpet.

 

“My family won’t know what happened to me,” Nick said. “They’ll think I deserted them.”

 

“Shut up,” Bobby Lee said.

 

“Don’t talk to him that way,” Preacher said.

 

“He keeps sassing you, Jack.”

 

“Mr. Dolan is a brave man. Don’t treat him as less. That’s far enough, Mr. Dolan.”

 

Nick felt the skin on his face shrink, the backs of his legs begin to tremble uncontrollably, his sphincter start to give way. In the distance he could see a bank of poplars at the edge of an unplowed field, wind flowing through Johnson grass that had turned yellow with drought, the brief tracings of a star falling across the sky. How did he, a kid from New Orleans, end up here, in this remote, godforsaken piece of fallow land in South Texas? He closed his eyes and for just a second saw his wife standing under the colonnade at the corner of St. Charles and Canal, raindrops in her hair, the milky whiteness of her complexion backlit by the old iron green-painted streetcar that stood motionless on the tracks.

 

“Esther,” he heard himself whisper.

 

He waited for the gunshot that would ricochet a .25-caliber round back and forth inside his brainpan. Instead, all he heard was the cow bawling in the dark.

 

“What did you say?” Preacher asked.

 

“He didn’t say anything,” Bobby Lee said.

 

“Be quiet. What did you say, Mr. Dolan?”

 

“I said Esther, the name of my wife, a woman who will never know what happened to her husband, you cocksucker.”

 

Nick could hear the tin roof on the farmhouse lift and clatter in the wind.

 

“What’s wrong, Jack?” Bobby Lee said.