THERE WERE FEW twelve-step groups in the area, or at least few that met more often than once a week, and the following day Pete Flores felt he was lucky to hitch a ride to one called the Sundowners that met in a fundamentalist church thirty miles down the road from the motel where he and Vikki were staying. The church house was a white-frame building with a small false bell tower on the apex of the roof and a blue neon cross mounted above the entranceway. In back were a mechanic’s shed and, next to it, a cemetery whose graves were strewn with plastic flowers and jelly glasses green with dried algae. Even with the windows wide open, the air inside the building was stifling, the wood surfaces as warm to the touch as a cookstove. Pete had arrived early at the meeting, and rather than sit in the heat, he went outside and sat on the back steps and looked at the strange chemical-green coloration in the western sky, the sun still as bright as an acetylene torch on the earth’s rim. The sedimentary layers of the mesalike formations were gray and yellow and pink above the dusk gathering on the desert floor. Pete felt as though he were sitting at the bottom of an enormous dried-out riparian bowl, one shaped out of potter’s clay in a prehistoric time, the land giving off an almost feral odor when rain tried to restore it to life.

 

The man who sat down next to Pete on the step was wearing an immaculate white T-shirt and freshly pressed strap overalls. He smelled of soap and aftershave lotion, and his dark hair was boxed on the back of his neck. His thick half-moon eyebrows were neatly clipped, the cleft in his chin shiny from a fresh shave. There was a bald spot in the center of his head. When he stared southward at the desert, his mouth was a gray slit without expression or character, his eyes dulled over. He pulled a cigarette out of his pack with his lips, then shook another one loose and offered it to Pete.

 

“Thanks, I never took it up,” Pete said.

 

“Good choice,” the man said. He lit his cigarette and blew the smoke from the side of his mouth deferentially. “I’m new at this meet. How is it?”

 

“Don’t know. This is my first time here, too.”

 

“You got some sobriety in?”

 

“A few days, that’s about it. I’ve got a twenty-four-hour chip.”

 

“Twenty-four hours can be a bitch.”

 

“You work here’bouts?” Pete asked.

 

“I was hauling pipe between Presidio and Fort Stockton, up to last month, anyway. I got a service-connected disability, but my boss was a pretty hard-nosed character. According to him, time in the Sandbox was for jerks.”

 

“You were in Iraq?”

 

“Two tours.”

 

“My tank got blown up in Baghdad,” Pete said.

 

The man’s eyes drifted to the long welted scar that ran like a pink raindrop down the side of Pete’s face. “You start drinking when you came home?”

 

Pete studied the deepening color in the sky, the hills that seemed humped against a fire burning just beyond the earth’s rim. “It runs in my family. I don’t think the war had much to do with it,” he said.

 

“That’s a stand-up way to look at it.”

 

“How much sobriety you have?”

 

“A couple of years, more or less.”

 

“You have a two-year chip?” Pete said.

 

“I’m not big on chips. I do the program my own way.”

 

Pete folded his hands and didn’t reply.

 

“You got wheels?” the man said.

 

“I hitched a ride with a guy who smelled like a beer truck. I asked him to come in with me, but he said Jesus’s first miracle was turning water into wine, and his followers weren’t hypocrites about it. I couldn’t quite fit all that together.”

 

“Want to get some coffee and a piece of pie after the meet? I’m springing,” the man in overalls said.

 

During the meeting, Pete forgot about his conversation with the man he’d met on the back steps. A woman was talking about going on a dry drunk and experiencing flashbacks that returned her to the inside of a blackout. Her voice, like that of a benighted soul forced to witness light, became threaded with tension as she told the group she might have killed someone with her automobile. The room was quiet when she finished speaking, the people in the pews and folding chairs staring at their feet or into space, their faces wan, each knowing the speaker’s story could have been his or her own.

 

After the meeting, the man in overalls helped stack chairs and wash out cups and the coffeemaker. He glanced in the direction of the woman who thought she might have committed vehicular homicide. He lowered his voice. “That one is about to talk herself into Huntsville pen,” he said to Pete.

 

“What you hear and who you see here stays here. That’s the way it’s supposed to work,” Pete said.

 

“Anybody who believes that has a lot more trust in people than I do. Let’s get something to eat, and I’ll take you home.”

 

“You don’t know how far I live.”

 

“Believe me, I got nothing better to do. My girlfriend boosted my truck and took off with a one-legged Bible salesman,” the man in overalls said. He stared across the row of pews at the woman who had spoken of a dry drunk earlier; his forehead creased with furrows. The woman stood at a window, her attention fixed on the darkness outside, her hands resting on the sill as though they weren’t attached to her arms. “Goes to show you, doesn’t it?” he said.

 

“Show you what?” Pete said.

 

“That woman over there, the one confessed to killing somebody who might not exist. She looks like she just figured out she’s created a bigger mess than the one she was already in.”

 

Pete didn’t answer. Ten minutes later he drove to a restaurant with the man in overalls, who said his name was Bill, and ordered a piece of cake and a glass of iced tea.

 

“You got a girl?” Bill said.

 

“I like to think I do,” Pete replied.

 

“She’s in the program, too?”

 

“No, she’s normal. I never could figure why she got involved with the likes of me.”

 

“Where y’all living?”

 

“A low-rent joint up the road.”

 

Bill seemed to wait for the next words Pete would speak.

 

“I’ve been thinking about something,” Pete said. “That woman back yonder at the meet?”

 

“The wet-brain?”

 

“I wouldn’t call her that.”

 

Bill picked up the check and studied it, then looked irritably in the direction of the waitress.

 

“She was willing to confess to something maybe she didn’t do,” Pete continued. “Or if she did do it, she was willing to confess to it and maybe go to prison. For her, it didn’t make any difference. She just wants to be forgiven for whatever she’s done wrong in her life. That takes guts and humility I don’t reckon I have.”

 

“That broad can’t add,” Bill said, getting up with the check in hand. “I’ll meet you outside. We need to haul freight. I got to get some shut-eye.”

 

Pete waited in the parking lot, chewing on a plastic soda straw, looking at the stars, Venus winking above a black mountain in the west. What had Bill said earlier about a two-year sobriety chip? He hadn’t bothered to accept it? That one didn’t quite slide down the pipe. That would be like turning down the Medal of Honor because the ceremony conflicted with an evening of color-matching your socks.

 

“Ready to roll?” Bill said, exiting the café.

 

Pete removed the soda straw from his mouth and looked at Bill in the glow of a neon beer sign.

 

“Problem?” Bill said.

 

“No, let’s boogie,” Pete said.

 

“You still haven’t told me where you live.”

 

“At the red light, turn east and keep going till you run out of pavement.”

 

“I thought you said you lived up the road, not east,” Bill said, trying to smile.

 

“I guess I’m not that sharp when it comes to the cardinal points of the compass. Actually, our place is so far back in the sticks, we got to bring the sunshine in on a truck,” Pete replied. “That’s a fact.”

 

Bill was quiet as they drove eastward through hardpan countryside dotted with mesquite and old tires and scrap metal that sparkled like mica under the moon. He put a mint on his tongue and sucked on it and looked sideways at Pete as the SUV hit chuckholes that jarred the frame. “How much farther?”

 

“Another five or six miles.”

 

“What the hell do you do out here?”

 

“I’m shaving and treating fence posts for a fellow.”

 

“That’s interesting. I didn’t know there was that much wood around here.”

 

“It’s what I do.”

 

“How about your girl?”

 

“She’s got a little Internet business.”

 

“Selling what? Lizard turds?”

 

“She does right well with it.”

 

Bill drove past another mile marker. Set back between two hills was a lighted house with a gasoline truck parked in the yard and a windmill in back. Horses stood motionlessly in a railed pen where the grass was nubbed down to the dirt.

 

“Excuse me,” Bill said, reaching across Pete.

 

“What are you doing?”

 

“It’s my Beretta. You see that jackrabbit go across the road? Hang on.”

 

Bill pulled onto the shoulder and got out, staring at a dry wash running from a culvert into a tangle of brush that had leaves like thick green buttons. Out in the moonlight, away from the shadows, were cactuses blooming with yellow and red flowers. A nine-millimeter semiauto hung from Bill’s right hand. “Want to take a shot?” he said.

 

“What for?”

 

“Sometimes in hot weather, they get worms. But if you gut and skin them right and hang them from wire overnight, so all the heat drains out, they’re safe to eat. Come on, hop out.”

 

Pete opened the SUV’s door and stepped down on the gravel, the wind warm on his face, a smell like dried animal dung in his nostrils. The highway was empty in both directions. On the other side of the border, he thought he could see electric lights spread across the bottom of a hill.

 

“Follow me down here,” Bill said. “You can have the first shot. He’s gonna spook out of the brush in just a minute. Jackrabbits always do. They don’t have the smarts to stay put, like a cottontail does. You never hunted rabbits when you were a kid?”

 

Pete took his soda straw out of his pocket and put it in his mouth. “Not often. Our farm was so poor the rabbits had to carry their own feed when they hopped across it.”

 

Bill grinned. “Come on, we’ll flush him out. Afraid of rattlers?”

 

“Never given them much thought.”

 

“Think I’m gonna rape you?”

 

“What?”

 

“Just a bad joke. But your behavior strikes me as a little bit queer.”

 

“How are you using the word ‘queer’?”

 

“That’s what I mean. You’re wrapped too tight, trooper. If you ask me, you need to get your pole polished.”

 

Bill seemed to lose interest in the conversation. He reached down and picked up a rock. He studied the clump of brush with buttonlike leaves at the bottom of the wash and flung the rock into it hard enough to break a branch and make a clattering sound far down the wash. “See him scoot? Told you he was in there,” he said.

 

“Yeah, you called it.”

 

Bill turned and faced Pete. His nine-millimeter was pointed downward, along his thigh, the butterfly safety pushed to the fire position. He formed a pocket of air in one cheek, then the other, like a man rinsing his mouth. “Yes, sir, you’re a mite spooky, Pete. A hard man to read, I’d say. I bet you blew up some hajji ass over there, didn’t you?”

 

Pete tried to remember giving his name to Bill. Maybe he had, if not at the meet, perhaps at the café. Think, think, think, he told himself. He could feel his scalp tightening. “I’d better be getting on home. I’d like to introduce you to my girlfriend.”

 

“She’s waiting on you, huh?”

 

“Yeah, she’s a good one about that.”

 

“Wish I was you. You bet I do,” Bill said. He looked southward into the darkness, his thoughts hidden. Then he released the magazine on his gun and stuck it in his pocket. He cleared the chamber and inserted the ejected round into the top of the magazine and shoved the magazine back into the frame with the heel of his hand. “Think fast,” he said, throwing the gun to Pete.

 

“Why’d you do that?”

 

“See if you were paying attention. Scared you, didn’t I?”

 

“Pert’ near,” Pete replied. “You’re quite a card, Bill.”

 

“Not when you come to know me,” Bill said. “No, sir, I wouldn’t say I was a card at all. Just stick my piece back in the glove box, will you?”

 

Five miles farther down the road, the hills flattened and the moon sat on the horizon like a huge, bruised white balloon. Up ahead, Pete could see a passing lane, then a brightly lit convenience store and gas-pump island. “We’re just about two miles or so from the dirt track that goes to our house,” he said. “I can get off up yonder if you want.”

 

“In for a penny, in for a pound. I’ll take you all the way.”

 

“I got to be honest about something, Bill.”

 

“You kill somebody with your car while you were in a blackout?”

 

“The reason I don’t have a lot of sobriety is I want to drink.”

 

“You mean now?”

 

“Now, yesterday, last week, tomorrow, next month. When I catch the bus, the undertaker will probably have to set a case of Bud on my chest to keep me in the coffin.”

 

“What are you trying to tell me?”

 

“Like they say, unless you’ve reached your bottom, you’re just jerking on your dork. Pull into the store yonder.”

 

“Sure that’s what you want to do?”

 

“Hell, yes, it is. What about you?”

 

“One or two cold brews wouldn’t hurt. I’m no fanatic. What about your girlfriend?”

 

“She doesn’t complain. You’ll like her.”

 

“I bet I will,” Bill said.

 

He pulled the SUV into the gas island and got out to fill the tank while Pete went inside the convenience store. The air was thick and warm and smelled of burned diesel. Hundreds of moths had clustered on the overhead lights. Pete took two packs of pepperoni sausage from a shelf and two cartons of king-size beers from the cooler. The cans were silver and blue and beaded with moisture and cold inside the cardboard. He set them on the counter and waited while another customer paid for a purchase, clicking his nails on top of one carton, looking around the store as though he had forgotten something. Then he adjusted his belt and made a face and asked the cashier where the men’s room was. The cashier lifted his eyes only long enough to point toward the rear of the store. Pete nodded his thanks and walked between the shelves toward the back exit, out of view from the front window.

 

Seconds later, he was outside in the dark, running between several eighteen-wheelers parked on a grease-compacted strip of bare earth behind the diesel island. He dropped down into an arroyo and ran deeper into the night, his heart beating, clouds of insects rising into his face, clotting in his mouth and nostrils. The heat lightning flaring in the clouds made him think of the flicker of artillery rounds exploding beyond the horizon, before the reverberations could be felt through the earth.

 

He crawled through a concrete culvert onto the north side of the two-lane state highway, then got to his feet and began running across a stretch of hill-flanged hardpan traced with serpentine lines of silt and gravel that felt like crustaceans breaking apart under his shoes.

 

He had created a geographic forty-five-degree angle between his present location and the Fiesta motel, where Vikki waited for him. The distance, by the way the crow flies, was probably around forty-five miles. With luck, if he ran and walked all night, he would be at the motel by sunrise. As he raced across the ground, the lightning threw his shadow ahead of him, like that of a desperate soldier trying to outrun incoming mail.

 

 

 

 

 

12

 

WHEN HACKBERRY HOLLAND was captured by the Chinese south of the Yalu and placed in a boxcar full of marines whose clothes smoked with cold, he tried to convince himself during the long transportation to the POW camp in No Name Valley that he had become part of a great historical epic he would remember one day as one remembers scenes from War and Peace. He would be a chronicler who had witnessed two empires collide on a snowy waste whose name would have the significance of Gallipoli or Austerlitz or Gettysburg. A man could have a worse fate.

 

But he quickly learned that inside the vortex, you did not see the broad currents of history at work. No grand armies stood in position behind rows of cannons that were given the order to fire in sequence, almost in tribute to their own technological perfection rather than as a means of killing the enemy. Nor did you see the unfolded flags flapping in the wind, the caissons and ambulance wagons being wheeled into position, the brilliant colors of the uniforms and the plumes on the helmets of the officers and the sun shining on the drawn sabers. You saw and remembered only the small piece of ground you had occupied, one that would forever be filled with sounds and images that you could not rinse from your dreams.

 

You remembered shell casings scattered along the bottom of a trench, field dressings stiff with blood, frozen dirt clods raining down on your steel pot, the chugging sound of a 105 round arching out of its trajectory, coming in short. You remembered the rocking of the boxcar, the unshaved jaws of the men staring back at you out of their hooded parkas; you remembered the face of hunger in a shack where fish heads and a dollop of rice were considered a banquet.

 

When Hackberry returned from San Antonio after the shooting death of Isaac Clawson, he pulled off his boots on the back steps and walked inside the house in his socks, undressed in the bath, and stayed in the shower until there was no more hot water in the tank. Then he dried himself and put on fresh clothes and took his shoeshine kit out on the steps and used the garden hose and a can of Kiwi polish and a brush and a rag to clean Isaac Clawson’s blood from the sole and welt of his right boot.

 

He had burst into the motel room where Isaac Clawson died, not knowing what was on the other side of the door, and stepped into a pool of Clawson’s blood, printing the carpet with it, printing the walkway outside, smearing it into the grit and worn fabric that marked the passage of a thousand low-rent trysts.

 

And that was the way he would always remember that moment—as one of ineptitude and unseemliness and violation. Later, after the arrival of a journalist and a photographer, someone had placed a hand towel over Clawson’s head and face. The towel didn’t cover his features adequately and provided him neither anonymity nor dignity. Instead, it seemed to add to the degradation done to him by the world.

 

The shooter, who was probably Preacher Jack Collins, had gotten away. In his wake, he had left the ultimate societal violation for others to clean up. For Hackberry, those details and none other would always define the death of Isaac Clawson. Also, he would never lose the sense that somehow, by stepping in Clawson’s blood, he had contributed to the degradation of Clawson’s person.

 

Hackberry used a second rag to wipe the moisture from the hose off his boots. When his boots were dry and clean and smooth to the touch, he slipped them on his feet and put his rags, his shoe brush, and the can of Kiwi polish in a paper bag, soaked the bag with charcoal starter, and burned it in the metal trash barrel by his toolshed. Then he sat down on the steps and looked at the sun rising above the poplars at the back of his property.

 

Inside the shadows, he saw a doe with twin fawns looking back at him. Two minutes later, Pam Tibbs pulled her cruiser into the driveway and rang the bell.

 

“Back here,” Hackberry yelled.

 

When she came around the side of the house, she was holding a thermos in one hand and a bag of doughnuts in the other. “You get some sleep?” she said.

 

“Enough.”

 

“You coming to the office?”

 

“Why wouldn’t I?”

 

“You eat yet?”

 

“Yeah, I think I did. Yeah, I’m sure I did.”

 

She sat on the step below him and unscrewed the top of the thermos and popped open the bag of doughnuts. She poured coffee into the thermos top and wrapped a doughnut in a napkin and handed both to him. “You worry me sometimes,” she said.

 

“Pam, I’m your administrative superior. That means we don’t personalize certain kinds of considerations.”

 

She glanced at her watch. “Until eight A.M. I’ll do what I damn please. How do you like that? Can I get a cup out of your kitchen?”

 

He started to answer, but she opened the screen door and went inside before he could speak. When she came back out, she filled her cup and sat down beside him. “Clawson went in without backup. His death is not on either one of us,” she said.

 

“I didn’t say it was.”

 

“But you thought it.”

 

“Jack Collins got away. We were probably within a hundred feet of him. But he got out of the motel and out of the parking lot and probably out of San Antonio while I was tracking an ICE agent’s blood all over the crime scene.”

 

“That’s not what’s bothering you, is it?”

 

When he blinked, like a camera lens clatching open and closing just as quickly, he saw the faces of the Asian women staring up at him from the killing ground behind the stucco church, grains of dirt on their lips and in their nostrils and hair.

 

“Ballistics shows that all the women were killed by the same weapon,” he said. “There was probably only one shooter. From what the FBI knows about Collins, he seems to be the one most capable of that kind of mass murder. We could have put Collins out of business.”

 

“We will. Or if we don’t get to him first, the feds will.”

 

Hackberry looked at the doe with her fawns in the poplar trees and could feel Pam’s eyes on the side of his face. He thought of his twin sons and his dead wife and the sound the wind made at night when it channeled through the grass in the pasture. Pam moved her foot slightly and touched the side of her shoe against his boot. “Are you listening to me, Hack?”

 

He could feel a great fatigue seep through his body. He cupped his hands on his knees and turned his head toward her. There was no mistaking the look in her eyes. “I’m too old,” he said.

 

“Too old for what?”

 

“The things young people do.”

 

“Like what?”

 

“You got me. How about we change the subject?”

 

“You’re a stubborn and unteachable man. That’s why somebody needs to look after you.”

 

He got to his feet, shifting a growing pocket of pain out of his spine. “I must have committed some terrible sins in my past life,” he said.

 

She drank from her coffee, her gaze lifting to his. He let out his breath and went inside to get his hat and gun before going to the office.

 

 

THREE DAYS LATER, at five P.M., Ethan Riser called Hackberry at the department and asked him to have a drink.

 

“Where are you?” Hackberry asked.

 

“At the hotel.”

 

“What are you doing down here?”

 

“Soliciting some help.”

 

“The FBI can’t handle its problems on its own?”

 

“I heard you like Jack Daniel’s.”

 

“The word is ‘liked,’ past tense.”

 

“I’ll meet you at that joint down the street,” Ethan Riser said.

 

One block from the jail, behind the Eat Café, was a saloon with a sign over the bar that warned the customer YOU ARE STANDING ON THE HARDEST FLOOR IN TEXAS, SO YOU BEST NOT LAND FACEDOWN ON IT. The floor was made from old railroad ties that were grimed black with diesel and creosote and cinders and smoke from prairie fires and anchored to their crossbeams with rusted steel spikes. The bar itself was fitted with a brass footrail that had three cuspidors pushed neatly under it. On top of the bar were a bowl of hard-boiled eggs and a jar of pickled hogs’ feet and another jar that contained a urine-yellow liquid and a rattlesnake whose thick coils and open mouth were pressed against the glass. The lights behind the bar were hooded with green plastic shades, and a wood-bladed fan turned slowly on the ceiling. Ethan Riser was standing at the far end of the bar, a cone-shaped glass of draft beer in one hand, a leather cup in the other.

 

“What’s up?” Hackberry said.

 

Ethan Riser rattled five poker dice in the leather cup and rolled them on the bar. “Your grandfather really put John Wesley Hardin in the can?”

 

“He locked him in chains and nailed the links to the bed of a wagon and drove him there personally, after first raking him off the top of his horse.”

 

“Know how Hardin died?”

 

“He was rolling dice in the Acme saloon in El Paso. He said, ‘You got four sixes to beat’ to the man drinking next to him. Then he heard a pistol cock behind his head. Then next thing he heard was a pistol ball entering his skull just above the eye.”

 

“I wish I could roll four sixes, but I can’t,” Riser said. “I’ve got a psychopath on the loose that some other people want to cut a deal with, even if this lunatic has murdered a federal agent.”

 

“Jack Collins?”

 

“These people I work with, or under, think Collins can help us nail somebody we’ve wanted to take off at the neck for a long time. A Russian by the name of Josef Sholokoff. Ever hear of him?”

 

“No.”

 

“I think my colleagues are wrong on two counts. I believe Collins is a button man others hire and discard like used Kleenex. I don’t think he’s wired in to people of any importance. Second, I don’t believe in making deals with the killers of federal agents.” Riser saw the expression in Hackberry’s eyes, a brief flicker of disappointment that seemed to make Riser reexamine what he had just said. “Okay, I don’t believe in making deals with guys who mow down defenseless women, either.”

 

“Why tell me all this?”

 

“Because you’re smart and not political. Because you’ve been around awhile and you don’t care a lot about what people think of you or what happens to you.”

 

“You know how to say it, Mr. Riser.” Hackberry signaled to the bartender. He leaned on his elbows and waited for Riser to continue. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the beer in Riser’s glass going flat.

 

“We think we got a break down by the Big Bend,” Riser said. “A guy caused a commotion in a convenience store, and the clerk called it in. The guy had been putting gas in his SUV, and his buddy had gone inside to buy beer. Except the buddy left the beer on the counter and went out the back door and hauled ass.”

 

The bartender set a glass of ice and carbonated water and lime slices in front of Hackberry.

 

“You drink that?” Riser asked.

 

“Go on about the guy.”

 

“He came into the convenience store and wanted to know where Pete went. The clerk said he didn’t know. The guy called him a liar and pulled a semiauto out of his overalls. The clerk called nine-one-one, and the sheriff decided to lift some prints off the fuel-pump handle. They got a hit. The guy with the semiauto is Robert Lee Motree, also known as Bobby Lee Motree. He did six months in the Broward County stockade for illegal possession of a firearm. He’s also worked for a New Orleans private investigative service owned by a guy named Arthur Rooney. You recognize that name?”

 

“Yeah, but I thought Rooney ran some escort fronts in Houston or Dallas,” Hackberry said.

 

“That’s the same guy. Rooney got blown out of New Orleans by Katrina and is in Galveston now.” Riser seemed to hesitate, as though his words were leading him into an area he hadn’t fully given himself consent to enter.

 

“Go on,” Hackberry said.

 

“Rooney is a careful man, but we put a tap on his current punch of the day. He made a call from her apartment to a contract hitter by the name of Hugo Cistranos. On the tape, it sounds like Rooney and Cistranos are going to clip Jack Collins.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Get this. Collins cut off Rooney’s finger with a barber’s razor on Rooney’s own desktop.” Riser started laughing.

 

“What’s the Russian’s role in all this?”

 

“We’re not sure. He’s a big player in Arizona and Nevada and California. He owns whole networks of whores and porn studios and has a lot of outlaw bikers muling his tar and crystal meth up from the border. How much China white do you see here?”

 

“Not much. It’s upscale stuff. Addicts with money can smoke it and not worry about needles and AIDS.”

 

“DEA says a two-million-dollar shipment was off-loaded from a two-engine plane that landed on a highway in your county last week.”

 

“Tell them thanks for letting us in on that.”

 

“If you were looking for Vikki Gaddis and Pete Flores down in the Big Bend, where would you start?”

 

“I’d have to give that some thought.”

 

“You don’t like us much, do you?” Riser drank from his beer and wiped his mouth.

 

“I like y’all just fine. I just don’t trust you,” Hackberry said.

 

 

THAT NIGHT HACKBERRY ate dinner by himself in a back booth at a restaurant out on the highway, his Stetson crown-down on the seat beside him. Working-class families were lined up at the salad bar, and country music filtered through the swinging doors of the lounge annex on the far side of the cashier’s counter. He saw Pam Tibbs enter the front door with an athletic-looking man dressed in sport clothes and shined loafers, his dark hair wet-combed and sun-bleached at the tips, his face confident and tanned and unwrinkled by either worry or age. Pam wore a purple skirt and black pumps and a black top with a gold cross and chain; she had just had her hair cut and looked not only lovely but ten years younger than her age in the way that women look when they love someone. When she saw Hackberry, she jiggled her fingers at him and went inside the lounge with her friend.

 

Ten minutes later, she came back out of the swinging doors and sat down across from Hackberry. He could smell her perfume and the hint of bourbon and ice and crushed cherries on her breath. “Join us,” she said.

 

“Who is ‘us’?” he asked, and wondered if she caught the tinge of resentment in his voice.

 

“My cousin and me. His wife will be here in a few minutes,” she said, her fingers spreading on the table, her expression not quite able to contain her surprise at his reaction.

 

“Thanks, I have to get home.”

 

“Hack?”

 

“What?”

 

“Come on.”

 

“Come on, what?”

 

He felt her foot touch his under the table. “Ease up,” she said.

 

“Pam—”

 

“I mean it. Give yourself a break. People can’t be alone all the time.”

 

“You’re my chief deputy. Act like it,” he said. He looked sideways to see if anyone had heard him.

 

“What if I am?” she said, leaning forward now.

 

“I’d like to finish my dinner.”

 

“You make me mad. I want to hit you sometimes.”

 

“I’m going to get some salad.”

 

“Your chicken-fried steak will get cold.”

 

Hackberry thought he might have discovered the source of many unexplained brain aneurysms.

 

 

THAT NIGHT HE returned home and sat on a folding chair in the yard under a sky that roiled with thunderclouds. It was not a rational act. The hour was late, the wind bending the poplar trees at the foot of his property, the air filled with bits of desiccated matter that stung his face like insects. Overhead, yellow pools of dry lightning flared and pulsed in the clouds but made no sound. Even though he had soaked the lawn that morning, the ground under his feet felt as hard as brick. Five or six deer had clustered down in the trees as though preparing for an impending storm. Then he realized the deer were there for other reasons. On a rise just above his property, he saw the silhouettes of four coyotes slink across the crest. When lightning lit the sky behind them, he saw the yellow-gray of their coats, the peculiar way they hung their heads, the neck bones and jaws loose and not completely connected, a suggestion of slather on the teeth and lips.

 

Was this what it was all about? he wondered. One creature killing and eating another? Or even worse, the fanged predator with eyes in the front hunting down and tearing apart the gentle grass-eating animal born with eyes on the sides of its head, forever condemned to be food for coyotes and wolves and cougars and, finally, man with his sharpened stick?

 

What was it that had bothered him about Ethan Riser? The fact that he could drink normally and walk away from it? That he represented an organization with power that had almost global reach? Or Hackberry’s refusal to accept the notion that the Ethan Risers of the world were functional and made the system work and, in spite of all their inadequacies and failures, did an enormous amount of good?

 

No, that wasn’t it, either. Some people dwelled apart and didn’t fit. It was that simple. Preacher Jack Collins was one of them. In all probability, he was a psychopath who, upon his death, would continue to look upon himself as normal, stepping through a hole in the dimension still convinced it was the world that was wrong and not he. But there were both male and female counterparts to men like Jack Collins. They wore badges or Roman collars or climbed fire ladders into flaming buildings or did triage in battalion aid stations and, like Collins, never discussed their difference or the events in their lives that had sawed them loose from the seminal glue holding the rest of humankind together.

 

Saint Paul had written that perhaps there were angels living among us. If so, perhaps this was the bunch he was talking about. But before any one of them congratulated himself, he needed to be aware of the dues that went with membership. If an individual, through either his own volition or events over which he had no control, found himself taking up residence in a country undefined by flags or physical borders, he could be assured of one immediate and abiding consequence: He was on his own, and solitude and loneliness would probably be his companions unto the grave.

 

The greatest irony was that celibacy often went with the residency, less out of spiritual choice than circumstance. And those who called celibacy a gift were usually, in Hackberry’s opinion, those who lived twenty-four hours a day inside the iron maiden, their flesh tormented by the spikes of their unacknowledged desire.

 

He leaned forward in his folding chair and stretched his lower back, his sciatica like a fire creeping along his spinal cord.

 

He saw the cruiser turn off the road and come up his driveway. He heard the doorbell ring but did not bother to get up to answer it. When Pam Tibbs came around the side of the house, he saw that she had changed out of her evening clothes into jeans and a departmental khaki shirt. She was wearing her gun belt and cuffs and slapjack and Mace.

 

“What are you doing here?” he said.

 

“This month I go on at oh-one-hundred Saturdays,” she replied.

 

“That doesn’t address the question.”

 

“You always sit in the yard by yourself at one in the morning?”

 

“Sometimes my back lights up and I have to wait for it to pass.”

 

She was standing in front of him, looking down at him, the curly ends of her hair hanging against her cheeks, her eyes bright in the shadows. He could hear her breathing and see her breasts rising and falling under her shirt. “You want me to resign?” she said.

 

“No, I just want you to accept certain realities.”

 

“Like what?”

 

“You’re still a young woman. The world is yours. Don’t mistake sympathy or admiration or friendship for love.”

 

“Who the hell are you to tell me what to think?”

 

“Your goddamn boss is what I am.”

 

“You never swear, Hack. You’re going to start now?”

 

“I told you, I’m old. You need to let me alone, Pam.”

 

“Then run me off,” she said. “Until then I’m not going anywhere.”

 

She was standing closer to his chair, closer than she should have been. He stood up, towering over her. He could smell the heat in her clothes and the warm odor in her hair. She put her hands on both of his hips and pressed the crown of her head into the center of his chest. He could feel his mouth go dry and a thickness growing in his loins.

 

“The best women always fall in love with the wrong men,” he said. “You’re one of those, kid.”

 

“Don’t call me that.”

 

“You’re late for your shift,” he said.

 

He left her there and went inside the house and locked the door behind him.

 

 

 

 

 

13

 

LIAM ERIKSSON HAD parked his pickup truck, one with a camper shell inserted in the bed, down in a sandy bottom thinly shaded by mesquite trees. A shiny green liquid, one with the viscosity of an industrial lubricant, wound through the pebbled creek bed, and gnats and horseflies hung in the brush along the banks. In the distance was a long stretch of baked flatland that glimmered like salt and, beyond it, a range of blue hills. Bobby Lee Motree sat on a rock and took a longneck from a bucket of ice and cracked off the cap.

 

“I don’t see how you can cut up a sweet piece like that,” he said.

 

“Business is business. Why be sentimental about it? Besides, I found it, so it ain’t no skin off my ass,” Liam replied.

 

Liam stood at the rear door of his camper shell, touching the blade of a hacksaw with his thumb. He was bare-chested and wore a straw hat with a wilted brim, like one a female gardener would wear, and hiking shorts with big snap pockets and alpine shoes with lugs on the soles. He had shaved off his orange beard after he had screwed up at the check-cashing store in San Antonio; now the lower half of his face looked like emery paper. Or maybe the skin of a freshly exhumed corpse, Bobby Lee thought.

 

“You should have left your beard, or maybe just trimmed or dyed it,” Bobby Lee said.

 

“Something eating on you?”

 

Yeah, there was. But exactly how much information could he trust Liam with? Bobby Lee bit on his lip and thought about it.

 

Liam grinned, showing the gaps in his teeth, and locked down a pump shotgun in a machinist vise that was bolted to the bed of his truck. He had already wood-rasped the stock into a pistol grip and machine-sanded the wood smooth. He set the hacksaw blade flush with the pump and began sawing.

 

“I think I’ve figured out where the soldier boy is living,” Bobby Lee said.

 

“How’d you do that?” Liam asked, still grinning.

 

“He led me south, then way to hell and gone out east. I think he’s probably about the same distance in the exact opposite direction.”

 

“You were always good at ciphering things out, Bobby Lee. Matter of bloodline, maybe,” Liam said. “I’m referring to the fact that Robert E. Lee is in your pedigree.”

 

Was Liam coming on wise? Bobby Lee narrowed his eyes. All right, let’s take a run at it, he thought. “We’ve worked lots of gigs, me and you.”

 

“We’ve splattered the walls, bud. They’re never gonna know who did any of it, either,” Liam said.

 

“But this current deal has gotten complicated.” Bobby Lee let his words hang in the air.

 

Liam stopped sawing, not raising his eyes. He wiped the cut in the shotgun’s barrel with an oily rag. “Does this have something to do with that call you got from Hugo?”

 

“Hugo says we get rid of the girl and the soldier. Then we do Nick Dolan and his wife, with special instructions for the wife. Then we do Preacher.”

 

Liam began sawing again, his back turned to Bobby Lee. “I suspect I misheard you on that last part.”

 

“Jack cut off Artie Rooney’s finger, and now he’s shaking him down for a half mil. Hugo says it’s time for Jack to join the Hallelujah Chorus.”

 

Liam turned around. “Do Preacher? You’re actually serious? You haven’t started fooling with acid again?”

 

“I’m taking you into my confidence, Liam. I don’t like the way things have turned out. But Preacher is slipping. I think it’s because of the deal behind the church.”

 

“Yeah, well, nobody planned that one. If that’s on anybody, it’s on Hugo.”

 

“You in or not, Liam?”

 

“Cap Preacher? That’s like trying to kill death.”

 

“He’s got a weakness. It’s got something to do with sugar. Or candy or pastry. I don’t get it. But he’s got something wrong with him. A hooker I knew said Jack almost died once because of something he ate.”

 

“You’re that scared of him?” Without waiting for an answer, Liam casually resumed cutting off the shotgun’s barrel, the muscles in his back rippling like warm tallow as he worked.

 

Bobby Lee felt a blood vessel pulse in his temple. He took a sip of his beer before he spoke. “Want to add anything to that last remark?”

 

“Why would I want to do that?”

 

“Because I’m having a little trouble handling it.”

 

“I was talking about myself. Preacher scares the hell out of me. He’s a mean motor scooter and crazy besides.”

 

Bobby Lee started to speak again but this time held his tongue. He cracked open another beer and drank from it, realizing irrefutably that he had made his problems worse by taking Liam into his confidence. He had stood up for Liam with Preacher, and this was what he got for it. Liam was no different from any other gutter rat in the business. He had no mercy, either. He had proved that when he went to work on the owner of the diner, what-was-his-name, Junior Kraut Face or something. Now Bobby Lee had both Preacher and Liam to worry about, plus the fact that he hadn’t gotten paid, plus the fact that Preacher had popped a federal agent, which was sure to bring down a ton of heat on all of them.

 

Liam finished sawing through the shotgun’s barrel and sailed it across the creek bed into a cluster of sandstone boulders. He listened as the barrel tinkled and rolled down the side of a ravine. He begin fitting a series of twelve-gauge shells into the magazine, pushing them in with his thumb until the spring in the loading tube came tight. “I already took out the sportsman’s plug,” he said. “Five double-aught bucks. You want to see the paint fly? These babies can do it.”

 

He aimed at a jackrabbit running across the hardpan, leading it with the sawed tip of the barrel, one eye closed. Then he breathed out a popping sound and lowered the gun. He grinned and smacked Bobby Lee on the shoulder, causing him to spill beer down the front of his shirt. “Relax, enjoy the time you got,” Liam said. “That’s my philosophy. Life’s a party, right?”

 

Bobby Lee took a drink from his bottle, eyeing Liam with the caution he would show a snake coiled in the shade of scrub brush.

 

“You spoke up for me when Preacher wanted to rip my ass,” Liam said. “I’m not forgetting that. We’re buds. Crack me a beer.”

 

 

DANNY BOY LORCA was squatted behind the jail at sunup Monday morning when Hackberry parked his truck and started inside. Danny Boy’s skin had the dark, smudged coloration of someone who cooked as a matter of course over open charcoal pits or who cleared and burned brush for a living or who worked land that had been blackened by wildfires. His thick hair, cut like an Apache’s, did not look unwashed as much as dull and ash-powdered, the scars from jailhouse-knife beefs of years ago like dead worms on his hands and forearms. He was drawing a picture in the dirt with a sharpened stick.

 

“What you got there, Danny Boy?” Hackberry asked.

 

“Face I saw in a dream.”

 

“You here to see me about something?”

 

Danny Boy stood up. He wore jeans that were so tight that they looked painted on his body, and a long-sleeve calico shirt notched around the upper arms with purple garters. Stuffed in his clothes, he had the shape of a giant banana. “Pete Flores called me. He needs me to get him a car. Him and Vikki Gaddis want to go to Montana.”

 

“Come inside.”

 

“I been dry three days. I’m staying clear of jail for a while,” Danny Boy said, not moving. The sky in the west was a metallic blue still caught between darkness and first light, the horizon layered with a long band of steel-colored clouds that could have been either dust or rain mist. Danny Boy sniffed at the air and stared at the sky as though he had just heard a brief rumble of thunder that had no source.

 

“I thought we were friends,” Hackberry said. “I thought you trusted me. You think I’ll do you harm?”

 

Danny Boy’s eyes seemed full of sleep when he looked back at Hackberry. Hackberry could not remember seeing Danny Boy smile, not ever. “Pete said he got away from a guy who was trying to kill him. Somewhere down by Big Bend. He said the guy was at an A.A. meeting in a church. If Pete can get holt of a car, he’s gonna drive straight through to Montana.”

 

“Where’s Pete staying?”

 

Danny Boy shook his head, indicating that he didn’t know or he wasn’t prepared to say.

 

“How about Vikki?”

 

“Waitressing and playing in a restaurant or a club. I told Pete I didn’t have no money, but he better not be thinking about stealing a car. He says he ain’t going down for the murder of them Oriental women.”

 

“He won’t. I promise.”

 

“Last night I dreamed about rain. I woke up and thought it was hitting on my roof. But it was grasshoppers flying into the windmill and the screens. You say Pete ain’t going down for them murders. But Pete was there when they got killed. Guys like Pete have a hard time in jail. They try to go their own way and get in trouble. He’ll be in Huntsville for a long time.”

 

“Not if I can help it.”

 

But Danny Boy had lost interest in the conversation in the same way he had lost interest years ago in the promises of most white people. He was staring at the face he had drawn in the dirt. The Apache haircut, the wide brow, the square jaw, and the small eyes all looked like his own. He rubbed the sole of his shoe back and forth across the drawing, smearing it back into the earth.

 

“Why’d you do that?”

 

“He’s one of them ancient rain gods. There was a bunch of them living here when this was a giant valley full of corn. But the rain gods went away. They ain’t coming back, either.”

 

“How do you know that?”

 

“They got no reason to. We don’t believe in them no more.”

 

 

AT EIGHT A.M. Hackberry called Pam Tibbs into his office.

 

“Yes, sir?” she said.

 

“I have a general idea where Vikki Gaddis and Pete Flores might be. My back is flaring up, and I need you to drive me,” he said.

 

“You ought to see a doctor,” she said. Her eyes left his. “Sorry.”

 

“I depend on you because you’re smart, Pam. I’m not patronizing you when I say that.”

 

“You don’t have to explain yourself.”

 

He let it pass. “We’ll be back late tonight or maybe tomorrow. Get whatever you need out of your locker.” But he couldn’t let it pass after all. Why did she bother him like this? “I know I don’t have to explain myself. I was trying to…Never mind.”

 

“What?”

 

“Nothing. Would you get me an aspirin, please? Bring the box.”

 

At eight-thirty A.M., Hackberry and Pam Tibbs were doing eighty miles an hour down the four-lane, the emergency flasher rippling silently. Hackberry lay back in the passenger seat, half asleep, his Stetson tilted over his eyes, his long legs extended.

 

Where do you look for a guitar-picking woman in the state of Texas?

 

Anywhere.

 

Where do you look for a guitar-picking woman who sings “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” to a beer-joint audience?

 

In a place that will probably remember the experience for a long time.

 

Hackberry knew his errand was probably a foolish one. He was out of his jurisdiction and trying to save young people who trusted neither him, his department, nor the system he represented. Cassandra had been given knowledge of the future and simultaneously condemned to a lifetime of being disbelieved and rejected. The wearisome preoccupation of the elderly—namely, the conviction that they had already seen the show but could never pass on the lessons they had learned from it—was not unlike Cassandra’s burden, except the anger and bitterness of old people was not the stuff of Homeric epics.

 

Hackberry shifted in the seat, pulling his hat lower on his face, and tried to get out of his funk. The cruiser hit a bump and forced his eyes open. He hadn’t realized how far he and Pam had driven. He saw the shapes of mountains in the south and the buildings and planted trees and the planned neighborhoods of a small town spread along the side of a long geological slope that looked as though the land had suddenly tilted into the sky.

 

“You fell asleep,” Pam said.

 

“Where are we?”

 

“Not far from the convenience store where Bobby Lee Motree pulled a semiauto on the night clerk. Did the FBI get you a mug shot of him yet?”

 

“They will eventually. They have their own problems to deal with.”

 

“Why do you make excuses for them?”

 

“Because a lot of them are decent people.”

 

“I bet they love their grandmothers and they’re kind to animals, too.” She glanced sideways at him, her expression hidden behind her aviator shades, her mouth a flat line.

 

“My grandfather was a Texas Ranger,” Hackberry said. “He and some of his friends went on a raid into Mexico after Pancho Villa crossed the river and killed a bunch of civilians. My grandfather and his friends attacked a train loaded with Villa’s soldiers. The Texans had captured a Lewis gun. They caught a bunch of those poor devils in an uncoupled cattle car that was rolling downhill. My grandfather said their blood was blowing out of the boards and fanning in the wind like the discharge from a chute in a slaughterhouse.”

 

“I don’t get your point.”

 

“My grandfather was an honest lawman. He did some things that bothered his conscience, but you don’t judge a person by one episode or event in his life, and you don’t judge people categorically, either. Ethan Riser is a good man.”

 

“You really were an ACLU lawyer.”

 

Hackberry removed his hat and ran a comb through his hair. He could feel his gun belt biting into his hips. “Put it on pause, will you, Pam?”

 

“Say again?”

 

“That must be the convenience store yonder,” he said.

 

They parked and introduced themselves to the assistant manager. He had the manic look and behavioral manner of someone who might have spent his life inside a windstorm. His description of Bobby Lee Motree was not helpful. “You tend to forget what people look like when they’re waving a pistol in your face,” he said.

 

“You don’t happen to have the surveillance tape, do you?” Hackberry said.

 

“Them FBI people took it.”

 

“Have you ever seen Pete Flores?”

 

“Who?”

 

“The kid who left the beer on your counter and took off. The one with the long scar on his face.”

 

“No, sir. I can tell you one thing about him, though. That boy can flat haul ass.”

 

“How’s that?”

 

“After the weirdo with the gun drove off, I went out back looking for the kid with the scar. I saw him there on the other side of the road in the moonlight, his shirttail flying, heading due north. He went over the top of a rail fence like he had wings on.”

 

“Did you get the weirdo’s tag number?” Hackberry asked.

 

“There was mud smeared on it.” The assistant manager lifted up a baseball bat and dropped it on top of the counter. “The next time I see that guy, I’m gonna park his head over Yellow House Peak. Them FBI people are gonna be hauling off a man with no head.”

 

Hackberry and Pam got back in the cruiser, the air conditioner running, the sun white and straight overhead. “Where to?” Pam asked.

 

“Danny Boy Lorca said Pete told him he’d met a guy at an A.A. meeting who tried to kill him,” Hackberry said. “How many A.A. meetings are held on a given night in a rural area like this?”

 

“Not many. Maybe one or two,” she said.

 

“You ever attend one?”

 

“My mother did.”

 

“Let’s go back to that last town.”

 

She pulled out on the road, blowing gravel off the back tires. “I’ve never seen you drink,” she said.

 

“What about it?”

 

“I thought maybe you went to A.A. meetings at one time or another.”

 

“No, I just don’t drink anymore. When people ask about it, that’s what I tell them. ‘I used to drink, but I don’t anymore.’”

 

She looked across the seat at him, her eyes unreadable behind her shades. “Why’d you quit?”

 

There was a taste like pennies in his saliva. He rolled down the window and spat. He wiped his mouth and stared at the countryside sweeping by, the grass on the hillsides brown and bending in the wind, a cattle truck parked by a turnout where a historical marker stood, the cattle bawling in the heat. “I quit because I didn’t want to be like other members of my family.”

 

“Alcoholism runs in your family?”

 

“No, killing people does,” he said. “They killed Indians, Mexicans, gunmen, Kaiser Bill’s heinies—anyone they could get in their sights, they blew the hell out of them.”

 

She concentrated on the road and was silent a long time.

 

At the intersection of the county and state highways, Hackberry used a pay phone to call the regional hotline of Alcoholics Anonymous. The woman who answered said that only one meeting was available in the area on the night Hackberry asked about. It was held in a white frame church house just north of the intersection where Hackberry was calling from.

 

“There’re some early-bird meetings. I also have a schedule for Terlingua and Marathon, if you don’t mind driving a piece,” she said.

 

“No, I think the one at the church is the one I’m interested in. That’s the only one here’bouts on Tuesday nights, right?”

 

“That’s right.”

 

“Who can I talk to there?”

 

“Anybody at the meeting.”

 

“No, I mean right now.”

 

“You think you’re going to drink?”

 

“I’m an officer of the law, and I’m investigating a multiple homicide…Hello?”

 

“I have to think about what you just told me.” There was a short pause. “I finished thinking about it. Thanks for calling the A.A. hotline. Goodbye.” The line went dead.

 

Hackberry and Pam drove through town and found the church on the east side of the state highway. A rail of a man was hammering shingles on the roof, his denim shirt buttoned at the throat and neck against the heat, his armpits dark with sweat, his knees spread like a clamp on the roof’s spine. Pam and Hackberry got out of the cruiser and looked up at him, trying to shield their eyes from the glare.

 

“You the pastor?” Hackberry called up.

 

“I was when I got up this morning.”

 

“I’m looking for a young man named Pete Flores. Maybe he attended an A.A. meeting here.”

 

“I wouldn’t know,” the man said.

 

“Why not?” Hackberry said.

 

“They don’t use last names.”

 

“I’ve got a picture of him. Mind if I come up?”

 

“Doubt if it’ll do any good.”

 

“Why not?”

 

“I let them use the building, but I don’t go to their meetings, so I’m not real sure who attends them.”

 

“Give me the picture, Hack. I’ll take it up,” Pam said.

 

“I’m fine,” Hackberry said. He mounted the ladder and climbed steadily up the rungs, his neutral expression held carefully in place as a bright red fire blossomed in the small of his back. He worked the photo Ethan Riser had given him out of his pocket and handed it to the pastor. The pastor studied it, his uncut hair stuck like wet black points on the back of his neck.

 

“No, sir, I never saw this fellow at my church. What’d he do?” said the pastor.

 

“He’s a witness to a crime and may be in danger.”

 

The pastor looked at the photo again, then handed it back to Hackberry without comment.

 

“You said you never saw him at your church.”

 

“No, sir, I haven’t.”

 

“But maybe you saw him somewhere else.”

 

The pastor took the photo back, his face starting to show the strain of squatting on the roof’s slant. “Maybe I saw a kid in a filling station or up at the café. He wasn’t in uniform, though. He had a scar on his face. It looked like a long drop of pink wax running down his skin. That’s why I remember him. But the soldier in this picture don’t have a scar.”

 

“Think hard, Reverend. Where’d you see him?”

 

“I just don’t recall. I’m sorry.”

 

“You ever hear of a woman here’bouts who likes to sing country spirituals in nightclubs or beer joints?”

 

“No, sir. But you must do mighty interesting work. Let me know if you ever want to trade jobs.”

 

 

BOBBY LEE’S FRUSTRATION with events and with Liam’s weather-vane personality was starting to reach critical mass. It was Liam’s truck that had broken down on the state highway, forcing them to call for a tow to a shithole with one restaurant and one mechanic’s shop. It was Liam who had left vinyl garbage bags spread all over the bottom of his camper shell, causing the mechanic to ask if they were trying to get a jump on deer season. It was Liam who had droned on and on about how Bobby Lee had screwed up at the convenience store, his eyes as self-righteous and mindless as a moron’s, his tombstone teeth too large for his mouth.

 

They were in a booth at the back of the restaurant, Liam’s gym bag by his foot, a change of clothes and a shaving kit and the cut-down shotgun zipped inside. They were waiting for the mechanic’s brother-in-law to drive them forty-five miles to the motel where Bobby Lee’s SUV was parked under the porte cochere.

 

“If you hadn’t pulled your piece on a nerd in a convenience store, we wouldn’t be having this problem,” Liam said. “We could be using your vehicle instead of mine. I told you I had transmission trouble last week. You can’t get information out of a nerd without sticking a gun up his nose?”

 

“I didn’t pull my piece. You got that? It fell out of my belt. But I didn’t pull it deliberately, Liam. How about giving it a rest?”

 

The waitress brought their food and poured more water in their glasses. They stopped speaking while she tended to the table. She set a basket with packaged crackers between them, then retrieved salt and pepper shakers from another table and set them by the basket. Bobby Lee and Liam waited. She loomed over them, her big shoulders and wide hips and industrial-strength perfume somehow shrinking the space around them.

 

“You guys want anything else?” she asked.

 

“No, we’re good here,” Bobby Lee said.

 

“I need some steak sauce,” Liam said.

 

Bobby Lee smoldered in silence until the waitress brought a bottle of A.1. to the table and went away.

 

“What are you so heated up about?” Liam asked.

 

“Take off that hat.”

 

“What for?”

 

“It’s stupid. It looks like a woman’s.”

 

Liam stuffed a complete slice of white bread in his mouth and chewed it with his mouth open.

 

“We got to have an understanding, Liam. I trusted you when I told you maybe Preacher has got to go off the board. I got to know we’re on the same wavelength here. I can’t have you bitching me out all the time.”

 

“You don’t like to hear the truth, that’s your problem.”

 

Outside, the sun was red on the horizon, dust rising off the hills in a brown nimbus. Bobby Lee felt as though someone had stuck a metal key into the base of his neck and wound up his nerve endings as tightly as piano wire. He started to eat, then set down his fork and stared emptily at his plate.

 

He had played the whole deal wrong. Liam was not to be trusted or confided in; he was a whiner who scapegoated his friends. But if Liam wasn’t a bud, who was? Who was the purist in their midst? Who was the guy who did the work less for the money than for the strange visions that seemed to crawl across the backs of his eyelids?

 

“Looks like you’re doing some heavy thinking,” Liam said.

 

“You think I blew it for us at the convenience store, that I should have handled it different, that I should have let the soldier take off on me and not even go inside.”

 

“I thought you said to drop it.”

 

“I just want you to put yourself in my place and tell me what you would have done, Liam.”

 

“When this is over, we’ll both get laid. I got a couple of discount coupons from Screw magazine.” Liam waited, grinning idiotically.

 

Bobby Lee looked into Liam’s eyes. They were a translucent blue, their moral vacuity creating its own kind of brilliance, the pupils like dead insects trapped under glass. They were the eyes of a man to whom there was no significant reality beyond the tips of his fingers.

 

“When this is over, I’m going back to college. My sister has a house in Lauderdale. I’m gonna take her kids to Orlando,” Bobby Lee said.

 

“Everybody says that, but it doesn’t work that way. Can you see yourself selling shoes to old guys in Miami Beach with smelly socks?”

 

“I’m studying to be an interior decorator.”

 

But Liam wasn’t listening. His attention had shifted to a man and woman who were sitting at a booth by the entrance to the restaurant.

 

“Don’t turn around yet, but check out John Wayne over there,” he said. “I’m not kidding. From the side, he looks just like Wayne. He’s even got Calamity Jane with him. She must be his traveling punch. Who said western movies are dead?”

 

 

 

 

 

14

 

THE AIR-CONDITIONING WAS turned up full-blast in the restaurant, fogging the bottoms of the windows. Hackberry and Pam had taken a booth close to the front counter. Family people were eating dinner in the back section, which was separated from the front by a latticework partition decorated along the top with plastic flowers. A church bus pulled up in front, and a throng of preteens came in and piled into the empty booths. Workingmen were drinking beer at the counter and watching a baseball game on a flat-screen television high on the wall. As the sun set on the hills, the interior of the restaurant was lit with a warm red glow that did not subtract from its refrigerated coolness but only added to its atmosphere of goodwill and end-of-the-day familiality.

 

Hackberry put his hand over his mouth and yawned and stared at the menu, the words on it swimming into a blur.

 

“How’s your back?” Pam asked.

 

“Who said anything about my back?”

 

“Back pain saps a person’s energy. It shows in a person’s face.”

 

“What shows in my face are too many birthdays.”

 

“Do you know we covered a hundred square miles of Texas today?”

 

“We might do twice that tonight.”

 

“I think they’re in Mexico.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because that’s what I would do.”

 

“Vikki Gaddis might. Pete won’t.”

 

The waitress returned to the table and took their order and went away. Pam sat stiffly in the booth, her shoulders pushed against the backrest. “Vikki will blow Dodge, but Pete will hang tough? Because that’s what swinging dicks do? Girls aren’t swinging dicks, you’re saying?”

 

“Pete is one of those unfortunate guys who will never accept the possibility that their country will use them up and then spit them out like yesterday’s bubble gum. Can you stop using that language?”

 

She scratched at a place between her eyes and looked out the window, her badge glinting on her khaki shirt.

 

As they waited for their food, Hackberry felt the day catch up to him like a hungry animal released from its leash. He ate three aspirin for the pain in his back and gazed idly at the people in the restaurant. Except for the television set on the wall and the refrigerated air, the scene could have been lifted out of the year 1945. The people were the same, their fundamentalist religious views and abiding sense of patriotism unchanged, their blue-collar egalitarian instincts undefined and vague and sometimes bordering on nativism but immediately recognizable to an outsider as inveterately Jacksonian. It was the America of Whitman and Jack Kerouac, of Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis, an improbable confluence of contradictions that had become Homeric without its participants realizing their importance to the world.

 

If someone were to ask Hackberry Holland what his childhood had been like, he would answer the question with an image rather than an explanation. He would describe a Saturday-afternoon trip to town to watch a minor-league baseball game with his father the history professor. The courthouse square was bordered by elevated sidewalks inset with tethering rings that bled rust like a ship’s scuppers. A khaki-painted World War I howitzer stood in the shadows of a giant oak on the courthouse lawn. The dime store, a two-story brick building fronted with a wood colonnade, featured a popcorn machine that overflowed onto the concrete like puffed white grain swelling out of a silo. The adjacent residential neighborhood was lined with shade trees and bungalows and nineteenth-century white frame houses whose galleries were sunken in the middle and hung with porch swings, and each afternoon at five P.M. the paperboy whizzed down the sidewalk on a bicycle and smacked the newspaper against each set of steps with the eye of a marksman.

 

But more important in the memory of that long-ago American moment was the texture of light after a sun shower. It was gold and soft and stained with the contagious deep green of the trees and lawns. The rainbow that seemed to dip out of the sky into the ball diamond somehow confirmed one’s foolish faith that both the season and one’s youth were eternal.

 

Now Hackberry dipped a taco chip in a bowl of red sauce and put it in his mouth. He picked up his glass of iced tea and drank from it. A bunch of the kids from the church bus brushed by the table on their way to the restroom. Then they were gone, and he found himself looking through the latticework partition at the face of a man who seemed familiar but not to the degree that Hackberry could place him. The man wore a gardener’s hat, the wide brim shadowing his features. The waitress working the back of the restaurant kept moving back and forth behind the latticework, further obstructing Hackberry’s view.

 

Hackberry pinched the fatigue out of his eyes and straightened his spine.

 

“You developed back trouble from your time as a POW?” Pam said.

 

“I guess you could say I didn’t have it when I went to Korea, but I did when I returned.”

 

“You draw disability?”

 

“I didn’t apply for it.”

 

“Why is it I knew you were going to say that?”

 

“Because you’re omniscient.”

 

He was grinning. She propped her knuckles under her chin and tried not to laugh, then gave it up, her eyes crinkling, holding on his, a smile spreading across her face.

 

The waitress brought their Mexican dinners to the table, gripping each plate with a damp dish towel, the heat and steam rising into her eyes. “Be careful. It’s real hot,” she said.

 

 

LIAM WAS ORDERING dessert, his eyes doing a breast inventory as the waitress leaned over and picked up his dirty dishes.

 

“Want a little R and R across the border tonight?” he said after the waitress was gone.

 

“What I can’t understand is why we haven’t been able to find the motel. It’s the Siesta motel, right?” Bobby Lee said, ignoring Liam’s suggestion.

 

“I looked on the Internet. There’s no such motel down here. You want to get laid tonight or not?”

 

“I want to find the soldier and his squeeze and do our job and go home.”

 

“That’s when we take care of Preacher?”

 

“I didn’t say that.”

 

“Maybe it’s the smart move.”

 

“In what way?”

 

“He and Hugo always get the high end on payday. Why should a guy get extra pay because he’s crazy?”

 

“Preacher is smart in a different way. That doesn’t mean he’s crazy,” Bobby Lee said.

 

“Having second thoughts?”

 

“We’re soldiers. We do what we’re told,” Bobby Lee said, picking up the salt shaker and looking at it.

 

“You’re lots of things, Bobby Lee, but soldier isn’t one of them.”

 

“Want to explain that?”

 

“What did you say you’re studying? Interior design? I bet you’ll be good at it.”

 

Bobby Lee put a matchstick in his mouth. “I got to take a drain,” he said. He went into the restroom and soaped his hands and forearms and rinsed his skin clean and cupped cold water into his face with both hands. He had to swallow when he looked into the mirror. His bald spot seemed to be spreading outward. His eyebrows formed a single black line across his brow, giving his face a crunched look, as though a great weight were pressing down on his head. His throat was starting to sag under his chin; his unshaved jaw had specks of gray. He was twenty-eight years old.

 

This whole gig stank. Worse, he’d allied himself with Liam Eriksson, who had just mocked him to his face. Bobby Lee sat on the stool inside the toilet stall and checked the bars on his cell phone, then punched in Preacher’s number.

 

“Yeah?” Jack’s voice said.

 

“Jack, glad you’re there, man.”

 

“What’s going on, Bobby Lee?”

 

“Where are you?”

 

“Like the Beach Boys say, ‘I get—’”

 

“Yeah, I know, you get around.”

 

“Got some news for me?” Jack said, undisturbed by Bobby Lee’s impatience.

 

“Not exactly.”

 

“What did you call me for?”

 

“Just checking in.”

 

“Having trouble with Liam?”

 

“How’d you know?”

 

“You got a lot of talent, Bobby Lee. Of the seven deadly sins, envy is the only one that doesn’t have a trade-off.”

 

“You lost me.”

 

“Lust, hate, covetousness, pride, sloth, greed, and gluttony bring with them an appreciable degree of pleasure. But an envious man gets no relief. It’s like a guy drinking liquid Drano because another guy has wine on his table. One thing you can be sure about, though. The man who envies you will eventually blindside you proper.”

 

“Liam envies me?”

 

“What does a fellow like me know?”

 

“A lot. You know a lot, Jack.”

 

“Something going on, boy?”

 

“Nothing I can’t take care of.”

 

“That’s the way to talk.”

 

“See you, Jack.”

 

Bobby Lee closed his cell phone and stared at the back of the stall door. It was patinaed with drawings of genitalia that had been scratched into the paint. For just a moment he wondered if the drawings were not an accurate representation of the thoughts that went on inside Liam’s head. How could he have been willing to throw in his lot with a bozo like Liam and betray a pro like Jack? Jack might be a religious head case, but he was no Judas, and Hugo and Liam were. Taking off Artie Rooney’s finger seemed like an extreme measure, but at least with Jack, you always knew where you stood.

 

So where did that leave Bobby Lee?

 

Answer: playing it cool, gliding on that old-time R&B. A little time would pass and all this would be over and he’d be bone-fishing in the Keys, eating fried conch, drinking St. Pauli Girl beer, and watching a molten-red sun slip into the waters off Mallory Square.

 

As he started back toward the booth, he glanced through the latticework partition that separated him from the front of the restaurant. Suddenly, he realized he was looking at the couple Liam had told him to turn around and check out. The woman wore jeans and a khaki shirt and a badge on her breast. The tall man Liam had said looked like John Wayne was sitting across from her in the booth, his Stetson crown-down on the seat. He was cutting up his food, his profile silhouetted against the sunset. Bobby Lee could also see the holstered white-handled blue-black thumb-buster revolver that hung from his gun belt.

 

Bobby Lee also had no doubt who the tall man was. He had seen both him and the female deputy next to the diner where Vikki Gaddis had worked, with a guy who was probably a fed, maybe even the one Preacher capped later, all three of them talking to the owner of the diner, Junior Whatever in handcuffs. The tall guy’s name was Holland, that was it, Holland, the county sheriff, a big wheel in Dipshit, Texas, and the woman was his deputy, and now the two of them were right here, maybe forty feet from Bobby Lee and Liam’s booth.

 

Bobby Lee went straight back into the restroom, into the stall, and punched in Liam’s number.

 

“You fall in the commode?” Liam said.

 

“The guy in the booth, the one you said looked like John Wayne, that’s the sheriff.”

 

“Sheriff?”

 

“You couldn’t see his gun belt below the table. His name’s Holland. I saw him questioning Vikki Gaddis’s boss, the guy from the diner. The deputy was there, too. With a guy who looked like a fed. I think the fed was the guy Preacher smoked in that motel in San Antonio. I saw his picture in the paper.” Bobby Lee could hear Liam breathing into the cell phone.

 

“They haven’t made us,” Liam said. “We walk out together, calm and cool and collected.”

 

“The cash register is right by their fucking booth.”

 

“Create a distraction.”

 

“Hang my dick out the men’s room door?”

 

“You have matches?”

 

Bobby Lee pulled the wet kitchen match out of his mouth. “What about it?”

 

“Start a fire in the wastebasket.”

 

“Look, Liam—”

 

“Do it,” Liam said, and broke the connection.

 

Not good, Bobby Lee thought, his heart starting to seize up in his chest.

 

Another man came into the restroom and began relieving himself in the urinal, making a lot of noise. Bobby Lee combed his hair in the mirror until the man had finished and gone back outside. Bobby Lee looked at the wads of discarded paper towels overflowing from the wastebasket. The paper was damp and would smolder like leaves burning on a fall day.

 

But for what? To bring emergency vehicles and firemen and more cops to the restaurant while Liam and Bobby Lee tried to walk discreetly away, with no vehicle, no way to get out of town, carrying a gym bag, with half the people in the restaurant remembering they had seen Bobby Lee in the can before smoke started gushing through the door?

 

Right.

 

Bobby Lee went out the back exit into the warmth of the evening, into the smell of the cooling land, into the touch of a raindrop on his brow.

 

Liam was on his own, he told himself. Better that Liam pay the check and walk out quietly rather than the two of them try it together, doubling their chances of recognition. What was wrong with that? Only Liam would recommend starting a fire in a confined situation in order not to draw attention.

 

Bobby Lee walked around the side of the building, angling toward the mechanic’s shed across the street, glancing sideways through the window at the booth where the sheriff and his deputy were still eating. He saw the sheriff stand up, pick up his hat, then replace it on the seat. The sheriff said something to the deputy, his expression pleasant, unhurried. Then he walked behind a bunch of kids who were headed toward the restroom.

 

Bobby Lee didn’t think twice about the opportunity that had just been presented to him. He flipped open his cell phone and punched redial, the adrenaline pounding in his ears, his heart swelling against his ribs.

 

“What now?” Liam said.

 

“The sheriff just made you. He’s headed for your booth. Get the fuck out of there,” he said. Bobby Lee clicked off his cell phone, the chimes ringing in his closed palm. He crossed the road hurriedly in the shadow of a striated mesa, an acrid stench like the smell of a tar pot rising into his face.

 

 

AT LEAST EIGHT or nine boys had gotten up at once and headed toward the men’s room, walking ahead of Hackberry, causing him to pause between a booth and a table while a youth minister tried to form the boys into a line. Hackberry glanced back at his booth. Pam had gotten up from the seat and picked up the check and was computing the tip, counting out four dollar bills and some change on the tabletop. She looked pretty, framed against the window, the tips of her hair touched by the late sun, her shoulders muscular inside her khaki shirt, her bottom a little too wide for her jeans, her chrome-plated .357 high up on the right hip. When she realized he was staring at her, her cheeks colored and her expression took on an uncharacteristic vulnerability.

 

He winked and gave her the thumbs-up sign, but if asked, he couldn’t have explained why.

 

The events and the images of the next few moments were kaleidoscopic in nature and seemed to lack causality, coherence, or rational sequence. The young boys crowding into the men’s room were still unruly, but in the innocent way that all boys on a cross-country trip were unruly. An apple-cheeked bovine man in a western suit the color of tin was ladling meatballs off a platter onto the plates of his grandchildren. A workingman at the counter wiped beer foam off his chin and asked the waitress to change the television channel. A woman held up her water glass against the light and examined a dead fly floating in it. A minister in a lavender Roman collar was eating a steak, dipping each bite into a pool of ketchup that he had sprinkled with black pepper; his wife was telling him he was eating his food too fast. At the dessert bar, a teenage girl was upset because she had dropped and sunk the dipper in a container of hot fudge.

 

And Hackberry Holland, walking toward the restroom, squeezing between the diners, saw in the corner of his eye the man in the straw gardener’s hat wrestling open a gym bag by his foot, ripping a thirty-inch-long object loose from a tangle of underwear and shirts and socks. As Hackberry stared in disbelief, as though watching a slow-motion film that had nothing to do with reality, he saw that the object was a cut-down pump shotgun, the hacksawed steel still bright from the cut, loose shotgun shells spilling out of the gym bag onto the floor.

 

His next thoughts flashed across his mind in under a second, in the way that a BB arches into space and disappears:

 

Where had he seen the man’s face?

 

In a photo, maybe.

 

Except the face in the photo had an orange beard of the kind a Nordic seafarer might have.

 

Was this how it ended, with a flash from a shotgun muzzle and a burst of light inside the skull before the report ever reached his ears?

 

Hackberry tilted a table upward, spilling food and plates onto the floor, and flung it at the man in the gardener’s hat, who was raising the shotgun toward Hackberry’s chest. The first discharge blew a shower of splinters and shreds of red-and-white-checkered cloth all over Hackberry’s shoulder and left arm and down the side of his pants.

 

No one in the room moved. Instead, they looked stunned, shrunken, frozen inside clear plastic, as though a sonic boom had temporarily deafened them. Hackberry got his revolver free of its holster just as he heard the shooter jack another round into the chamber of his weapon. The second blast went high, over the top of the table. Glass caved out of the front window into the parking lot. Only then did people begin screaming, some trying to hide under tables or behind the booths. Someone kicked open a fire exit, setting off an alarm. The boys from the church bus had piled over one another into the men’s room, their faces stretched tight with fear.

 

Hackberry was crouched behind the table and a wood post, a bent fork or spoon biting through the cloth of his trousers into his knee. He pointed his revolver through a space between the table and the wood post and let off two rounds in the direction of the shooter, the .45’s frame kicking upward in his hand. He fired again and saw stuffing from a booth floating like chicken feathers in the gloom. He heard the shooter work the pump on his twelve-gauge and a spent shell casing clink and roll on a hard surface.

 

Hackberry hung on to the post and pulled himself erect, a tree of pain blooming in his back. He ran for the cover provided by the last booth in the shooter’s row, letting off one round blindly at the shooter, his boots as loud as stones striking a wood surface.

 

The room became absolutely quiet, as though the air had been sucked out of it. Hackberry rose in a half-crouch and pointed his revolver at the place where the shooter had been. The gym bag was still on the floor. The shooter and the shotgun shells he had spilled from the bag were gone.

 

Hackberry straightened his back, his weapon still pointed in front of him, the hammer on full cock, the sight on the tip of the barrel trembling slightly with the tension of his grip on the frame. He glanced over his shoulder. Where was Pam? The window behind her booth was blown out, one vinyl seat of the booth and the wedges of glass protrud ing from the window frame painted with red splatter. Hackberry wiped his mouth with his free hand and widened his eyes and tried to think clearly. What was the formal name for the situation? Barricaded suspect? The clinical language didn’t come close to describing the reality.

 

“Give it up, partner. Nobody has to die here,” he said.

 

Except for a cough, the muted crying of a woman, and a sound like somebody prizing open a stuck window, the room remained silent.

 

“He went in the girls’ bathroom,” a burr-headed boy in short pants said from under a table.

 

A latticework alcove had been built around the entrance to the women’s restroom, obscuring the doorway. Hackberry walked at an angle toward the door, silverware and broken glass crunching under his boots, his eyes locked on the door through the spaces in the latticework.

 

Had Pam been hit? The second shotgun blast had traveled right across the booth where she had been counting out the tip on the tabletop.

 

“He’s got a little girl in there. Don’t go in there,” a voice said from behind an overturned chair.

 

It was the minister in the lavender Roman collar. He was bleeding from his cheek and neck; the heel of one hand sparkled with ground glass. His wife was on her knees beside him, gripping his arm, her body rounded into a ball.

 

“You saw him?” Hackberry asked.

 

“He grabbed the girl by the neck and pulled her with him,” the minister said.

 

“Can you get to the front door?” Hackberry asked.

 

“Yes, sir,” the minister replied. “I can.”

 

“When I start into the women’s room, you stand up and take as many people with you as you can. Can you do that for me, sir?”

 

“You’re going in there?”

 

“We’ll bring the girl out of there safely. When you get out front, find my deputy. Her name is Pam Tibbs. Tell her exactly what you told me.”

 

“Who’s the man with the shotgun?”

 

“His name is Eriksson. My deputy will recognize the name. Better get going, Reverend.”

 

“You said ‘we.’”

 

“Sir?”

 

“You said ‘we’ll’ get the girl out. Who’s ‘we’?”

 

A moment later, Hackberry closed the distance between himself and the doorway while the minister and his wife began herding a group of twelve to fifteen people toward the front of the restaurant. Hackberry pressed his back against the wall, his revolver pointed upward. He could see the red sunset flowing through the destroyed front window and hear sirens in the distance. “Hear that sound, Eriksson?” he said.

 

There was a beat. “How’d you make me?”

 

“I didn’t. If you hadn’t shot at me, I would have walked past you.”

 

“You’re lying.”

 

“Why would I lie?”

 

Eriksson had no answer. Hackberry remembered that originally, a second man had been sitting in Eriksson’s booth, someone who had probably blown Dodge and left Eriksson to take the fall for both of them.

 

“Your partner screwed you, bub,” Hackberry said. “Why take his weight? Send the little girl out, and it’ll be taken into consideration. You did security work in Iraq. That’ll be a factor, too. Get a good defense lawyer, and with the right kind of post-traumatic-stress-disorder mambo, you might even skate. It beats eating a two-hundred-and-thirty-grain round from a forty-five.”

 

“You’re gonna drive me out of this county. You’re gonna get me into Mexico. Or I waste the girl.”

 

“Maybe I can arrange that.”

 

“No, you don’t arrange anything. You do it.”

 

“How do you want to work that? Want me to bring a vehicle around back and load you and the girl up?”

 

“No, you put your piece on the floor, slide it to me with your foot, then you walk in with your fingers laced on the back of your neck.”

 

“That doesn’t sound workable, Eriksson.”

 

“Maybe you’d like to see her brains floating in the toilet bowl.”

 

Hackberry heard the voice of a little girl crying. Or rather, the voice of a child whose fear had gone beyond crying into a series of hiccups and constrictions of air in the nostrils and throat, like someone having a seizure. “Be stand-up. Let her go, partner,” Hackberry said.

 

“You want her? No problem. Kick the piece inside and come in after it. Otherwise, all bets are off. Think I’m jerking your johnson? Stick your head in here.”

 

Hackberry could hear a dronelike whirring sound in his ears, one he associated with wind blowing out of a blue-black sky across miles of snowy hills and ice splintering under the weight of thousands of advancing Chinese infantry.

 

“I’ll make it easy for you,” Eriksson said. He opened the bathroom door slightly, allowing Hackberry a brief view of the restroom’s interior. Eriksson was holding the little girl by the neck of her T-shirt while he screwed the cut-down pump into her shoulder bone. “I got nothing to lose,” he said.

 

“I believe you,” Hackberry said. He stepped backward, opened the cylinder to his revolver, and dumped his four spent rounds and two unfired ones into his palm and threw them clattering across the floor. He squatted, placed his revolver on the floor, and shoved it with one foot into the restroom.

 

“Walk in behind it,” Eriksson said.

 

Then Hackberry was in the enclosure with him, staring into the muzzle of the shotgun.

 

“Go on, little girl,” Eriksson said. “I wasn’t gonna hurt you. I just had to say that.”

 

“Yes, you were. You hurt me bad,” she said, cupping her hand to one shoulder.

 

“Get out of here, you little skank,” Eriksson said. He bolted the door behind her, his attention never leaving Hackberry. “Slickered you, motherfucker.”

 

Hackberry let his eyes become dead and unseeing, let them drift off Eriksson’s face to a spot on the wall. Or perhaps to a patch of red sky that should not have been visible inside a women’s restroom.

 

“Did you hear me?” Eriksson asked.

 

“You’re a smart one,” Hackberry said.

 

“You got that right.”

 

Then Eriksson seemed to realize something was wrong in his environment, that he had not seen or taken note of something, that in spite of his years of vanquishing his enemies and shaving the odds and orchestrating events so that he always walked away a winner, something had gone terribly wrong. “Get on your cell,” he said.

 

“What for?”

 

“What do you mean, what for? Tell your people to stay away from the building. Tell them to bring a car to the back.”

 

“You’re not getting a car.”

 

“I’ll get a car or you’ll catch the bus, whichever you prefer.”

 

“You’re leaving here in cuffs.”

 

Eriksson took his own cell phone from his pocket and tossed it to Hackberry. It bounced off Hackberry’s chest and fell to the floor. “Pick it up and make the call, Sheriff,” Eriksson said.

 

“I said you’re a smart one. A smart man is a listener. Listen to what I say and don’t turn around. No, no, keep your eyes on me. You do not want to turn around.”

 

“Are you senile? I’m holding a shotgun in your face.”

 

“If you turn around, you’ll lose your head,” Hackberry said. “Look straight ahead. Kneel down and place your weapon on the floor.”

 

Eriksson’s lips parted. They were dry, caked slightly with mucus. His hands tightened on the twelve-gauge. He crimped his lips, wetting them before he spoke. “This has got a hair trigger. No matter what happens, you’re gonna have a throat full of bucks.”

 

“Believe what I tell you, Eriksson. Don’t move, don’t back away from me, don’t turn around. If you do any of those things, you will die. I give you my word on that. No one wants to see that happen to you. But it’s your choice. You lower your weapon by the barrel with your left hand and place it on the floor and step away from it.”

 

“I think you’re a mighty good actor, Sheriff, but I also think you’re full of shit.”

 

Eriksson stepped backward, out of Hackberry’s reach, turning his line of vision toward a frosted back window that had been wedged open with a tire tool. For just a moment, the aim of his shotgun angled away from Hackberry’s chest. Outside, a huge cloud of orange dust gusted across the sun.

 

Eriksson’s translucent blue eyes were charged with light. His face seemed to twitch just before he saw Pam Tibbs standing slightly beyond the window ledge, her khaki shirt speckled with taco sauce, her chrome-plated revolver aimed in front of her with both hands. That was when she squeezed the trigger, driving a soft-nosed .357 round through one side of his head and out the other.

 

 

 

 

 

15

 

PREACHER JACK COLLINS lived at several residences, none of which carried his name on a deed or a rental agreement. One of them was located south of old Highway 90, within sight of the Del Norte Mountains, twenty miles deep into broken desert terrain that looked composed of crushed stone knitted together by the roots of scrub brush and mesquite and cactus that bloomed with bloodred flowers.

 

On the mountain behind his one-bedroom stucco house was a series of ancient telegraph poles whose wires hung on the ground like strands of black spaghetti. Behind the poles was the gaping opening of a rock-walled root cellar that had been shored up with wood posts and crossbeams that either had collapsed or that insects had reduced to the weightless density of cork.

 

One starlit night, Preacher had sat in the entrance and watched the desert take on the gray and blue and silver illumination that it seemed to draw down into itself from the sky, as though the sky and the earth worked together to both cool the desert and turn it into a pewter artwork. Then he had realized that a breeze was blowing into his face and flowing over his arms and shoulders and into the excavation at his back. The root cellar was not a root cellar after all. Nor was it a mine. It was a cave, deep and spiraling, one that had probably been formed by water millions of years ago, one that led to the other side of the mountain or a cavern far beneath it. Perhaps early settlers had framed up the walls and ceilings with timbered support, but Preacher was convinced no human hand had contributed to its creation.

 

He spent many evenings sitting on a metal chair in front of the cave, wondering if the wind echoing inside it spoke to him and if indeed the desert was not an ancient vineyard made sterile by man’s infidelity to Yahweh. Paradoxically, that thought comforted him. The sinfulness of the world somehow gave him a greater connection to it, made him more acceptable in his own eyes and simultaneously reduced the level of his own iniquity. Except Preacher had one problem he could not rid himself of: He had filled the ground with the bodies of Oriental women and watched while Hugo’s bulldozer had scalloped up the earth and pushed the backfill over them. He told himself he had been acting as an agent of God, purging the world of an abomination, perhaps even preempting the moral decay and diseases that had awaited them as prostitutes on the streets of a corrupt nation.

 

But Preacher was having little success with his rationalization for the mass execution of the helpless and terrified women who waited for him nightly in his sleep. When Bobby Lee Motree arrived at Preacher’s house in the desert, Jack was delighted by the distraction.

 

He set up two metal chairs in front of the cave and opened cold bottles of Coca-Cola for the two of them and watched while Bobby Lee drank his empty, his throat pumping, one eye fastened curiously on Preacher. Bobby Lee was wearing a muscle shirt and his top hat and his brown jeans that had yellow canvas squares stitched on the knees. He was full of confidence and cheer at being back in Preacher’s good graces; he unloaded his burden, telling Preacher how Liam got popped by the female deputy sheriff in the restaurant and how that rat bastard Artie Rooney had told Hugo to smoke everybody—the soldier and his girl, the Jewish guy and his wife and maybe even the Jewish guy’s kids, and finally, Preacher himself.

 

“If you cain’t trust Artie Rooney, who can you trust? The standards of our profession have seriously declined,” Preacher said.

 

“I was thinking the same thing,” Bobby Lee replied.

 

“That was a joke.”

 

“Yeah, I knew that. I can always tell when you’re joking.”

 

Preacher let the subject slide. “Tell me again how this Holland fellow spotted Liam. I didn’t quite get all that.”

 

“I guess he recognized him, that’s all.”

 

“Even though Liam had shaved off his beard and was sitting in a crowded restaurant and the sheriff had never seen him and had no reason to be looking for Liam there?”

 

“Search me. Weird stuff happens.”

 

“But the sheriff didn’t make you?”

 

“I was in the can, taking a dump.”

 

“How’d you get out during all that shooting if you were in the can?”

 

“It was a Chinese fire drill. I ran outside with the crowd.”

 

“And just strolled on off, a fellow with no car, a fellow everybody saw sitting with Liam just a few minutes earlier?”

 

“Most of them were pouring the wee-wee out of their shoes. Why should they worry about me?”

 

“Maybe you were just lucky.”

 

“I told you the way it was.”

 

“Young people believe they’re never going to die. So they’ve got confidence that old men like me don’t have. That’s where your luck comes from, Bobby Lee. Your luck is an illusion produced by an illusion.”

 

Bobby Lee’s obvious sense of discomfort was growing. He shifted in his chair and glanced at the stars and the sparkle of the desert and the greenish cast at the bottom of the sky. “Is that hole behind us one of those pioneer storage places where they kept preserves and shit?”

 

“Maybe it goes down to the center of the earth. I’m going to find out one day.”

 

“Sometimes I just can’t track what you’re saying, Jack.”

 

“My uncle was in the South Pacific. He said he dynamited a whole mountain on top of the Japs who wouldn’t surrender and were hiding in caves. He said you could hear them at night, like hundreds of bees buzzing under the ground. I bet if you put your ear to the ground, you might still hear them.”

 

“Why do you talk about stuff like that?”

 

“Because I’m doubting your truthfulness, and you’re starting to piss me off.”

 

“I wouldn’t try to put the glide on you. Give me some credit,” Bobby Lee said, his eyes round, unblinking, the pupils dilated like drops of ink in the dark.

 

“Bobby Lee, you either gave up Liam or this fellow Holland is a special kind of lawman, the kind who doesn’t quit till he staples your hide on the barn door. Which is it?”

 

“I didn’t give up Liam. He was my friend,” Bobby Lee replied, propping his hands on his knees, tilting his face up at the sky. His unshaved jaw looked as though grains of black pepper and salt had been rubbed into the pores. Preacher looked at him for a long time, until Bobby Lee’s face began to twitch and his eyes glistened. “You want to keep hurting and insulting me, go ahead and do it. I came out here to see you because you’re my friend. But all you do is run me down,” Bobby Lee said.

 

“I believe you, boy,” Preacher said.

 

Bobby Lee cleared his throat and spat. “Why do you do it?” he asked.

 

“Do what?”

 

“Our kind of work. We’re button men. We push people’s off button and shut down their motors. A pro does it for money. It’s not supposed to be personal. You’re a pro, Preacher, but with you, it’s not the money. It’s something nobody ever asks you about. Why do you do it?”

 

“Why are you asking me?”

 

“’Cause you’re the only man I could ever relate to.”

 

“You see the glow in the land? It’s the bone in the soil that does that. Inside all that alluvial soil and lava flow and sedimentary rock, there’s millions of dead things letting off energy, lighting the way for the rest of us.”

 

“Go on.”

 

Preacher picked a mosquito off his neck and squeezed it between his thumb and finger. He wiped the blood on a piece of Kleenex. “That’s all. You asked a question and I answered it.”

 

“I don’t get it. Lighting the way, what?”

 

“Don’t fret yourself, boy. I need to know everything about this fellow Holland. I want to know why he was down by Big Bend. I want to know how he recognized Liam.”

 

“I’m one guy. You got us into all this, Jack. How am I supposed to fix everything?”

 

Preacher didn’t respond. In the wind, his face looked as serene and transfixed as though it had been bathed in warm water, his lips parted slightly, his teeth showing. In his eyes was a black reflection that made even Bobby Lee swallow, as though Preacher saw a presence on the horizon that no one else did. “You’re not mad at me, are you?” Bobby Lee said, trying to smile.

 

“You? You’re like a son to me, Bobby Lee,” Preacher answered.

 

 

BOBBY LEE DROVE away from the stucco house before first light, and Preacher prepared breakfast for himself on a propane stove and ate from a tin plate on his back steps. As a red glow fingered its way across the plain from the east, Preacher mounted his crutches and worked his way down the incline toward a mesa that was still locked in shadow. He crossed the opening to an arroyo and stumped through a depression of soft baked clay that cracked and sank beneath his weight with each step he took. He thought he could see petroglyphs cut in the layered rock above his head, and he was convinced he was traversing an alluvial flume that probably had irrigated verdant fields when an agrarian society had lived in harmony with the animals and a knife blade hammered out of primitive iron drew no blood from them or the people who had been sent to dwell east of Eden.

 

But Preacher Jack’s thoughts about a riparian paradise brought him no peace. When he looked behind him, the funnel-shaped indentations of his crutches in the dried-out riverbed reminded him of coyote tracks. Even the drag of his footprints was serpentine and indistinct, as though his very essence were that of a transient and weightless creature not worthy of full creation.

 

He wished to think of himself as a figure emblazoned retroactively on biblical legend, but the truth was otherwise. He had been a burden to his mother the day he was born, as well as a voyeur to her trysts. Now he lusted for the woman who had bested him both physically and intellectually and, in addition, had managed to pump one .38 round into his calf and one through the top of his foot. The memory of her scent, the heat in her skin and hair, the smear of her saliva and lipstick on his skin caused a swelling in his loins that made him ashamed.

 

She had not only eluded him but indirectly had gotten Liam Eriksson killed and involved a sheriff named Holland in the case, probably the kind of rural hardhead a pro didn’t mess with or, if necessary, you paid somebody else to pop.

 

Preacher turned in a circle and began thudding his way back toward his house. The hills and mesas were pink in the sunrise, the air sweet, the leaves of the mesquite brushing wetly against his trousers and wrists and hands. He wanted to breathe the morning into his chest and cast out the funk and depression that seemed to screw him into the earth, but it was no use; he had never felt so alone in his life. When he closed his eyes, he thought he saw a boxcar on a rail siding, his mother sitting on a stool inside the open door, cutting carrots and onions into a pot in which she would make a soup that she would heat on an open fire that evening. In the dream, his mother lifted her face into the sunlight and smiled at him.

 

Maybe it was time to put aside doubt and self-recrimination. A man could always become captain of his soul if he tried. A man didn’t have to accept the hand fate had dealt him. Moses didn’t. Neither did David. Wasn’t it time to continue his journey into a biblical past and to become a son of whom his mother could be proud, regardless of deeds he had performed on behalf of Artie Rooney, regardless of the nightmares in which a line of Oriental women tried to hold up their palms against the weapon that jerked sideways in his grasp, almost as though it possessed a will stronger than his own?

 

The answer lay in the Book of Esther. The story had been written twenty-three hundred years before he was born, and it had waited all these centuries for him to step inside it and take on the role that should have been his, that was now being offered to him by an invisible hand. He drew the freshness of the morning into his lungs and felt a pang in his chest as sharp as a piece of broken glass.

 

 

AT FIVE A.M. Nick Dolan woke to the sound of raindrops striking the banana fronds below his bedroom window. Briefly, he thought he was at his grandfather’s house off Napoleon Avenue in New Orleans. His grandfather had lived in a shotgun house with a peaked tin roof and ceiling-high windows flanged by ventilated shutters that could be latched during the hurricane season. There was a pecan tree in the backyard with a rope swing, and the ground under its branches was soft and moldy and green with flattened pecan husks. Even in the hottest part of the day, the yard was breezy and stayed in deep shade and the neighborhood children gathered there each summer afternoon at three o’clock to await the arrival of the Sno-Ball truck.

 

The grandfather’s house was a safe place, far different from Nick’s neighborhood in the Ninth Ward, where Artie Rooney and his brothers and their friends had made life a daily torment for Nick.

 

Nick sat on the side of the bed and cupped his hand lightly on Esther’s hip. She was turned toward the wall, her dark hair and paleness touched with the shadows the moonlight created through the window. He slipped her nightgown up her thigh and hooked his finger over the elastic of her panties and pulled them down far enough so he could kiss her lightly on the rump, something he always did before congress with her. He could feel the nocturnal intensity of her body heat through her gown and hear the steady, undisturbed sound of her breathing against the wall. The touch of his hand or his lips seemed to neither awaken nor arouse her, and he wondered if her deep slumber was feigned or if indeed she had dreamed herself back into a time when Nick had not exchanged off their happiness for success in the skin trade.

 

He put on his slippers and robe and ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts and drank a glass of cold milk in the kitchen and, at six A.M., disarmed the burglar alarm and retrieved the newspaper from the front yard. The morning was cool and damp and smelled of water sprinklers and Nick’s closely cropped St. Augustine grass that his Mexican gardeners had mowed late yesterday and the night-blooming flowers Esther constantly fertilized with coffee grounds and bat guano and fish blood and black dirt bagged from a swamp outside Lake Charles, all of which created a fecund odor Nick associated with a Louisiana graveyard that lay so deep in shadow it was never penetrated by sunlight.

 

Enough with thoughts about graveyards, he told himself, and went back in the house, the rolled newspaper fat in his hand. Nor did he wish to dwell on thoughts about schoolyard bullies and personal failure and the slippage of his fortune onto the shoals of financial ruin. He wanted to be with Esther, inside her warm embrace, inside the glow of her thighs with the smell of her hair in his face and the rhythm of her breath on his cheek. It didn’t seem a lot to ask. Why had the Fates ganged up against him? He pulled the plastic rain sheath off the newspaper and unrolled the paper on the breakfast table. The lead story dealt with the murder of a young mother and her two children. The primary suspect was an estranged boyfriend. The woman’s face looked familiar. Had she worked in his club? Yeah, it was possible. But what if she had? What was worse, the daily drudgery and humiliation and penury of a welfare recipient or knocking down some quasi-serious bucks by cavorting a few hours on a pole for the titty-baby brigade?

 

Nick knew the secret source of his discontent. His money had been his validation and his protection from the world, his payback for every time he had been shoved down on line at school or at the movie theater or chased crying into his yard by the army of street rats who claimed they were avenging the death of Jesus. Now a large part of Nick’s income was gone, and some bad ventures in commodities and mortgage companies were about to wipe out the rest of it.

 

Nick had nail wounds in his wrists and hands for other reasons. Although Esther pretended differently, she would probably never forgive him for his involvement in the deaths of the Asian women, regardless of the fact that he was almost as much a victim as they were. At least that was the way he saw it.

 

A shadow moved across the breakfast table. Nick turned in his chair, startled, knocking over his glass of milk.

 

“You want oatmeal?” Esther said.

 

“I already ate,” he replied.

 

“Why are you up so early?”

 

“Restless, I guess.”

 

“Go on back to bed.”

 

“Do you want to?”

 

“Want to what?”

 

“Sleep some more?”

 

“I’m going to fix some tea.”

 

“Maybe neither one of us got enough sleep,” Nick said, stifling a yawn. “It’s only six-twenty. We could take a little nap. Later, we can go out for breakfast. Want to do that?”

 

“My aerobics class is at seven-thirty.”

 

“Better not miss the aerobics. That’s important. They let men in there? I could use that. Jumping up and down and sweatin’ to the golden oldies or whatever.” He stiffened his fingers and jabbed them against the softness of his stomach. Then he did it again, harder.

 

She gave him a curious look and filled a pan with water and placed it on the gas burner. “Sure you don’t want some oatmeal?”

 

“I’m starting a diet. I need to reform myself physically, maybe get plastic surgery while I’m at it.”

 

Nick went upstairs and shaved and brushed his teeth and got fully dressed, putting on a tie and a white shirt, more as a statement of independence from his sexual and emotional need than as preparation to go to work at his restaurant, which didn’t open until eleven. He went back downstairs, deliberately walking through the kitchen, pulling a carton of orange juice out of the refrigerator, sucking his teeth, whistling a tune, ignoring Esther’s presence.

 

“Where are you going?” she said.

 

“Downstairs and pay some bills. While there’s still money in the bank for me to pay the bills. Tell the kids I’ll drive them to the pool later.”

 

“What’s with the attitude?” she asked.

 

“The flower beds smell like litter boxes with fish buried in them. We need to load the weed sprayer with Lysol and douche all the beds.”

 

“Listen to you. You see the paper? A whole family is killed, and you’re talking about how the garden smells. Count your blessings. Why the dirty mouth in your own kitchen? Show a little respect.”

 

Nick squeezed the heels of his hands against his temples and went down the half-flight of stairs into the glacial coldness of his office. He sat behind his desk in the darkness and planted his forehead on the desk blotter, the gold tie hanging from his throat like an ear of boiled corn, his flaccid arms like rolls of bread dough at his sides. He banged his head up and down on the blotter.

 

“I couldn’t help but hear y’all talking. Maybe you could take a page from the papists. Celibacy probably has its moments,” a voice said from the darkness.

 

“Jesus Christ!” Nick said, his head jerking up.

 

“Thought we should go over a few things.”

 

“I had the alarm on. How’d you get in?” Nick said, focusing on the man who sat in the stuffed leather chair, a pair of walking canes propped across his shoe tops.

 

“Through the side door yonder. I came in before y’all went to bed. Fact is, I browsed two or three of your books and took a little nap here in the chair and used your bathroom. You need to tidy up in there. I had to dig clean hand towels out of the closet.”

 

Nick picked up the phone receiver, the dial tone filling the room.

 

“I came here to save your life and the lives of your wife and children,” Preacher said. “If I were here for another reason…Well, we don’t even need to talk about that. Put the phone down and stop making an ass of yourself.”

 

Nick replaced the receiver in the cradle. The back of his hand looked strangely white and soft, cupped around the blackness of the receiver. “Is it money?”

 

“I say something once, and I don’t repeat it. You’re not deaf, and you’re not lacking in intelligence. If you pretend to be either one, I’m going to leave. Then your family’s fate is on you, not me.”