Nick’s fingers were trembling on top of the desk blotter. “It’s about Artie Rooney and the Asian girls, isn’t it? Were you the shooter? Hugo said the shooter was a religious nutcase. That’s you, right?”

 

Preacher’s face remained impassive, his greased hair combed back neatly, his forehead shiny in the gloom. “Rooney is going to have you and Mrs. Dolan killed, and maybe your children, too. If the shooter can get in close, he wants your wife shot in the mouth. He also plans to have me killed. That gives us a lot of commonalities. But you say the word, and I’ll be gone.”

 

Nick felt his mouth drying up, his eyes watering, his rectum constricting with fear and angst.

 

“Are you going to get emotional on me?” Preacher asked.

 

“Why should you care about us?”

 

“I’ve been sent. I am the one who has been sent.” Preacher tilted his face up. He seemed to smile in a self-deprecating manner, in a way that was almost likable.

 

“What the hell are you talking about?” Nick wiped at his nose with the back of his wrist, not expecting an answer, not wanting to listen any more to a lunatic.

 

“You watch television shows about witness protection and that kind of thing?”

 

“Everybody does. That’s all that’s on TV.”

 

“Want to live in a box in Phoenix in summertime with sand and rocks for a yard and bikers with swastika tats for neighbors? Because outside of cooperating with me, that’s the only shot you’ve got. Artie Rooney has an on-again, off-again business relationship with a Russian by the name of Josef Sholokoff. His people come out of the worst prisons in Russia. Want me to tell you what they did to a Mexican family in Juárez, to the children in particular?”

 

“No, I don’t want to hear this.”

 

“Cain’t blame you. You know a man name of Hackberry Holland?”

 

“No…Who? Holland? No, I don’t know anybody by that name.”

 

“You recognize the name, though. You’ve seen it in the newspaper. He’s a sheriff. You read about the death of the ICE agent in San Antonio. Holland was there.”

 

“I told you, I don’t know this Holland guy. I’m a restaurateur. I got into the escort business, but I don’t do that anymore. I’m going broke. I’m not a criminal. Criminals don’t go broke. Criminals don’t file bankruptcy. They don’t see their families put on the street.”

 

“Were you interviewed by the ICE agent? Has Holland been to see you?”

 

“Me? No. I mean, maybe the man from Immigration and Customs came to my home. I don’t know anybody named Holland. You say something only once to other people, but other people got to say it ten times to you?”

 

“I think Sheriff Holland wants to do me injury. If he takes me off the board, you go off the board, too, because I’m the only person standing between you and Artie Rooney and his Russian business partners.”

 

“I made mistakes, but I’m not a thief. You stop dragging me into your life.”

 

“You’re telling me I’m a thief?”

 

“No, sir.”

 

“You have a pistol in your drawer, a Beretta nine-millimeter. Why don’t you take it out of the drawer and hold it in your hand and point it at me and call me dishonorable again?”

 

“If you found my gun, you took the bullets out.”

 

“Could be. Or maybe not. Open the drawer and pick it up. The weight should tell you something.”

 

“I apologize if I said something I shouldn’t.”

 

Preacher leaned forward in the chair. He was wearing a brown suit with light stripes in it, and the cast was gone from his leg. “You take Mrs. Dolan and your children out of town for a while. You pay cash everywhere you go. A credit card is an electronic footprint. You don’t call your restaurant or your lawyer or your friends. Artie Rooney may tap your phone lines. I’ll give you a cell phone number where you can contact me. But I’ll be the only person you’ll be talking to.”

 

“Are you crazy? Nobody is this arrogant.” Nick opened the side drawer to his desk and looked at the gun lying inside it.

 

“A crazy person is psychotic and has a distorted vision of the world. Which of us is the realist? The one who has survived among the predators or the one who pretends to be a family man while he lives off the earnings of whores and puts his family at mortal risk?”

 

Nick tried to hold his gaze on Preacher’s.

 

“You want to say something?” Preacher asked. “Pick up the gun.”

 

“Don’t tempt me.”

 

“Did you ever fire it?”

 

“No.”

 

“Pick it up and point it at me. Hold it with both hands. That way your fingers will stop trembling.”

 

“You don’t think I’ll pick it up?”

 

“Show me.”

 

Nick rested his hand in the drawer. The steel frame and checkered grips of the nine-millimeter felt solid and hard and reassuring as he curved his fingers around them. He lifted the gun out of the drawer. “It’s light. You took the clip out.”

 

“It’s called a magazine. It feels light because you’re scared and your adrenaline gives you strength you normally don’t have. The firing mechanism has a butterfly safety. The red dot means you’re on rock and roll. Pull back the hammer.”

 

“I don’t want to.”

 

“Do it, little fat man. Do it, little Jewish fat man.”

 

“What did you call me?”

 

“It’s not what I call you. It’s what Hugo calls you. He also calls you the Pillsbury Doughboy. Fit your thumb over the hammer and pull it back, then aim the front sight at my face.”

 

Nick set down the gun on the desk blotter and removed his hand from the grips. He was breathing audibly through his nostrils, his palms clammy, a taste like soured milk climbing into his mouth.

 

“Why cain’t you do it?” Preacher asked.

 

“Because it’s empty. Because I’m not here to entertain you.”

 

“That’s not why at all. Push the button by the trigger guard.”

 

Nick picked up the gun and squeezed the release on the magazine. The magazine fell from the frame and clunked on the desktop, the loading spring stacked tight with brass-jacketed shells.

 

“Pull back the slide. You’ll see a round in the chamber. The reason you didn’t point the gun at me is because you’re not a killer. But other men are, and they don’t think two seconds about the deeds they do. Those are the men I’m trying to protect your family from. Some of us are made different in the womb and are not to be underestimated. I’m one of them, but I think I’m different from the others. Is everything I say lost on you? Are you ignorant as well as corrupt?”

 

“No, you make me want to blow your fucking head off.”

 

The door to the upstairs opened, and light flooded down the staircase. “Who’s down there?” Esther said. Before anyone could answer her question, she descended the stairs, gripping an empty pot by the handle. She stared down at Preacher. “Who are you?”

 

“A friend.”

 

“How’d you get in my house?”

 

“The side door was open. I’ve explained this. Why don’t you sit down?”

 

“You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

 

“One of who?”

 

“The gangsters who have been plaguing our lives.”

 

“You’re wrong.”

 

“He’s about to leave, Esther,” Nick said.

 

“You’re one of those who abducted my husband,” she said.

 

“I wouldn’t call it that.”

 

“Don’t lie.”

 

“You shouldn’t use that term to me, madam.”

 

She stepped closer to him. “The Asian women, the prostitutes, the illegals or whatever they were, you’re here about them. You’re the one who did it.”

 

“Did what?”

 

“Killed them. It was you, wasn’t it?”

 

“Why do you say that?” Preacher’s mouth twitched slightly, his words catching in his throat.

 

“Your eyes are dead. Only one kind of man has eyes like that. Someone who murders the light behind his own eyes. Someone who has tried to scrub God’s fingerprint off his soul.”

 

“Don’t you talk to me like that, woman.”

 

“You call me ‘woman’? A dog turd off the sidewalk calls me ‘woman’ in my own house?”

 

“I came here to—”

 

“Shut up, you worthless gangster,” she said.

 

“By God, you won’t talk to me like—” he began.

 

She swung the stainless-steel pot, still caked with oatmeal, across his face. The sound reverberated like a brass cymbal inside the room. Before he could recover from the shock, she hit him again, this time on the head. When he tried to raise his arms, she rained down one blow after another on his neck, shoulders, and elbows, gripping the handle with both hands, chopping downward as though attacking a tree stump.

 

“Esther!” Nick said, coming from behind his desk.

 

When Preacher lowered his arms, she swung the pot again, catching him right above the ear. He got to his feet and stumbled to the side door, blood leaking out of his hair. He jerked open the door and climbed the short flight of concrete steps into the yard, grabbing the higher steps for support, his palms smearing with bird shit.

 

Esther picked up his walking canes and followed him into the yard, through the citrus and crepe myrtle trees and windmill palms and hibiscus. He headed for the street, trying to outdistance her, looking back over his shoulder, his hatchet face quivering, his broken movements like a land crab’s. She flung his walking canes at his head. “Just so you don’t have any reason to come back,” she said.

 

Preacher crashed through the hedge onto the sidewalk and saw Bobby Lee fire up his vehicle down the street, just as a water truck passed and splattered Preacher from head to foot. The eastern sky was the blue of a robin’s egg and ribbed at the bottom with strips of crimson and purple cloud. The colors were majestic, the royal colors of David and Solomon, as though the sky itself had conspired to mock his grandiosity and foolish pride and vain hope that salvation would ever be his.

 

 

 

 

 

16

 

EARLY SATURDAY MORNING, Hackberry walked down to his barn and skimmed the bugs from the secondary tank he kept for his registered Missouri foxtrotters, a chestnut named Missy’s Playboy and a palomino named Love That Santa Fe. Then he turned on the spigot full blast and let the water run until it overflowed the aluminum sides and was clean of insects and dust and cold to the touch and tinted a light green from the pieces of hay floating in it. Both foxtrotters were still colts and gave themselves the liberty of nuzzling him and poking at his pockets for treats, their breath heavy and warm and grassy on the side of his face. Sometimes they pulled a glove from his pocket or grabbed the hat from his head and ran away with it. But this morning they were not playful and instead kept staring down the pasture, motionless, ears back, nostrils dilating in the wind that blew out of the north.

 

“What’s wrong, boys? A cougar been around?” Hackberry said. “You guys are too big to be bothered by such critters as that.”

 

He heard his cell phone chime in his khakis. He opened it, looking toward the railed fence at the north end of the pasture, seeing nothing but a solitary oak framed against the sunrise and an abandoned clap board shack his neighbor kept hay in. He placed the phone against his ear. “You up, Hack?” a voice said.

 

“What’s going on, Maydeen?”

 

“I just got a weird call. Some guy says he has to talk with you but won’t give his name.”

 

“What’s he want?”

 

“He said you’re in danger. I asked him in danger of what. He said I didn’t want to know. He said he’s using a cell phone he bought off a street person, so I could forget about tracing the call.”

 

“What’d you tell him?”

 

“That I’d deliver the message. If he calls again, you want me to give him your number?”

 

“Yeah, go ahead.”

 

“There’s something else. I asked him if he’d been drinking. He said, ‘I wish I was just having the DTs. I wish this was all a dream. But those Asian women didn’t shoot themselves.’”

 

A half hour later, while Hackberry was watering his flower beds, his cell phone chimed in his pocket again. “Hello?” he said. There was no reply. “Is this the same man who called my office earlier?”

 

“Yes.”

 

Hackberry leaned over and turned off the water faucet. “You wanted to warn me about something?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Want to tell me what it is?”

 

“Jack Collins, that’s his name. People call him Preacher.”

 

“What about him?”

 

“He thinks you’re after him. He thinks you and me have met.”

 

“What’s your name?”

 

“Collins killed the Thai women. He’s hooked up with Hugo Cistranos and Arthur Rooney. He thinks he’s a character out of the Bible.”

 

“Are you telling me you’re in danger, sir?”

 

“I don’t care about me.”

 

“Collins is trying to hurt your family?”

 

“You’ve got it all wrong. He thinks he’s protecting us. Collins says Arthur Rooney plans to kill us.”

 

“Let us help you. Meet me someplace.”

 

“No. I made this call because—”

 

“Because what?”

 

“I don’t want your blood on me. I don’t want the Asian women’s blood on me. I don’t want that soldier and his girlfriend hurt, either. I didn’t plan any of this.”

 

Nobody does, bud, Hackberry thought.

 

“Did you make a nine-one-one call about this some time ago and try to warn the FBI about Vikki Gaddis and her boyfriend?”

 

“No.”

 

“I think you did. I heard your voice on the tape. I think you’re probably a good man. You shouldn’t be afraid of us.”

 

“Artie Rooney says he wants my wife shot in the mouth. I’m not a good man. I let all this happen. I said what I had to say. You’re never gonna hear from me again.”

 

The signal went dead.

 

Hackberry called Maydeen. “Get ahold of Ethan Riser. Tell him I think we’ve got a solid lead on Jack Collins.”

 

“Ethan who?”

 

“The FBI agent. Tell him to call me at the house.”

 

“Is there somebody out to get you, Hack?”

 

“Why should I be a threat to anybody?”

 

“Because you’re stubborn as a cinder block and you don’t give up and all the shitbags know it.”

 

“Maydeen, would you please—” He shook his head and closed his phone.

 

Throughout the day, Hackberry waited for Ethan Riser to call back. At the office, he cleaned out the paperwork in his in-basket, drove a sick female inmate from the jail to the hospital, ate lunch, shot a game of pool in the saloon, placed an ad for a road-gang guard in the newspaper (eight dollars an hour, no benefits, must not be an ex-felon), and returned home for supper.

 

Still no call from Ethan Riser.

 

He washed his dishes and dried them and put them away, then sat on the porch as the evening cooled and plumes of dust rose off the land and a purple haze formed in the sky. Occasionally, he sensed a hint of rain in the air, a touch of ozone, a shift in the breeze that was ten degrees cooler, a ripping sound in a bank of black clouds on the horizon. When he strained his eyes, he thought he saw lightning on a distant hill, like gold wires sparking against the darkness.

 

From where he sat, he could see both the southern and northern borders of his property, the railed pastures he watered with wheel lines, the machine shed where he parked his tractor and his four-stall barn and his tack room filled with bridles and snaffle bits and saddles and hackamores and head stalls and three-inch-diameter braided rope leads and horsefly spray and worming syringes and hoof clippers and wood rasps, the poplar trees he had planted as windbreaks, his pale, closely clipped lawn that looked like a putting green in a desert, his flower beds that he constantly weeded and mulched and fertilized and watered by hand every morning. He could see every inch of the world he had created to compensate for his solitude and to convince himself the world was a grand place and well worth fighting for and, in so doing, had found himself without someone to enjoy it beside in equal measure.

 

But maybe it was presumptuous of him to conclude that his ownership of the ranch was more than transitory. Tolstoy had said the only piece of earth a person owned was the six feet he claimed with his death. The gospel of Matthew said He makes His sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust. Just across the border was a moral insane asylum where drug dealers did drive-bys in SUVs on entire families, where coyotes stole the life savings of peasants who simply wanted to work in the United States, and where any freshly created hump in the countryside could contain a multiple burial.

 

Wasn’t the potential for devolvement back into a simian society always extant within? Hackberry had seen American soldiers sell out their own in a prison camp south of the Yalu. The purchase price had been a warm shack to sleep in, an extra ball of rice, and a quilted coat with lice eggs in the seams. A trip into any border town gave one little doubt that hunger was the greatest aphrodisiac. It wouldn’t take much to create the same kind of society here, Hackberry thought. The collapse of the economy, the systemic spread of fear, the threat of imagined foreign adversaries would probably be enough to pull it off. But one way or another, his home and his ranch and the animals on it and he himself would become dust blowing in the wind.

 

He stood up from his wicker chair and leaned his shoulder against one of the lathe-turned wood posts on the porch. The sun had burned into a red spark between two hills, and again he thought he smelled impending rain in the south. He wondered if all old men secretly searched for nature’s rejuvenation in every tree of lightning pulsing silently inside a storm cloud, in every raindrop that struck a warm surface and reminded one of how good summer could be, of how valuable each day was.

 

The chime of his cell phone interrupted his reverie.

 

“Hello?” he said.

 

“It’s Ethan. I hear you’re having problems with anonymous callers.”

 

“Remember the guy who called in the nine-one-one warning about Vikki Gaddis? My bet is he’s from around New Orleans.”

 

“You a dialectical linguist?”

 

“On the tape, the caller sounded like he had a pencil between his teeth. The guy who called me had an accent like the Bronx or Brooklyn, except not quite. You only hear that accent in New Orleans or close by. I think this is the same guy who called while he was drunk.”

 

“Your dispatcher said this guy gave you a lead on Jack Collins.”

 

“The caller said Collins has taken an undue interest in me. I don’t give a lot of credence to that, but I do think the caller is obsessed with guilt and is hooked up with Arthur Rooney.”

 

“I think you’re underestimating Collins’s potential, Sheriff. From everything we know about him, he believes he’s the victim, not the perpetrator. You know the story of Lester Gillis?”

 

“Who?”

 

“Baby Face Nelson, a member of the Dillinger gang. He carried the photos and addresses and tag numbers of cops and FBI agents everywhere he went. He passed two agents in their car and made a U-turn and ran them off the road and killed both of them with seventeen bullet holes in him. I think Collins is the same kind of guy, except probably crazier. Get this: Baby Face Nelson had the last rites of the Catholic Church and had his wife wrap his body in a blanket and leave him in front of a cathedral because he didn’t want to be cold.” Riser started laughing.

 

“Arthur Rooney is originally from New Orleans, isn’t he?” Hackberry said.

 

“The Ninth Ward, the area that got hit hardest by Katrina.”

 

“Can you get me the names of his old business associates?”

 

“Yeah, I guess I could do that.”

 

“Guess?”

 

“I’ve got certain parameters I have to abide by.”

 

“Your colleagues still want to use Jack Collins to get to the Russian, what’s-his-name?”

 

“Josef Sholokoff.”

 

“So I have limited access to your information, even though I may be the target of the guy your colleagues want to cut a deal with?”

 

“I wouldn’t put it that way.”

 

“I would. Tell your colleagues that if Jack Collins comes around here, they’re going to be interviewing his corpse. See you, Mr. Riser.” Hackberry clicked off his cell phone and had to restrain himself from sailing it over the top of his windmill.

 

One hour later, he looked out the window and saw Pam Tibbs turn off the state road and drive under his arch and park her pickup in front of the house. She got out and seemed to hesitate before coming up the flagstones that led through his yard. She wore earrings and designer jeans and boots and a magenta silk shirt that was full of lights.

 

He stepped out on the porch. “Come in,” he said.

 

“I didn’t want to bother you,” she said.

 

“You didn’t necessarily catch me in the middle of inventing the wheel.”

 

“Maydeen gave me two tickets to the rodeo. We can probably still catch the last hour or so, or just go to the fair.”

 

“Is everything okay?”

 

“Sure. No problems.”

 

He walked into the yard, the spray from his sprinklers iridescent in the glow of the porch light. She looked up into his face, an expectation there that he couldn’t quite define. He scratched at the top of his fore head. “I had dreams about Korea for a long time,” he said. “Once in a while I still go back there. It’s the way we’re made. If certain things we do or witness don’t leave a stone bruise on the soul, there’s something wrong with our humanity.”

 

“I’m all right, Hack.”

 

“It doesn’t work that way, kiddo.”

 

“Don’t assign me patronizing names.” When he didn’t reply, she put her hands on her hips and stared into the darkness, her eyes fighting with an emotion she didn’t plan to discuss or perhaps even recognize. “Eriksson looked into my face just before I shot him. He knew what was about to happen. I’ve always heard the term ‘mortal fear’ used to describe moments like that. But that wasn’t it. He saw the other side.”

 

“Of what?”

 

“The grave, judgment, eternity, whatever people want to call it. It was like he was thinking the words ‘It’s forever too late.’”

 

“Eriksson dealt the play and got what he deserved. You saved my life, Pam. Don’t let a sonofabitch like that rob you of your life.”

 

“You can be pretty hard-edged, Hack.”

 

“No, I’m not. Eriksson was a killer for hire.” He cupped his palm around the back of her neck. “He preyed on the defenseless and used what was best in people to turn them into his victims. We’re the children of light. That’s not a hyperbole.”

 

Her eyes wandered over his face as though she feared mockery or insincerity in his words. “I’m not a child of light, not at all.”

 

“You are to me,” he said. He saw her swallow and her lips part. His palm felt warm and moist on the back of her neck. He removed it and hooked his thumbs in his pockets. “I’d really like to go to that rodeo. I’d like to buy some candied apples and caramel corn at the fair, too. Anybody who doesn’t like rodeos and county fairs has something wrong with him.”

 

“Get mad at me if you want,” she said. She put her arms around him and hugged herself against him and pressed her face against his chest and her body against his loins. He could smell the perfume behind her ears and the strawberry shampoo in her hair and the fragrance of her skin. He saw the windmill’s blades ginning in the starlight, the disen gaged rotary shaft turning impotently, the cast-iron pipe dry and hard-looking above the aluminum tank. He rested his cheek on top of Pam’s head, his eyes tightly shut.

 

She stepped away from him. “Is it because you feel certain people shouldn’t be together? Because they’re the wrong age or color or gender or their bloodline is too close? Is that how you think, Hack?”

 

“No,” he replied.

 

“Then what is it? Is it because you’re my boss? Or is it just me?”

 

It’s because it’s dishonorable for an old man to sleep with a young woman who is looking for her father, he thought.

 

“What did you say?”

 

“I said nothing. I said let me buy you a late supper. I said I’m happy you came by. I said let’s go to the fair.”

 

“All right, Hack. If you say so. I won’t—”

 

“Won’t what?”

 

She smiled and shrugged.

 

“You won’t what?” he repeated.

 

She continued to smile, her feigned cheerfulness concealing her resignation. “I’ll drive,” she said.

 

 

THAT NIGHT AFTER she dropped him off, he sat for a long time in his bedroom with the lights turned off. Then he lay down on top of the bedcovers in his clothes and stared at the ceiling, the heat lightning flickering on his body. Outside, he heard his horses running in the pasture, their hooves heavy-sounding, swallowed by the wind, as though they were wrapped in flannel. He heard his garbage-can lid rattle on the driveway, blown by the wind or pulled loose from the bungee cord by an animal. He heard the trees thrashing and wild animals walking through the yard and the twang of his smooth wire when a deer went through his back fence. Then he heard a noise that shouldn’t have been there, a car engine in closer proximity to his house than the state road would allow.

 

He sat up and slipped his boots on and went out on the porch. A car had pulled off the asphalt and driven onto the dirt track beyond the northern border of his property. The car’s lights were off, but the engine was still running. Hackberry went back into the bedroom and removed his holstered revolver from under his bed and unsnapped the strap from the hammer and let the holster slide off the barrel onto the bedspread. He walked back outside and crossed the yard to the horse lot. Missy’s Playboy and Love That Santa Fe were standing by their water tank, frozen, looking to the north, the wind drifting a cloud of dust across them.

 

“It’s okay, fellows. We’re just going to check this guy out,” Hackberry said, walking between them, the white-handled .45 hanging from his left hand.

 

As Hackberry approached the north fence on the pasture, the driver of the car shifted into gear without apparent urgency, the lights still off, and turned in a circle, dead tree branches and uncropped Johnson grass raking under the car’s frame. Then he drove in a leisurely fashion onto the asphalt and continued down the road, clicking on his headlights when he passed a clump of oaks on the bend.

 

Hackberry went back to the house, set his revolver on the nightstand, and gradually fell asleep. He dreamed of a rodeo bull exploding out of a bucking chute. The rider’s bones seemed to be breaking apart inside his skin as the bull reared and corkscrewed between his thighs. Suddenly, the rider was in the air, his wrist still tied down with a suicide wrap, his body over the side, whipped and dirt-dragged and flung into the boards and finally horned.

 

Without ever quite waking from the dream, Hackberry reached for his revolver and clenched its white handles in his palm.

 

 

PREACHER CONSIDERED HIMSELF a tolerant man. But Bobby Lee Motree could be a challenge.

 

“Holland is an old man,” Bobby Lee said over the cell phone. “When he was running for Congress, he was known as a drunk and a gash hound. He got religion after he started representing a Mexican farmworkers’ union, probably because he’d already screwed up everything else he touched. His first wife dumped him and cleaned out his bank account. His second wife was a Communist organizer of some kind. She died of cancer. The guy’s a loser, Jack.”

 

Preacher was sitting at a card table in the shade behind his stucco house, watching a lizard crawl across the top of a big gray rock while he talked. The table was spread with a clean cloth. On top of the cloth, Preacher had disassembled his Thompson machine gun. Next to the disassembled parts were a can of lubricant and a bore brush and a white rag stained yellow with a fresh application of oil. While he talked, Preacher touched the oiled surface of the Thompson’s barrel and studied the wispy tracings his fingerprints left on the steel.

 

“Listen, Jack, if it’s not broken, you don’t fix it,” Bobby Lee said. “The guy couldn’t even save his own grits. Liam would have capped him if that cunt of a deputy hadn’t shown up.”

 

“Don’t use that term around me.”

 

“We’re talking about popping a Texas sheriff, and you’re worried about language?”

 

Preacher wiped his fingertips on the gun cloth and studied a hawk flying above the mountainside, its shadow racing across the slope.

 

“You there?” Bobby Lee said.

 

“Where else would I be?”

 

“I’m just saying Holland is a retread and a rural schmuck who surrounds himself with other losers. Why borrow trouble?” Bobby Lee said.

 

“The man has the Navy Cross.”

 

“So, rah-rah, he’s a swinging dick. Maybe he ran in the wrong direction.”

 

“You have a serious problem, Bobby Lee.”

 

“What’s that?”

 

“You come to conclusions without looking at the evidence. Then you find reasons to justify your shoddy conclusions. It’s like inventing a square wheel and trying to convince yourself you like your wagon to ride a little rough.”

 

“Jack, you smoked a federal agent. You want to add another cop to your tally? They not only execute in this state, they have beer parties at the prison gates when they do it. I’m risking my life throwing in with you. We’ve got Hugo and Artie Rooney to deal with. Then there’s Vikki Gaddis and the soldier boy. What’s next, dropping a hydrogen bomb on Iran?”

 

“I’ll handle Artie Rooney.”

 

“You ought to get laid. You know what Hugo said? I’m quoting Hugo, I didn’t say it, it’s Hugo talking, not me. He said, ‘Preacher’s last sexual encounter was a visit to his proctologist.’ How long has it been since you got your ashes hauled?”

 

Preacher watched the lizard’s throat puff out in a red balloon on the rock. The lizard’s tongue uncoiled and wrapped around a tiny black ant and pulled the ant into the lizard’s mouth. “I’m glad you’re on my side, Bobby Lee. You have loyalty in your lineage. That’s why General Lee stuck with the state of Virginia, isn’t it? Loyalty has no surrogate. Blood will out, won’t it?”

 

There was a long silence. “Why are you always ridiculing me? I’m the only guy who stood with you. You really hurt my feelings, man.”

 

“You got a point. You’re a good boy, Bobby Lee.”

 

“That means a lot to me, Jack. But you got to quit renting space in your head to bozos who couldn’t shine your shoes.”

 

“Artie Rooney is going to pay me a half million dollars. Ten percent of that will go to you.”

 

“That’s generous of you, man. You got a kind heart.”

 

“In the meantime, Artie is going to leave the Jews alone. That one isn’t up for grabs.”

 

“You still worried about the Jews after what Ms. Dolan did to you? What about the Gaddis broad and the soldier boy? Are they out?”

 

“They’re in.”

 

“They’re in?”

 

“You heard me.”

 

“What about Holland?”

 

“I’ll give it some thought.”

 

“I think he saw me. I pulled off the road to case his place. I thought he was asleep. He came outside and saw my car. But it was too dark for him to get my tag or see my face. If we leave him alone, he’ll forget about it.”

 

“You didn’t tell me that.”

 

“So I just did. Use your head, Jack. Artie Rooney hijacked Josef Sholokoff’s whores. Who do you think Rooney is gonna put that on? You got the rep from L.A. to Miami. Mexican cops think you walk through walls. Artie gets on the phone, tells Sholokoff you’re a psycho, tells him you’re working for Nick Dolan, and gets you permanently out of his hair. You taught me to be a fly on the wall, Jack.”

 

“Want to spell that out?”

 

“That agent you capped wasn’t just a fed, he was from ICE. They’re fanatics, worse than Treasury agents. You got any idea of how hot you are?”

 

“You just said ‘you.’”

 

“Okay, ‘we.’”

 

“Call me when you find Vikki Gaddis.”

 

“Is this girl worth clipping? Think about it. A waitress from a truck stop?”

 

“Did I say anything about clipping her? Did you hear me say that?”

 

“No.”

 

“You find her, but you don’t touch her.”

 

“Why should I want to touch her? It’s not me who’s got—”

 

“Got what?”

 

“An obsession. Like a tumor on the brain. The size of a carrot.”

 

Again Preacher let his silence speak for him; it was a weapon Bobby Lee never knew how to deal with.

 

“You still there?”

 

“Still here,” Preacher said.

 

“You’re the best there is, Jack. Nobody else could have done what you did behind the church. It took guts to do that.”

 

“Say again?”

 

“To step across the line like that, to grease every one of them, to burn the whole magazine and bulldoze them under and mark it off. It takes maximum cojones to do a mass whack like that, Jack. That’s why you’re you.”

 

This time Preacher’s silence was not of his own volition. He took the cell phone from his ear and opened his mouth to clear a blockage in his ear canal. The side of his face felt both numb and hot to the touch, as though he had been stung by a bee. He stared at the gray rock. The lizard was gone, and at the base of the rock, he saw a spray of tiny purple flowers that looked like tiny violets. He wondered how any flower that lovely and delicate could grow in the desert.

 

“You still there? Talk to me, man,” he heard Bobby Lee’s voice say. Preacher closed his cell phone without replying. He picked up the Thompson and ran a bore brush through the barrel and swabbed it with a clean oil patch. He folded a piece of white paper and inserted it in the open chamber, reflecting the sunlight up through the rifling. The inside of the barrel was immaculate, the whorls of light an affirmation of the gun’s mechanical integrity and reliability. He lifted up the drum and snapped it cleanly into place under the barrel and laid the gun across his lap, his palms resting on the wood stock and steel frame. He could hear whirring sounds in his head, like wind blowing in a cave or perhaps the voices of women whispering to him through the ground, whispering inside the wildflowers.

 

 

AT THAT SAME moment, one hundred miles away, three bikers were headed down a two-lane highway, full-bore, their arms wrapped with jailhouse tats, the points of their shoulders bright with sunburn. Sometimes, out of boredom, they lazed across the solid yellow stripe or stopped at a roadside rathole for a beer and a grease burger or caught a live hillbilly band at a shitkicker nightclub or steak house. But otherwise, they burned their way across the American Southwest with the dedication of Visigoths. The crystal that coursed in their veins, the dirty thunder of their exhaust flattening against the asphalt, the blowtorch velocity of the wind on their skin, the surge of the engines’ power into their genitalia, blended together in a paean to their lives.

 

They topped a rise and turned onto a dirt road and followed it for two miles until they came out on the cusp of a sloping plain of alluvial grit and alkali and green mesquite. They stopped between two dun-colored bluffs, and their leader consulted a topographical map without dismounting, then used binoculars to study a small stucco house set against a mountain that contained a shadow-darkened opening in its face. “Bingo,” he said.

 

The three men dismounted and touched fists and parked their hogs down in a gulley and built a fire and cooked their food on sticks. When they had finished eating, they pissed on the flames in the sunset and rolled out their sleeping bags and smoked weed and, like spectators at an exotic zoo, silently watched a coyote with a stiffened back leg try to keep up with a pack climbing a hill. Then they fell asleep.

 

On the fair side of the plain, the stucco house was quiet. A solitary figure sat on a metal chair in front of the opening to a shored-up cave, staring at the mantle of gold light on the hills, his expression as removed from earthly concerns as that of a man whose severed head had just been placed on a platter.

 

 

 

 

 

17

 

BUT IN THE morning, the man who lived upon occasion in the stucco house was not to be found. The bikers had approached the house on foot from three directions, the sun still buried beneath the earth’s rim, the light so weak their bodies cast no shadows on the ground. A compact car was parked twenty yards away from the house, the doors unlocked, the keys hanging in the ignition. The bikers kicked open the front and back doors of the house, turned over the bed, raked the clothes out of the closets, and tore the plywood out of the ceiling to see if Preacher was hiding in an attic or crawl space.

 

“The mine shaft,” one of them said.

 

“Where?” another said.

 

“Up on the mountain. There’s no other place he could be. Josef said he’s on crutches.”

 

“How’d he know we were coming?”

 

“The Mexicans say he walks through walls.”

 

“That’s why their country would make a great golf course, as long as it was run by white people.”

 

The bikers spread out and approached the opening on the mountainside, their weapons hanging loosely at their sides. They wore needle- nosed cowboy boots that were metal-plated around the heels and toes, jeans that were stiff with grit and road grime, and shirts whose sleeves were razored off at the armpits. Their hair was sunburned at the tips and grew in locks on the backs of their necks. Their bodies had the tendons and lean hardness of men who lifted weights daily and for whom narcissism was a virtue and not a character defect.

 

Their leader was named Tim. He stood two inches taller than his companions and wore a gold earring in one earlobe and a beard that ran along his jawline like a cluster of black ants. A Glock semiautomatic hung from his right hand. He paused in front of the cave and slipped the gun into the back of his belt, as though enacting a private ritual unrelated to what anyone thought of him. He took a breath and entered the cave. He produced a penlight from his jeans, clicked it on, and shone it into the darkness.

 

“It’s a mine?” one of his companions said.

 

“I can feel a breeze blowing through it. It’s got to have a second opening.”

 

“You see the guy?”

 

“No, that’s why I said it’s got a second opening. Maybe he went through it and out the other side.”

 

“Where’s it go?”

 

Tim continued to walk deeper into the cave, the beam of his penlight watery and diffuse on the walls. “Come have a look at this.”

 

“At what?”

 

“Did you see Snakes on a Plane?”

 

The two bikers who had remained outside the cave stepped into the darkness. Tim aimed the penlight in front of him, pointing it down a passageway that twisted into the mountain.

 

“Jesus!” one of them said.

 

“They go where there’s food or water. Maybe a cougar dragged its kill in here,” Tim said. “You ever see that many in one place?”

 

“Maybe Collins is a ghoul. Maybe he dumps his victims in here.”

 

“Go down and check it out. They rattle before they strike. They’re not rattling. You’ll be okay.”

 

“How about that one on the ledge behind you?”

 

The other two bikers waited, smiles on their faces, expecting Tim to jump. Instead, he turned around and shone the light into a diamondback’s eyes. He picked up a piece of splintered timber that had fallen from the roof. He poked at the snake’s head with it, then bedeviled it in the stomach, and finally, lifted it up in a coil and flipped it into the darkness.

 

“You’re not afraid of snakes?”

 

“I’m afraid of bad information. I think this Texas bunch is jerking Josef around. This guy Collins is a hitter, not a pimp. Hitters don’t boost somebody else’s whores.”

 

“Where do you think he went?”

 

“One thing is for sure. He didn’t go out the other side.”

 

“Then where is he?”

 

“Probably watching us.”

 

“No way. From where?”

 

“I don’t know. The guy has been killing people for twenty years and never went inside.”

 

“This blows, Tim.”

 

They were outside the cave now, the stucco house still in shadow, the morning cool, the wind ruffling the mesquite. The three men stared at the surrounding hills, looking for the glint of binoculars or the lens on a telescopic rifle sight.

 

“Who are we supposed to check in with?”

 

“The guy who ratted out Collins. His name is Hugo Cistranos.”

 

“What are we gonna do?”

 

Tim slipped the Glock from behind his belt and strolled down the gravel path from the cave to Preacher’s compact car. He circled the car, taking careful aim, and shot out each tire. He went inside the house and closed all the windows, like a man securing his home from an impending storm. He found a candle in a kitchen drawer, lit it, and melted the wax in a pool so he could affix it to the drainboard. Then he shut the front door and turned on the propane stove and shut the kitchen door behind him as he exited the house.

 

“Let’s fang down some frijoles,” he said.

 

 

SHERIFF HACKBERRY HOLLAND had just picked up Danny Boy Lorca for public intoxication and locked him in a cell upstairs when Maydeen told him Ethan Riser was on the phone.

 

“How you doing, Mr. Riser?” Hackberry said, picking up the receiver on his desk.

 

“Can’t you call me Ethan?”

 

“It’s a southern inhibition.”

 

“You were right about the origins of your mystery caller. We think his name is Nick Dolan. He was a floating casino operator in New Orleans before Katrina.”

 

“How’d you ID him?”

 

“His name was in Isaac Clawson’s notes. Clawson figured the Thai murder victims for prostitutes somebody was smuggling into the country, so he started running down anybody with major ties to escort services. It appears Clawson was giving Arthur Rooney a hard look and decided to check out Nick Dolan at the same time. Evidently, he interviewed Dolan at his vacation home in New Braunfels.”

 

“Why are y’all just finding this out?”

 

“Like I told you, Clawson liked to work alone. He didn’t put everything he did in the official file.”

 

“But so far you’re not absolutely sure Dolan is the same guy who called me?”

 

“Dolan knows Rooney. Dolan has been mixed up with prostitution for the last two years. Clawson had him in his bombsights. Also, Dolan just dissolved his partnership in his escort services and fired all the strippers at his nightclub. Either Clawson scared the shit out of him, or Dolan has developed problems of conscience.”

 

“You haven’t interviewed him yet?”

 

“No.”

 

“You’re putting a tap on him instead?”

 

“Did I say that?”

 

“I think you’re calling me because you don’t want me to find Dolan on my own.”

 

“Some people have a way of putting themselves in the middle of electric storms, Sheriff.”

 

“I don’t think the problem is mine. Your colleagues want Collins as a conduit to this Russian out on the West Coast. I think they might want to use Dolan as bait. In the meantime, I’m a hangnail.”

 

This time Ethan Riser was silent.

 

“You’re telling me I’m bait, too?” Hackberry said.

 

“I can’t speak for the actions of others. But I sleep nights. I do so because I treat people as honestly as I can. Watch your ass, Sheriff. Guys like us are old school. But there’s not many of us left.”

 

 

A FEW MINUTES later, Hackberry filled a Styrofoam cup with black coffee, dropped three sugar cubes in it, and removed a folded-up checkerboard and a box of wood checkers from his bottom desk drawer. He walked up the old steel stairs to the second floor and pulled up a chair to Danny Boy Lorca’s cell. He sat down and placed the coffee and the checkerboard inside the bars and unfolded the checkerboard on the concrete floor. “Set ’em up,” he said.

 

“I fell off the wagon again,” Danny Boy said, sitting up on the edge of his bunk, rubbing his face. His skin was as dark as smoked leather, his eyes dead, like coals that have been consumed by their own fire.

 

“One day you’ll quit. Between now and then, don’t fret yourself about it,” Hackberry said.

 

“I dreamed it rained. I saw a dried-out field of corn stand up straight in the rain. I had the same dream for three nights.”

 

Hackberry’s eyes crinkled at the corners.

 

“You don’t pay no attention to dreams, huh?” Danny Boy said.

 

“You bet I do. Your move,” Hackberry said.

 

 

THE THREE BIKERS checked in to a motel next to a truck stop and nightclub, partially because the portable sign in front of the nightclub said LADIES FREE TONIGHT—TWO-FERS 5 TO 8. They showered and changed into fresh clothes and drank Mexican beer at the bar and picked up a woman who said she worked at the dollar store in town. They also picked up her friend, who was sullen and suspicious and claimed she had a ten-year-old boy waiting alone at home.

 

But when Tim showed the friend his tin Altoids box packed to the brim with a lovely white granular cake of nose candy, she changed her mind and joined him and her girlfriend and the other two bikers for a couple of lines, some high-octane weed, and an order-in pizza back at the motel.

 

Tim had rented a room at the end of the building, and while his companions and their new friends went at it full-throttle on two beds, he drank a soda outside and crushed the can in one hand and threw it in the trash. He sat on a bench under a tree throbbing with cicadas and opened his cell phone. He could hear the bedstead banging against the motel wall and the cacophonous laughter of the two dimwits his friends had picked up, as if their laughter were outside them and not part of anything that was funny. He put an unlit cigarette in his mouth and tried to clear his head. What would the smart money do in a situation like this? You didn’t blow a hit for Josef Sholokoff. You also didn’t mess up when you took on a guy like Jack Collins, at least if he was as good as people said he was.

 

The eaves of the motel were lit with pink neon tubing. The light was fading from the sky, and the air was purple and dense and moist, with a smell of dust in it that suggested a drop in the barometer, perhaps even a taste of rain. The fronds on a palm tree by the entrance to the motel straightened and rattled in the wind. He thought about going back inside and trying out one of the dimwits. No, first things first. He dialed a number on his cell phone. While he listened to the ring, he wondered what was keeping the pizza man with their order.

 

“Hugo?”

 

“Yeah, who’s this?”

 

“It’s Tim.”

 

“Tim who?”

 

“Tim who works for Josef. Lose the charade. You want an update or not?”

 

“You got Preacher?”

 

“We’re working on it.”

 

“Explain that.”

 

“We had him boxed, but he disappeared. I don’t know how he did it.”

 

“Preacher is onto you but he got away? Do you have any idea what you’re telling me?”

 

“It sounds like you overloaded on your Ex-Lax.”

 

“You listen, asshole—”

 

“No, you listen. The guy has got no wheels and no house to go back to. We’ll find him. In the meantime—”

 

“What do you mean, he has no house to—”

 

“There was a propane accident in his kitchen. Some vandals blew the tires off his car at about the same time. Everything is under control. Here’s the good news. You said you were looking for a broad.”

 

“No, I said Preacher was looking for a broad. He’s got an obsession about her. You said you shot out his tires? What the fuck do you think this is? Halloween?”

 

“Man, you just don’t listen, do you?”

 

“About what?”

 

“The broad and the soldier you’re looking for. She has chestnut hair and green eyes, looks like a fine piece of ass, sings Gomer Pyle spirituals to beer-drinking retards who don’t have a clue? If that sounds right, I know where you can find her.”

 

“You found Vikki Gaddis?”

 

“No, Michelle Obama. You got a pencil?”

 

“There’s one here somewhere. Hang on.”

 

“One day you guys have to explain to me how you got into the life.”

 

Inside the motel room, the women got up and dressed in the bathroom. The woman from the dollar store came out first, blotting her face with a towel, smoothing her hair out of her face. She was overweight and round-shouldered, her arms big like a farm girl’s; without makeup, her face was as stark as a pie plate. “Where’s the pizza?” she asked.

 

“The guy must have got lost,” one biker said.

 

The other biker wanted to use the bathroom, but the second woman had locked the door. “What are you doing in there?” he said, shaking the knob.

 

“Calling my son. Hold your water,” she said through the door.

 

“I love family values,” he said.

 

The second woman came out of the bathroom. Unlike her friend, her bone structure looked like it had been created from an Erector Set. Her face was triangular in shape, her skin bad, her eyes filled with a glint that seemed to teeter without cause on malevolence.

 

“Your kid okay?” one of the bikers said.

 

“You think I’d be here if he wasn’t?” she replied.

 

“Not everybody is such a good mother.”

 

The two women went out the door. A beaded sky-blue sequined purse hung on a string from the overweight woman’s shoulder. She looked back once, smiling as though to say good night.

 

Tim came back into the room and sat down in a chair by the window. He pulled off his metal-sheathed boots and cupped his hands on his thighs, staring at the floor. “We’ve got to clean this up.”

 

“You talk to Josef?”

 

“To this lamebrain Hugo. He says we spit in the tiger’s mouth.”

 

“A guy on crutches with no car or house? I think this guy is some kind of urban legend.”

 

“Maybe.”

 

“I’m hungry. You want me to call the pizza place again or go out?”

 

“What I want you to do is let me think a minute.”

 

“You should have got laid, Tim.”

 

Tim stared at the nicked furniture, the yellowed curtains on the windows, the bedclothes piled on the floor. On the chair by the television set was a gray vinyl handbag, the brass zipper pulled tight. “There’s something wrong,” he said.

 

“Yeah, we’re wandering around in a giant skillet. Is this whole state like this?”

 

“Who ordered the pizza?”

 

“The skinny broad.”

 

“What’d she say?”

 

“‘I want two sausage-and-mushroom pizzas.’”

 

“Pick up the receiver and hit redial.”

 

“I think you’re losing it, man.”

 

“Just do it.”

 

“This phone doesn’t have a redial.”

 

“Then get the number off the pizza menu on the desk and call it.”

 

“Okay, Tim. How about a little serenity here?”

 

Someone knocked on the door. The biker who had picked up the phone replaced the receiver in the cradle. He started toward the door.

 

“No!” Tim said, holding up his hand. He got up from his chair in his sock feet and clicked off the light. He pulled back the window curtain just far enough to see the walkway.

 

“Who is it?” the other biker asked him.

 

“I can’t tell,” Tim said. He removed the Glock from his overnight bag. “What do you want?” he said through the door.

 

“Pizza delivery,” a voice said.

 

“What took you so long?”

 

“There was an accident on the highway.”

 

“Set it on the walkway.”

 

“It’s in the warmer.”

 

“If you set it down, it won’t be in the warmer any longer, will it?”

 

“It’s thirty-two dollars.”

 

Tim put on the night chain and took out his wallet. He eased the door open, the chain links tightening against the brass slot. The delivery man was older than he expected, blade-faced, his nose sunburned, an orange-and-black cloth cap pulled low on his brow.

 

“How much did you say?”

 

“Thirty-two dollars even.”

 

“I’ve only got a hundred.”

 

“I have to go back to the car for change.”

 

Tim held on to the hundred and closed the door and waited. A moment later, the delivery man returned and knocked again. Tim cracked the door and handed the hundred-dollar bill to him. “Count the change out on the top of the box. Keep five for yourself.”

 

“Thank you, sir.”

 

“What’s your name?”

 

“Doug.”

 

“Who’s with you in your car, Doug?”

 

“My wife. When I get off, we’re going to visit her mother at the hospital.”

 

“You take your wife on deliveries so you can go to the hospital together?”

 

The delivery man began blinking uncertainly.

 

“I was just asking,” Tim said. He shut the door and waited. Then he went to the curtain and peeled it from the corner of the window and watched the pizza man turn his car around and drive back onto the highway. He opened the door and squatted down and lifted the two heavily laden cartons of pizza from the concrete. They were warm in his hand and smelled deliciously of sausage and onions and mushrooms and melted cheese. He watched the taillights of the delivery car disappear down the road, then closed the door and replaced the chain. “What are you guys looking at?” he said to his companions.

 

“Hey, you’re just being careful. Come on, let’s scarf.”

 

They ordered beer brought over from the nightclub, and for the next hour, they ate and drank and watched television and rolled joints out of Tim’s stash. Tim even became silently amused at his concern over the pizza man. He yawned and lay back on the bed, a pillow behind his head. Then he noticed again the vinyl handbag one of the women had left behind. It had fallen from the chair and was lodged behind the television stand. “Which one of the broads was carrying a gray purse?” he said.

 

“The bony one.”

 

“Check it out.”

 

But before the other biker could pick up the handbag, there was another knock on the door. “We need a turnstile here,” Tim said.

 

He got up from the bed and went to the window. This time he pulled the curtain all the way back so he could have a clear view of the walkway and door area. He went to the door and opened it on the chain. “You forgot your purse?” he said.

 

“I left it here or in the club. It’s not at the club, so it must be here,” the woman said. “Everything is in it.”

 

“Hang on.” He shut the door, his hand floating up to release the chain.

 

“Don’t let her in, man. If women can have a hard-on, this one has got a hard-on. I’ll get her purse,” one of the other bikers said.

 

Tim slipped the night chain from its slot.

 

“Tim, wait.”

 

“What?” Tim said, twisting the doorknob.

 

“There ain’t a wallet in the purse. Just lipstick and tampons and used Kleenex and hairpins.”

 

Tim turned around and looked back at his friend, the door seeming to swing open of its own accord. The woman who had knocked was hurrying across the parking lot toward a waiting automobile. In her place stood a man Tim had never seen. The man was wearing a suit and a white shirt without a tie, and his hair was greased and combed straight back, his body trim, his shoes shined. He looked like a man who was trying to hold on to the ways of an earlier generation. His weight was propped up by a walking cane that he held stiffly with his left hand. In his right hand, snugged against his side, was a Thompson machine gun.

 

“How’d you—” Tim began.

 

“I get around,” Preacher said.

 

The spent casings shuddering from the bolt of his weapon clattered off the doorjamb, rained on the concrete, and bounced and rolled into the grass. The staccato explosions from the muzzle were like the zigzags of an electric arc.

 

Preacher limped toward the waiting car, the downturned silhouette of his weapon leaking smoke. Not one room door opened, nor did one face appear at a window. The motel and the neon-pink tubing wrapped around its eaves and the palm tree etched against the sky by the entrance had taken on the emptiness of a movie set. As Preacher drove away, he stared through the big glass window of the front office. The clerk was gone, and so were any guests who might have been waiting to register. From the highway, he glanced back at the motel again. Its insularity, its seeming abandonment by all its inhabitants, the total absence of any detectable humanity within its confines, made him think of a snowy wind blowing outside a boxcar on a desolate siding, a pot of vegetables starting to burn on an untended fire, although he had no way to account for the association.

 

 

 

 

 

18

 

VIKKI GADDIS GOT off work at the steak house at ten P.M. and walked to the Fiesta motel with a San Antonio newspaper folded under her arm. When she entered the room, Pete was watching television in his skivvies. His T-shirt looked like cheesecloth against the red scar tissue on his back. She popped open the newspaper and dropped it in his lap. “Those guys were at the restaurant three nights ago,” she said. “They were bikers. They looked road-fried.”

 

Pete stared down at the booking-room photographs of three men. They were in their twenties and possessed the rugged good looks of men in their prime. Unlike the subjects of most booking-room photography, none of the men appeared fatigued or under the influence or nonplussed or artificially amused. Two of them had served time in San Quentin, one in Folsom. All three had been arrested for possession with intent to distribute. All three had been suspects in unsolved homicides.

 

“You talked to them?” Pete asked.

 

“No, they talked to me. I thought they were just hitting on me. I sang four numbers with the band, and they tried to get me to sit down with them. I told them I had to work, I was a waitress and just sang occasion ally with the band. They thought it was funny that I sang ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken.’”

 

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

 

“Because I thought they were jerks and not worth talking about.”

 

Pete began reading the newspaper story again. “They were machine-gunned,” he said. He bit a hangnail. “What’d they say to you?”

 

“They wanted to know my name. They wanted to know where I was from.”

 

“What’d you tell them?”

 

“That I had to get back to work. Later, they were asking the bartender about me.”

 

“What in particular?”

 

“Like how long I’d been working there. Like had I ever been a professional folksinger. Like didn’t I used to live around Langtry or Pumpville? Except these guys had California tags, and why should they know anything about little towns on the border?”

 

Pete turned off the television but continued to stare at the screen.

 

“They’re contract killers, aren’t they?” she said.

 

“They didn’t follow you after you got off work. They didn’t come around the motel, either. Maybe you were right—they were just jerks trying to pick you up.”

 

“There’s something else.”

 

He looked at her and waited.

 

“I talked with the bartender before I got off tonight. I showed him the newspaper. He said, ‘One of those bikers was talking about calling up some guy named Hugo.’”

 

“You’re just telling me all this now?” Pete said.

 

“No, you’re not listening. The bartender—” She gave up and sat down on the bed beside him, not touching him. “I can’t think straight.” She pushed at her forehead with the heel of her hand. “Maybe they did follow me home and I didn’t see them. What if they found out where we’re living and they called up this guy Hugo and told him?”

 

“I don’t get it, though. Who killed them?” Pete said. “The story doesn’t say what kind of machine gun the shooter used. There’s a lot of illegal stuff available now—AKs, Uzis, semiautos with hell-triggers.”

 

“What difference does that make?”

 

“The story says there were shell casings all over the crime scene. If the guy had a Thompson with a drum on it—”

 

“Pete, will you just spit it out? What are you saying? You talk in hieroglyphics.”

 

“The guy who killed all the women behind the church used a Thompson. They’re hard to come by. They shoot forty-five-caliber ammunition. The ammo drum will hold fifty rounds. Maybe the guy who killed the women behind the church is the same guy who machine-gunned the bikers.”

 

“That doesn’t make sense. Why would they be killing each other?”

 

“Maybe they’re not working together.” Pete read more, running his thumb down to the last paragraph. He set the paper aside and rubbed his palms on his knees.

 

“Say it,” she said.

 

“The shooter had a limp. Maybe he uses a walking cane. A trucker saw him from the highway.”

 

Vikki got up from the bed. Her face was pale, the skin tight against the bone, as though she were staring into a cold wind. “He’s the man I shot, isn’t he?”

 

Pete began putting on his trousers.

 

“Where you going?”

 

“Out.”

 

“To do what?”

 

“Not to drink, if that’s what you’re asking.”

 

Her eyes remained accusatory, locked on his.

 

“I brought all this on us, Vikki. You don’t have to say it.”

 

“Don’t leave.”

 

“More of the same isn’t gonna cut it.”

 

“I’m not mad at you. I’m just tired.”

 

“I’ll be back.”

 

“When?”

 

“When you see me.”

 

“What are you going to do?”

 

“Boost a car. I wasn’t just a crewman in a tank. I was a mechanic. See, there’s an upside to getting french-fried in Baghdad.”

 

“Damn you, Pete.”

 

 

HUGO CISTRANOS WAS sitting on a canvas chair on the beach in his Speedos, the waves capping and sliding in a yellow froth up on the sand. The air smelled like brass and iodine. It smelled of the crusted seaweed around his feet and the ruptured air sacs of the jellyfish that lay in a jagged line at the water’s edge. It smelled of the fear that fouled his heart and pooled in his glands that no amount of suntan lotion could hide.

 

He tried Preacher’s cell phone again. He had already left six messages, then had listened to a recording tell him Preacher’s mailbox was full. But this time the cell phone not only rang, Preacher picked up. “What do you want?” he said.

 

“Hey, Jack, where you been?” Hugo said. “I was worried sick, man.”

 

“About what?”

 

“About whatever has been going on over there. Where are you?”

 

“Looking for a new house.”

 

“Looking for—”

 

“I had a fire, a propane explosion.”

 

“You’re kidding?”

 

“During the fire, somebody shot out my car tires, too. Maybe one of the firemen.”

 

“I read about that motel gig in the Houston Chronicle. That’s what brought it on? Those punks torched your place?”

 

“What motel?”

 

“Jack, I’m your friend. Those guys worked for the Russian out on the coast. I don’t know why they were after you, but I’m glad they got clipped. I suspect they were sent out here to do a payback on Artie and everybody who works for him, including me.”

 

“I think you got it figured, Hugo.”

 

“Look, I called about a couple of other issues, even though I was worrying about you, not hearing from you and all.” A red Frisbee sailed out of nowhere and hit Hugo on the side of the head. He picked it up and flung it savagely in a little boy’s direction. “Artie wants to settle with you. He wants me to take care of the money transfer.”

 

“Settle? This isn’t a suit.”

 

“He’s offering you two hundred thou. That’s all the cash he’s got. Why not call it slick and put it behind you?”

 

“You said ‘issues,’ in the plural.”

 

“We think we know where the broad is.”

 

“Try to use proper nouns. That’s the specific name of a person, place, or thing.”

 

“Vikki Gaddis. I don’t know if the soldier is still with her or not. You want to handle it, or you want Bobby Lee and a couple of new guys to tune her up and maybe deliver her anywhere you want?”

 

“You don’t put a hand on her.”

 

“Whatever you say.”

 

“How’d you find her?”

 

“Long story. What do you want me to tell Artie?”

 

“I’ll get back to you with wire instructions for an offshore account.”

 

“That creates an electronic trail, Jack. We need to meet.”

 

“I’ll drop by.”

 

“No, we need to get everybody together at one time and talk things out.”

 

“Where’s the Gaddis girl?”

 

Hugo’s mind was racing. Why had he believed he could outthink a sociopath? His plated chest was heaving as though he had run up a hill. His skin felt encrusted with sand; sweat and sand seeped from his armpits. His mouth was dry, and the sun was burning through the top of his head. “Jack, we’ve been in the game a long time together.”

 

“I’m waiting.”

 

“You got it. I’m on your team. You got to believe me on that.”

 

He gave Preacher the name of the town and the name of the steak house where Vikki Gaddis had been seen, not revealing his source. Then he wiped his mouth. “You got to tell me something. How’d you get to those bikers? How’d you set that up, man?”

 

“Whores sell information. They also sell out their johns if the price is right. Some of them take a high degree of pleasure in it,” Preacher said.

 

As Hugo’s heart slowed, he realized an opportunity had just presented itself, one he had not thought about earlier. “I’m your friend, Jack. I’ve always looked up to you. Be careful when you’re down there on the border. That sheriff and his deputy, the ones who nailed Liam? They were here.”

 

“This fellow Holland?”

 

“Yeah, he was talking to Artie. About you, man. Artie told him he never heard of you, but this guy has you made for the deal behind the church. I think he’s got political ambitions or something. He was asking ugly questions about your family, about your mother in particular. What the fuck does that guy care about your mother?”

 

Hugo could hear the wind between his ear and the cell phone, then the connection went dead.

 

Got you, you crazy sonofabitch, he said to himself.

 

He slipped on his shades and watched the little boy’s red Frisbee sail gently aloft, out over the waves, seagulls cawing emptily around it.

 

 

PETE WALKED DOWN the road in the dark, under the pink stucco arch painted with roses, past the closed-down drive-in theater and the circular building with service windows constructed to resemble a bulging cheeseburger and the three Cadillacs that appeared to be buried nose-first in the hardpan. The wind was up, and the combination of dust and humidity it created felt like the filings from damp sandpaper in his hair and on his skin. At the edge of town, he followed a train spur northeast, walking along the edge of the embankment onto a wide flat plain where the main track pointed miles into the distance, the night sky gleaming on the rails.

 

A half hour later, as he walked into a basin, he heard a double-header coming at low speed down the track, the flat-wheelers and empty grain cars rocking on the grade. He moved out into the scrub brush until the first locomotive passed, then began to run beside the open door of an empty flat-wheeler. Just before the car wobbled past a signal light mounted on a stanchion, he leaped inside the car, pushing his weight up on his hands, rolling onto a wood floor that smelled of chaff and the warm, musky odor of animal hides.

 

He lay on his back and watched the hills and stars slip by the open door. He did not remember when he had slept an entire night without dreaming or waking suddenly, the room filling with flashes that had nothing to do with car lights on a highway or electricity in the clouds. The dreams were inhabited by disparate elements and people and events, most of them seemingly disconnected but held together in one fashion or another by color and the nauseating images the color suggested—the wet rainbow inside a bandage that had been peeled off an infected wound, a viscous red spray erupting from the hajjis who had been crawling on a disabled tank, trying to pry open the hatches, when Pete let off on them with Ma Deuce, a .50-caliber that could shred human beings into dog food. The victims in the dreams were many but not necessarily people he had known or seen—soldiers, children, sunken-faced old women and men whose teeth were an atrocity to look at. Paradoxically, for Pete, sleeplessness was not the problem; it was the solution.

 

Except he couldn’t hold a job. He daydreamed and dropped wrenches in machinery, couldn’t concentrate on what others were saying, and sometimes could not count the change in the palm of his hand. In the meantime, Vikki Gaddis was not only financially supporting him but had become the target of a collection of killers because of his irresponsibility and bad judgment.

 

He found a piece of burlap on the boxcar floor and stuffed it under his head and fell asleep. For some reason he didn’t understand, he felt himself rocking off to sleep, almost like an embryonic creature being carried safely inside its mother’s womb.

 

When he woke, he could see the lights on the outskirts of Marathon. He rubbed the sleep out of his face and dropped from the flat-wheeler onto the ground. He waited for the train to pass him, then crossed the tracks and found the two-lane road that led into town and eventually to his cousin’s used-car lot.

 

It was located appropriately in a tattered neighborhood that seemed leached of its color. A high fence surrounded the lot and the sales office, topped by rolls of razor wire. Pete walked down a side street, away from the streetlights on the two-lane county road, glancing over his shoulder at an eighteen-wheeler shifting down at the intersection. The lot was filled with oversize pickup trucks and SUVs whose commercial value had plummeted during the price rise of gasoline to four dollars a gallon. Pete looked up and down the line of unsold and marked-down vehicles, wondering which would be easiest to hotwire. Between an Expedition and a Ford Excursion, he saw the gas-guzzling junker his cousin had sold him and whose crankshaft had fallen out on the highway. The cousin had wrecker-hauled it back onto the lot and placed a for-sale sign inside the windshield. What did that say about the quality of the other vehicles his cousin was offering for sale?

 

Pete found a break in the spirals of razor wire at the back of the property and laced his fingers in the fence, preparing to climb over. Down the aisle between two rows of vehicles, he saw the chain-locked gates he would have to exit with whatever truck or SUV or compact shitbox he managed to boost. He had a collapsible Schrade utility tool in his pocket, one that contained pliers and wire cutters and screwdrivers and small wrenches of every kind, but nothing approaching the strength and size needed to cut a chain or padlock.

 

Through the front fence, he saw a sheriff’s cruiser pass on the county road and turn in to a diner at the intersection. How many blunders could one guy make in one night?

 

He sat down on a greasy hump of dirt out of which a cluster of pines grew and put his face in his hands. He watched the sheriff’s cruiser drive away from the diner, then his attention focused on a lighted phone booth between the diner and the corner of the intersection.

 

It was time to call for the cavalry, although he was afraid of what the cavalry was about to tell him. He walked to the telephone booth and made a collect call to the residence of William Robert Holland in Lolo, Montana.

 

But Pete’s intuitions had been correct. Billy Bob told him his only recourse was to surrender himself to his cousin Hackberry Holland; he even gave Pete Hackberry’s number. He also told Pete the FBI probably had a tap on his phone and that the clock was likely ticking on Pete.

 

Pete could hear the sorrow and pity in his friend’s voice, and it made his heart sink. In his mind’s eye, he saw the two of them years ago, cane-fishing under a tree on a green river, their cold drinks and bread-and-butter sandwiches lying on a blanket in the shade.

 

After Pete hung up, sweat was creaking in his ears, and the bodies of insects were thudding against the Plexiglas sides of the booth. He folded back the accordion door hard against the jamb and began walking down the two-lane toward the railroad tracks. Up ahead, he saw a lone compact car stopped at the traffic light, the driver waiting listlessly behind the steering wheel, his features lit by the glow from an AutoZone sign. The traffic light seemed to be stuck on red, but the driver waited patiently for it to change, although there were no other vehicles on the street.

 

The driver had a long nose and high cheekbones, the hair combed straight back, streaked with gel or grease. His facial structure could have been called skeletal except for the fact that the flesh was lumpy, as though it were covered with bee stings, suggesting carnality and decadence rather than deprivation. His gaze was focused on the traffic signal, like a modern parody of a Byzantine saint experiencing the dark night of the soul.

 

Pete started across the intersection, in front of the compact’s high beams, just as the traffic signal changed. The driver of the compact had to slam on his brakes. But Pete did not move. He continued to stare into the brilliance of the headlights, red and yellowish-green circles burning into his eye sockets. He spread his arms against the air. “Sorry for being on the planet,” he said.

 

The driver pulled slowly around him, his window down. “You have a problem of some kind?”

 

“Yes, sir, I do. See, the light was red when I started across the street. Because it turns from red to green doesn’t mean the driver of a car can run over whatever is in front of him.”

 

“That’s interesting to know. Now, how about taking your hand off the roof of my car? I don’t particularly enjoy looking into somebody’s armpit.”

 

“I like your ‘Support the Troops’ ribbons. You must have bought a shitpile of them. What d’you think about bringing back the draft so the rest of y’all can kick some rag-head ass over in the Sandbox?”

 

“Move away, kid.”

 

“Yes, sir, I’m very glad to,” Pete said. He began picking up rocks from the asphalt. “Let me he’p you on your way. Is there a late-night pinochle game down at the AMVETS tonight?”

 

The driver’s eyes roamed over Pete’s face. His expression was one of curiosity rather than fear or apprehension. “Get yourself some help. In the meantime, don’t ever fuck with me again.”

 

“I thank you for straightening me out, sir. Happy motoring. God bless and Godspeed.”

 

As the driver pulled away, Pete flung one rock after another at the compact, whanging them off the doors and roof and trunk. Then he picked up a half-brick and chased after the compact and threw the brick as hard as he could, pocking a hole in the rear window. But the driver never accelerated or touched the brake pedal. He simply drove steadily down the road toward the main highway that led out of town, leaving Pete in the middle of the street, wrapped in self-loathing and a level of impotent rage that sat on his brow like a crown of thorns.

 

 

AFTER PREACHER GOT back on the four-lane and resumed his journey, he looked in the rearview mirror at his broken window. Lunatic or drunken or drug-induced behavior had never been a source of worry or concern to him. Unhinged people like that kid back there flinging rocks at a stranger’s car were just a reminder that Preacher didn’t have to validate himself, that moral imbeciles had taken over the institution a long time ago. Check out the French General Assembly under Robespierre, he thought. Check out the crowd at a televangelical rally. If they had their way, there would be an electric chair on every street corner in Texas, and half the population would be bars of soap.

 

He pushed his speed up to sixty-five, staying under the seventy-mile-an-hour limit. The backseat was stacked with the boxed possessions he had salvaged from his destroyed house. His Thompson, for which he had paid eighteen thousand dollars, was concealed between the backseat and the trunk. He would miss his stucco house at the base of the mountain, but eventually, he knew he would return to it. He was sure the cave in the mountainside and the sounds the wind made blowing inside its walls held portent not only for him but for the unwinding scroll of which his story was a part. Was it too big a leap of faith to conclude the whistling of the wind was nothing less than the breathing of Yahweh inside the earth?

 

Weren’t all our destinies already written on scrolls that we unwound and discovered in incremental fashion? Perhaps the past and the pres ent and the future were already written on the wind, not in transient fashion but whispered to us with unerring accuracy if we would only bother to listen. The three bikers had thought they would kill him in his own house, little knowing of the power that inhabited the environment they had invaded. He wondered what they’d thought when he’d let off on them in the motel room. There had been regret in their eyes, certainly, and desperation and fear, but most of all just regret. If they could have spoken, he was sure they would have renounced everything in their lives in order to live five more seconds so they could make their case and convince either Preacher or whoever governed the universe that they would devote the remainder of their lives to piety and acts of charity if they could just have one more season to run.

 

Preacher steered around an eighteen-wheeler, the tractor rig’s high beams turning his pocked rear window into a fractured light prism. Had the rock thrower been drunk? The man hadn’t smelled of booze. Obviously, he had been in Iraq or Afghanistan. Maybe the VA was dumping its nutcases on the street. But there was a detail about the kid Preacher couldn’t forget. In his obsession to find Vikki Gaddis, he had thought little about her boyfriend, the kid Hugo and Bobby Lee always referred to as “the soldier boy.” What had Bobby Lee said about him? That the kid had a scar on his face that was as long as an earthworm?

 

No, it was just coincidence. Yahweh didn’t play jokes.

 

Or did He?

 

 

 

 

 

19

 

AT TWO A.M. the air-conditioning compressor outside Hackberry’s window gasped once, made a series of clunking sounds like a Coke bottle rolling down a set of stairs, and died. Hackberry opened the windows and the doors, turned on the ceiling fan in his bedroom, and went back to sleep.

 

A huge bank of thunderclouds had moved out of the south and sealed the sky. The clouds were lit by igneous flashes that rippled across the entirety of the heavens in seconds and died far out over the hills. It was cool in the room under the revolving blades of the fan, and Hackberry dreamed he was in a naval hospital in the Philippines, sedated with morphine, a hospital corpsman no older than he pulling the syringe from his arm. A sun shower was blowing in from the bay, and outside his window, an orchid tree bloomed on the lawn, its lavender petals scattered on the clipped grass. In the distance, where the bay merged with water that was the dark blue of spilled ink, he could see the gray hulking outline of an aircraft carrier, its hard steel edges smudged by the rain.

 

The hospital was a safe place to be, and the memories of a POW camp south of the Yalu seemed to have little application in his life.

 

He heard thunder and wind in his sleep and the twang of wire on his back fence and tumbleweed bouncing against the side of his house and matting in his flower beds. Then he smelled rain blowing through his screens, sweeping in a rush across the housetop, filling the room with a freshness that was like spring or memories of hot summers when raindrops lit upon a heated sidewalk and created a smell that convinced you the season was eternal and one’s youth never faded.

 

The mist drifted through the window, touching his skin, dampening his pillow. He got up and closed the window and, in the distance, saw lightning strike a hillside, flaring inside a grove of blighted oaks that looked like gnarled fingers inside the illumination. He lay back down, his pillow over his face, and fell asleep again.

 

 

OUT ON THE road, a compact car passed in the darkness, its headlights off. There was a solitary hole in the back window, its edges shaped into a crystalline eye superimposed on the car’s dark interior. The driver steered with both hands around a rock that had rolled onto the road, avoiding a fence post and a tangle of barbed wire that had tilted out of a hillside. He passed a barn and a pasture with horses and a water tank in it, then turned out into a field and drove across a long stretch of Johnson grass and parked his car in a streambed next to a hill, the dry rocks crackling under his tires. He removed the submachine gun from behind his backseat, and the paper bag that contained two ammunition drums, then sat down on a flat rock, his hat tilted on his face, his unpressed secondhand pin-striped suit dotted with rain, a walking cane propped against his knee.

 

The wind blew open his coat and ruffled the brim of his hat, but his eyes did not blink, nor did his face show any expression. He stared listlessly at the grass bending around him and at a stump fire smoldering in the rain. The smoke from the fire smelled like burning garbage and made him clear his throat and spit. He fitted the ammunition drum onto his Thompson and pulled and released the bolt, feeding a round into the chamber. He remained seated for a long time, staring at nothing, the Thompson resting on his lap, his hands as relaxed as a child’s on its barrel and stock.

 

He did not know the hour and never wore jewelry or a watch when he worked. He did not measure the passage of time in terms of minutes or hours but in terms of events. There were no vehicles on the county road. There was no sign of activity inside the house he was about to invade. There were no insomniacs or early risers turning on lights in the neighborhood. There was a fire burning in the grass, and horses were nickering in the darkness, the smoke providing a plausible explanation for their sense of alarm. The sky was booming with thunderous explosions; not those of dry lightning but the kind that promised serious rain, perhaps even the kind of monsoon that gave back life to a desert. In spite of the acrid tinge of smoke inside the mist, the night was as lovely and normal as one could expect during the late summer in Southwest Texas.

 

Preacher stuffed his trousers inside the tops of his boots and upended his Thompson in one hand, the other gripping his cane, then began walking through a thicket toward the ranch house in the distance, his face as impervious as molded plastic to both the brambles and the rain.

 

 

WHEN SERGEANT KWONG visited Hackberry in his dreams, a burp gun was always hanging on a strap from his shoulder, and an ice hook dripped from the fingers of his right hand. Hackberry could even see the half-moons of dirt inside Kwong’s nails and the shine of his quilted coat that was slathered with dried mud, the sleeves marked with mucus where he had wiped his nose.

 

In the dream, Kwong fitted the hook through one of the iron squares in the sewer grate above Hackberry’s head and hoisted the grate onto a cusp of yellowed snow where Kwong had urinated. Hackberry was sitting with his back against the dirt wall of the hole, his knees drawn up before him, the inverted steel pot he defecated in resting by his foot. Kwong’s massive body was silhouetted against a salmon-colored sky, his face dark with shadow under a short-billed cloth cap tied with earflaps under his chin. His unshaved jaw was as big as a gorilla’s, the hair in his nose white with ice crystals, his breath fogging. Hackberry could hear other POWs being pulled out of their holes, shoved into a line, the guards talking louder, more clipped, angrier than usual, kicking anyone who didn’t move fast enough.

 

Kwong dropped the iron grate heavily onto the snow, shaking the hook free. “Climb up, cocksuck. Today your day,” he said.

 

Inside his dream, Hackberry tried to force himself back to the hospital in the Philippines, back to the moment when the navy corpsman had injected him with morphine and he could arbitrarily turn his head on the pillow and see the orchid tree blooming on the lawn and in the distance the misty gray outline of the aircraft carrier in the rain.

 

On the north side of the pasture, Preacher walked steadily through the Johnson grass, its wetness glistening on his boots, the butt of the Thompson riding on his hip, his walking cane spearing into the soft dirt. The palomino and chestnut geldings in the horse lot were spooking in the curds of smoke from the stump fire, whinnying, their ears back. High overhead, a plane with lighted windows was making an approach to a private airport, gliding through the rain and flickers of lightning to a safe harbor. The sheriff’s neighbors were sound asleep, confident of the sunrise and the goodness of the day that awaited them. As Preacher thought of these things, his energies grew in magnitude and intensity, like bees stirring to life inside a hive after a boy has disturbed it with a rock. He cast aside his walking cane and climbed through the rails of the horse lot and continued toward the house, the discomfort gone from his leg and foot, a marching band blaring in his head.

 

The two horses ran in different directions from him, their back hooves kicking blindly at the air. Up ahead, the house was dark, the windmill on the far side chained up, the blades and rudder trembling stiffly in the wind.

 

 

WHEN HACKBERRY JERKED awake, he tried to sit up in bed, then heard metal clink and felt his left wrist come tight against a chain. He pushed himself up against the bedstead, his vision unfocused, his left hand suspended foolishly in the air as though his motor controls had been cut.

 

“Whoa, hoss,” Preacher said. He was sitting in a chair in the corner, the Thompson across his lap. He had removed his hat and placed it crown-down on the dresser. His clothes were damp and smudged with ash and mud, his face and boots shiny with rainwater. “It’s already a done deal. Don’t hurt yourself unnecessarily.”

 

Hackberry could hear himself breathing. “You’re the one they call Preacher?”

 

“You knew I was coming, didn’t you?”

 

“No. For me, it’s not personal.”

 

“I was told you were asking Arthur Rooney about me, about my private life and such.”

 

“Whoever told you that is a damn liar.”

 

“Yeah, he probably is. But nonetheless, you’ve been looking for me, Sheriff Holland. So I found you instead.”

 

“I should have locked my door.”

 

“Think your broken air conditioner was coincidental?”

 

“You did it?”

 

“No, a man who works for me did.”

 

“What’s your business here, Mr. Collins?”

 

“You have to ask that?”

 

“Jack Collins is your real name? The one given you at birth?”

 

“What difference does it make?”

 

“In case you haven’t figured it out, nicknames are forms of disguise. I hear you’re supposed to be the left hand of God.”

 

“I never claimed it.”

 

“You let others do that for you. You don’t discourage them.”

 

“I don’t study on what other people say or think. Why do you keep favoring the other side of your bed, Sheriff?”

 

“I have problems with sciatica. I can’t lie in one position.”

 

“Is this what you’re looking for?” Preacher said, holding up Hackberry’s revolver.

 

“Maybe.”

 

“If you’re going to keep a weapon close by your bed, it should be a small one, a derringer or an Airweight you can tuck under your mattress or pillow so an intruder cain’t find it without waking you up. You favor a thumb-buster forty-five? That’s a lot like carrying around a junkyard on your hip, isn’t it?”

 

Hackberry looked through the screen door at the rain blowing in the pasture, his horses playing in it, rearing in mock combat, a stump fire glowing orange and hot under a log each time the wind fed fresh oxygen into the flames. “Do what you came to do and be done,” he said.

 

“I wouldn’t rush my fate if I were you.”

 

“You lecture others, a man who killed nine unarmed women, some of them hardly more than children? You think you’re the scourge of God? You’re a pimple on creation. I’ve known your kind all my life. You’re always looking for a cause or a flag to hide under. There’s no mystery to your psychological makeup, Collins. Your mother probably wanted you aborted and cursed the day you were born. I think you were despised in the womb.”

 

Preacher’s mouth was a stitched seam, as though he were taking the measure of each word Hackberry used. He huffed air out his nostrils indifferently. “Could be. I never got to know her real well. You’re a recipient of the Navy Cross.”

 

“So what?”

 

“I checked out your background. You don’t fit easily into one shoe box. You were a womanizer and a drunkard. While you were married and running for Congress, you were hiring Mexican girls down on the border. You ever carry diseases home to your wife?”

 

The ammunition drum on the Thompson rested between Preacher’s knees; the index finger of his right hand was poised outside the trigger guard. “The question isn’t a complicated one,” he said.

 

“You name it and I did it. Until I met the woman who became my second wife.”

 

“The Marxist?”

 

“She was an organizer for the United Farm Workers and a friend of Cesar Chavez.”

 

“That’s how you took up with the papists?”

 

“There’re worse groups.”

 

“The situation with those Oriental women wasn’t of my selection.”

 

“I dug them up. I saw your handiwork up close and personal. Run your bullshit on somebody else.”

 

“You found them?”

 

“At least one girl had dirt clenched in her palm. You know what that indicates?”

 

Preacher raised his index finger in the air. “I didn’t have control of what happened out there.”

 

“You’re using the passive voice.”

 

“What?”

 

“It involves manipulation of language to avoid admission of guilt.”

 

“You a grammarian besides a war hero?”

 

“There’s nothing heroic about my history. I informed on two fellow POWs.”

 

Preacher seemed to have lost interest in the subject. He scratched idly at his cheek with four fingers. “You afraid?”

 

“Of what?”

 

“The other side.”

 

“I’ve already been there.”

 

“Say again?”

 

“I looked into the eyes of a man just like you. He carried a burp gun that was made in China or Russia. He was a cruel man. I suspect his cruelty masked his innate cowardice. I never met a cruel man or a bully who wasn’t a coward.”

 

Preacher waved his hand at the air. “Be quiet.”

 

At first Hackberry thought his words had reached inside Preacher’s defense system, then realized the vanity of his perception. Preacher had risen from his chair, his attention fixed on the road, the Thompson slanted downward. He moved to the window. “She’s not the brightest bulb in the box, is she?”

 

“Who?”

 

“Your deputy, the one who killed Liam. She just turned on her interior light to write in her log.”

 

“She patrols this road when she has the night shift. She’s not part of this, Collins.”

 

“Oh, yes, she is, my friend.”

 

“You sonofabitch, you motherfucker.”

 

“What did you call me?”

 

“I’m the guy who came after you, Collins. Not my deputy. She takes orders. She’s not a player.”

 

“You insult my mother, but you ask immunity for your female friend? Her fate is on your conscience. Think back: the unlocked doors, pursu ing me outside your jurisdiction, the killing of Liam Eriksson. You engineered this, Sheriff. Look into my face. Look inside me. You see yourself.”

 

Preacher had leaned down to speak, his breath sour, a tiny web of saliva at the corner of his mouth. Hackberry grabbed Preacher’s shirt with one hand and knotted the cloth in his fist and pulled Preacher toward him. He spat full in his face, then gathered his spittle a second time and spat on him again and again, until his mouth was empty of moisture.

 

Preacher jerked away from him and drove the butt of the Thompson into the bridge of Hackberry’s nose, using both hands. He hit him again, this time in the head, splitting the scalp, raking the steel butt plate down Hackberry’s ear.

 

Preacher picked up his hat from the dresser and walked toward the side door. “I’ll be back to deal with you later. I’ll be the last thing you ever see. And you’ll beg to take back every word you said about my mother.”

 

Blood leaked out of Hackberry’s hair into his eyes. He watched impotently as Preacher went out the door into the yard, the Thompson tilted downward in his silhouette like a black exclamation point against the glow of the cruiser’s headlights.

 

Hackberry strained against the manacle on his left wrist, forming his fingers into a cone, trying to pull the back of his hand through the steel’s circumference, blood running in strings down his thumb, braiding off his nails. He got to his feet and, with both arms outstretched, jerked against the chain, which was locked by the other manacle around a thick dowel on the bedstead. Through the window, he could see Preacher far down the driveway, approaching Pam Tibbs’s cruiser, the rain swirling like spun glass around him, thunder rippling across the sky.

 

Hackberry saw Pam reach up and turn off the dome light. Then, for a reason he didn’t understand, the light went back on. Hackberry yelled at the top of his voice just as the bedstead splintered apart. Preacher fitted the Thompson to his shoulder, his right elbow pointed outward like a chicken’s wing, and aimed through the iron sights.

 

The eruption of fire from the barrel was like the jagged and erratic contortions of an electrical arc. The .45-caliber rounds blew the glass out of the back and side windows and stitched across the doors, ripping stuffing out of the seats, exploding a side mirror, tattering the hood, flattening a tire in under a second.

 

Hackberry tore the handcuffs loose from the destroyed bedstead and found his holstered revolver on the floor where Preacher had placed it. He ran barefoot into the side yard just as Preacher let off another burst, this time holding the Thompson against his hip, spraying the cruiser from one end to the other. A flame glowed under the hood, then seemed to drip from the engine onto the asphalt and race backward toward the gasoline tank. There was no transition between the moment of ignition and the explosion that followed. A fireball exploded from the car’s frame, filling the windows, roasting the interior, rising into the darkness in a dirty red-black scorch that gave off a smell like an incinerator behind a rendering plant. Hackberry felt the whoosh of heat float across the lawn and touch his face.

 

“Collins!” he shouted. He saw Preacher turn, framed against the burning car. Hackberry raised his revolver and aimed with both hands and fired once, the report deafening, the recoil like the kick of a jackhammer. He steadied the front sight and fired two more shots, but he was too far away from his target, and he heard the rounds strike stone or the top of a rise and whine into the darkness with a sound like the tremolo of a broken banjo string.

 

He saw Preacher move out of the light and head for the north pasture, unhurried, holding the Thompson by the pistol grip, the barrel pointed at the sky, glancing back at Hackberry only once.

 

The rain steamed on the smoldering remains of the cruiser, the flames in the grass burning outward in a ring, the mesquite starting to catch and flare like fireflies. There was no movement anywhere near the cruiser. The airbags in the front seat had inflated and exploded in the heat and were now draped on the steering wheel and blackened seats and dashboard like curtains of ash. Hackberry could feel his eyes brimming with water. He followed Preacher into the pasture, the rain blowing in his face, his two geldings terrified. Inside the flash of lightning in the clouds, he thought he saw Preacher climbing through the rails of the north fence. He fired once, or was it twice, with no effect.

 

He stepped on a fence clip and felt the aluminum tip slice through the ball of his foot. Then Preacher was out in the pasture, out of the shadows, past the stump fire. Hackberry paused at the fence and fired again. This time he saw Preacher’s coat jump, as though a gust of wind had caught it and flapped it loose from his side. Hackberry climbed through the fence and went deeper into the Johnson grass, toward a thicket behind which a compact car was parked.

 

Preacher opened the compact’s door. Almost as an afterthought, he turned and faced Hackberry, his Thompson lowered. He smiled at the corner of his mouth. “You’re a persistent man, Holland.”

 

Hackberry raised his revolver with both hands, cocked back the hammer, and sighted on Preacher’s face. “Send me a postcard and tell me how you like hell,” he said. He squeezed the trigger. But the hammer snapped on a spent cartridge.

 

“You lose, bub,” Preacher said.

 

“Be done with it.”

 

“I don’t have to. I’m stronger than you are. I’ll live inside your thoughts the rest of your life. The woman I just killed will become my friend and haunt your sleep. Welcome to the great shade.”

 

Preacher got in his car, started the engine, and drove slowly out of the field. After he had passed the burned shell of the cruiser, he turned on his headlights and proceeded down the county road toward town, the pocked hole in his rear window glinting like a crystal eye.

 

Hackberry walked out of the field onto the asphalt, the blood in his hair mixing with the rain, running through his eyebrows and down his face. In the way that dreams turn out to be only dreams, he saw an image in the mist that made no sense, that was out of place and time, that was like the reversal of a film whose frames contained material that was unacceptable and had to be corrected.

 

Pam Tibbs was climbing from the rain ditch that paralleled the far side of the road, her clothes powdered with soot, her face smudged and streaked with rain.

 

“Oh, Pam,” he said.

 

She stepped out on the road, her eyes watering in the black smoke blowing off the cruiser’s tires. She seemed disoriented, as though the earth were shifting under her feet. She looked at him woodenly. “I’d gotten out of the cruiser. I thought I hit a deer. A doe with two fawns ran in front of me. One of the fawns was making a sound like it was hurt or frightened. But they’re not here. I think the explosion knocked me unconscious.”

 

“I was sure you were dead.”

 

“You’re hurt,” she said.

 

“I’m fine.”

 

“Is Collins still here?”

 

“He’s gone. You have your cell?”

 

He saw that it was already in her hand. He took it from her, but his fingers were shaking so badly that she had to make the 911 call for him.

 

 

 

 

 

20

 

PETE CAUGHT A ride back to the motel on a poultry truck and slept through the morning, trying to block out the memories of the previous night, which included his fight with Vikki, his failed attempt to boost a car, his admission of fear and inadequacy to his friend Billy Bob in Montana, and his rage and attack upon the driver of the compact car at the traffic light.

 

How could one guy screw up so often, so bad, and in so short a time? When he woke at noon, a poisonous lethargy seemed to grip both his body and spirit, as though he had been drinking for two days and all his tomorrows had been mortgaged. He was sure that if a high wind blew away the motel and left him behind, he would discover that creation was a vast empty shell as well as a sham, a stage set that hid no mysteries, and he was an insignificant cipher in the middle of it.

 

Vikki was nowhere in sight. His only companion was a roach the size of a cigar butt climbing up the curtain by the television set. He put on his shirt, not bothering to button it, and sat on the side of the bed and wondered what he should do next.

 

Billy Bob had said to trust his cousin the sheriff. But what about the feds? Sometimes they hung witnesses out to dry. Pete had heard stories about the Justice Department prosecuting cases that couldn’t be won, turning over the names of confidential informants to defense lawyers who passed the names on to their clients and exposed the informants to violent and perhaps fatal retribution.

 

His and Vikki’s names would be in the newspapers. Vikki had pumped two rounds into this guy Preacher when he had tried to force her into his car. Pete had never seen the man’s face and knew nothing of his history or background but had little doubt what he would do to Vikki if he got his hands on her.

 

But what if Pete continued to do nothing? So far he and Vikki had been lucky. If they just had money or passports or a car. Or a weapon. But they had none of these things, and now, to compound his problems, he had fought with Vikki.

 

The rains had passed when he went outside, but the sky was sealed from horizon to horizon with clouds that were as heavy and gray as lead, like a giant lid pressing the humidity and heat back into the earth. In the convenience store that doubled as a Greyhound bus stop, he bought a box of saltine crackers and a can of Vienna sausages. He also bought a coned-up straw hat from a Mexican who was selling hats and serapes and garish velvet paintings of either the Crucifixion or the Sacred Heart of Jesus off the back of a pickup truck. He bought a bottle of Coca-Cola from the outside machine, and just as the sun was breaking through the overcast, spearing columns of light onto the desert, he squatted down in the shade of the store and began eating the sausages sandwiched between crackers, drinking from the soda, moistening the dried-out saltines to the point where they were almost chewable.

 

He could not explain adequately to himself why he had bought the hat, which had cost six dollars, except for the fact that squatting down on his haunches, the leather of his colorless cowboy boots spiderwebbing with cracks, eating his lunch in the hot shade of a convenience store on the outer edges of the Great American Desert, his hat slanted down on his brow, was like a conduit back into a time when he had thought of the world in terms of chimerical holograms rather than events—bobber-fishing in a green river, Angus grazing in red clover, sunlit showers breaking on bluebonnets in the spring, harvest moons that were as big and brown and dust-veiled as a planet that had strayed from its orbit.

 

Pickup trucks and country music and dancing to the “Bandera Waltz” under Japanese lanterns at a beer garden on the banks of the Frio. Barbecues and fish frys and high school kids on hayrides and other kids hanging out on horseback in front of the IGA. Dinner on the ground and devil in the bush and baptism by immersion and outdoor preachers ranting in ecstasy with their eyes rolled back in their heads. If he could just reach back a couple of years and put his hand on all of it and hold on to it and never let anyone talk him into giving it up.

 

That was the secret: to hold on to the things you loved and never give them up for any reason, no matter how strong the entreaty.

 

He walked down the street to the town’s one block of business buildings, stepping up on an elevated sidewalk that still had tethering rings inset in the concrete. He passed a shut-down bank that had been constructed in 1891, a barbershop with a revolving striped pole in a plastic tube, a used-appliance store, a café that advertised bison burgers in water-based white paint on the window, a barroom that was as long and narrow and dark as a boxcar. The town’s library was tucked compactly inside a one-story limestone building that once sold recapped automobile tires.

 

In the reference section, he found a stack of phone books for all the counties in Southwest Texas. It took him only five minutes to find the number he needed. He borrowed a pencil from the reference librarian and wrote the number on a piece of scrap paper. The librarian’s hair was almost blue, her eyes very tiny and bright behind her glasses; her facial skin was wrinkled with deep folds that had the coloration of a pink rose. “You’re not from here, are you?” she said.

 

“No, ma’am. I’m a visitor.”

 

“Well, you come back here any time you want.”

 

“I surely will.”

 

“You’re a nice young man.”

 

“Thank you. But how do you know what I am?”

 

“You removed your hat when you entered the building. You removed it even though you thought no one was watching you. Your manners are those of a naturally considerate and respectful person. That makes you a very nice young man.”

 

Pete walked back to the motel, left a note for Vikki on her pillow, and hitchhiked thirty miles west of town to a desolate crossroads that reminded him of the place where the Asian women had died and his life had changed forever. He entered a phone booth, took a deep breath, and dialed a number on the phone’s console. In the distance, he could see a mile-long train inching its way along a stretch of alkali hardpan, like a black centipede, heat waves warping the horizon.

 

“Sheriff’s Department,” a woman said. It was a voice he had heard before.

 

“Is this the business line?” he asked.

 

“That’s the number you dialed. Did you want to report an emergency?”

 

“I need to talk to Sheriff Holland.”

 

“He’s not in right now. Who’s calling, please?”

 

“When will he be in?”

 

“That’s hard to say. Can I he’p you with something?”

 

“Patch me through. You can do that, cain’t you?”

 

“You need to give me your name. Is there a reason you don’t want to give me your name?”

 

He could feel sweat pooling inside his armpits, his own stale odor rising into his face. He folded back the door of the booth and stepped outside, the receiver pressed against his ear.

 

“Are you there, sir?” the woman said. “We’ve spoken before, haven’t we? You remember me? Your name is Pete, isn’t it?”

 

“Yes, ma’am, that’s what I go by.”

 

“We want you to come see us, Pete. You need to bring Ms. Gaddis with you.”

 

“That’s why I want to talk to the sheriff.”

 

“The sheriff is at the hospital. A man tried to kill him and Deputy Tibbs last night. I think you know the man we’re talking about.”

 

“This guy Preacher? No, I don’t know him. I know his name. I know he tried to kidnap and maybe kill Vikki. But I don’t know him.”

 

“We’ve been trying to he’p you, soldier. Sheriff Holland in particular.”

 

“I didn’t ask him to.” He could hear sweat creaking between his ear and the phone receiver. He held the receiver away from his head and wiped his ear with his shoulder. “Hello?”

 

“I’m still here.”

 

“How bad are the sheriff and the deputy hurt?”

 

“The sheriff is having some X-rays done. You’re not a criminal, Pete. But you’re not acting real bright, either.”