“What’s your name, ma’am?”

 

“Maydeen Stoltz.”

 

Pete looked at his watch. How long did it take to trace a call? “Well, Miss Maydeen, why don’t you pull your head out of your hole and give me the sheriff’s cell phone number? That way I won’t have to trouble you anymore.”

 

He thought he could hear her ticking a ballpoint on a desk blotter.

 

“I’ll give you his number and tell him to expect your call in the next few minutes. But you listen to me on this one, smartass. Last night we almost lost two of the best people either one of us will ever know. You give that some thought. And if you talk to me like that again and I catch up with you, I’m gonna slap the daylights out of you.”

 

She gave him the sheriff’s cell number, but he had nothing to write with and had to draw the numerals on the dusty shelf under the phone console with his finger.

 

He went inside the small grocery store at the intersection, the smell of cheese and lunch meat and insect spray and stale cigarette smoke and overripe fruit enough to make him choke. At the back of the store, he stared through the smoky glass doors of the coolers, his arms folded across his chest as though he were protecting himself from an enemy. Inside one door, the Dr Peppers and root beers and Coca-Colas stood end to end in neat racks. Behind the next door were six-pack upon six-pack of every brand of beer sold in Texas, the amber bottles beaded with coldness, the cardboard containers damp and soft, waiting to be picked up gingerly by caring hands.

 

One six-pack of sixteen-ouncers, he thought. He could space them out through the afternoon, just enough to flatten the kinks in his nervous system. Sometimes you needed a parachute. Wasn’t it better to ease into sobriety rather than to be jolted into it?

 

“Find what you want?” the woman behind the counter said. She weighed at least 250 pounds and swelled out like an inverted washtub below the waistline. She was smoking a cigarette and flicking the ash into a bottle cap, her lipstick rimmed crisply on the filter, a V-shaped yellow stain between her fingers.

 

“Where’s the men’s room?” he asked.

 

She drew in on her cigarette and exhaled the smoke slowly, taking his measure. “About four feet behind you, the door with the sign over it that says Men’s Room.”

 

He went in the restroom and came back out wiping the water off his face with a paper towel. He slid open the door to the cold box and lifted out a six-pack of Budweiser, balancing it on his palm, the cans coated with moisture and hard and clinking against one another inside the plastic yoke. The cashier was smoking a fresh one, blowing the smoke through her fingers while she held the cigarette to her mouth. He set the six-pack on the counter and reached for his wallet. But she didn’t ring up the purchase.

 

“Ma’am?”

 

“What?”

 

“You have a reason for acting so damn weird?”

 

“Weird in like what way?”

 

“For openers, staring at me like I just climbed out of a spaceship.”

 

She dropped her cigarette into a bucket of water under the counter. “I don’t have a reason for staring at you.”

 

“So—”

 

“He might.”

 

Her gaze drifted out the front window of the store, past the two gas pumps under the porte cochere. A town constable’s patrol car was parked beside the telephone booth. A man wearing a khaki uniform and shades was sitting behind the wheel, the engine off, the doors open to let in the breeze while he wrote on a clipboard.

 

“That’s Howard. He asked who was just using the phone,” the woman said.

 

“I reckon that could have been me.”

 

“I saw you at the A.A. meeting at the church.”

 

“That could have been me, too.”

 

“You still want the beer?”

 

“What I want is a whole lot of gone between me and your store.”

 

“I cain’t he’p you do that.”

 

“Ma’am, I’m in a mess of trouble. But I haven’t harmed anybody, not intentionally, anyway.”

 

“I expect you haven’t.”

 

Her eyes were full of pity, the same kind of pity and sorrow he had heard in the voice of his friend Billy Bob. Pete folded his arms across his chest again and watched the town constable get out of his patrol car and walk under the porte cochere and pull open the front door of the store. In those few seconds, a line of stitches seemed to form and burst apart across Pete’s heart.

 

“Were you using that booth out there?” the constable asked. His skin was sun-browned, his shirt peppered with sweat, his eyes hidden by his shades.

 

“Yes, sir, just a few minutes ago.”

 

“You owe the operator ninety-five cents. Would you take care of it? She’s ringing it off the hook.”

 

“Yes, sir, right away. I didn’t know I went overtime.”

 

“You want the beer?” the clerk said.

 

“I surely do.”

 

Pete hefted the six-pack under his arm, got his change and an extra three dollars in coins, and walked back out to the booth. The sun was hammering down on the hardpan and the two-lane asphalt state highway, glazing the hills, alkali flats, and the distant railroad track where the freight train had stopped and was baking in the heat.

 

He ripped open the tab on a sixteen-ouncer and set it on the shelf below the phone and punched in Sheriff Holland’s cell phone number. As the phone rang, he gripped the sweaty coldness of the can in his left palm.

 

“Sheriff Holland,” a voice said.

 

“Your cousin Billy Bob—”

 

“He’s already called me. You going to come see us, Pete?”

 

“Yes, sir, that’s what I want to do.”

 

“What’s holding you up?”

 

“I don’t want to go to Huntsville. I don’t want to see this guy Preacher and his friends come after Vikki.”

 

“What do you think they’re doing now, son?”

 

I ain’t your son, a voice inside him said. “You know what I mean.”

 

“How have people been treating you?”

 

“Sir?”

 

“Since you came back from Iraq, how do people treat you? Just general run-of-the-mill people? They been treating you all right?”

 

“I haven’t complained.”

 

“Answer the question.”

 

“They’ve treated me good.”

 

“But you don’t trust them, do you? You think they might be fixing to slicker you.”

 

“Maybe unlike others, I don’t have the luxury of making mistakes.”

 

“I have an idea where you might be, Pete. But I’m not going to call the sheriff there. I want you and Ms. Gaddis to come in on your own. I want y’all to help me put away the guys who killed those poor Asian women. You fought for your country, partner. And now you have to fight for it again.”

 

“I don’t like folks using the flag to get me to do what they want.”

 

“You drinking?”

 

“Sir?”

 

“You were drinking when you called in the original nine-one-one by the church house. If I were you, I’d lay off the hooch till I got this stuff behind me.”

 

“You would, would you?”

 

“I had my share of trouble with it. Billy Bob says you’re a good man. I believe him.”

 

“What do we do, just walk into your office?” Pete said. He looked at the cloud of vapor on top of the aluminum beer can. He looked at the brassy bead of the beer through the tab. His windpipe turned to rust when he tried to swallow.

 

“If you want, I’ll send a cruiser.”

 

Pete picked up the beer can and pressed its coldness against his cheek. He could see the train starting to move on the track, the black gondolas clanging against their couplings as though they were fighting against their own momentum.

 

He sat down on the floor of the booth, pulling the phone and its metal-encased cord with him, the six-pack splaying open on the concrete pad. He felt as though he had descended to the bottom of a well, beyond the sunlight, beyond hope, beyond ever feeling wind on his face again or smelling flowers in the morning or being a part of the great human drama most of the world took for granted, a man with red alligator hide for skin and a bagful of sins that would never be forgiven. He pulled his knees up to his face, his head bent forward, and began to weep silently.

 

“You still with me, bud?”

 

“Tell Miss Maydeen I’m sorry for sassing her. I also apologize to you and your deputy for getting y’all hurt. I also owe an apology to some guy I attacked at a traffic light last night. I think I’m plumb losing my mind.”

 

“You assaulted somebody?”

 

“I threw rocks at his car. I busted a hole in his rear window with a brick.”

 

“Where was this?”

 

Pete told him.

 

“What kind of car?”

 

“A tan Honda.”

 

“You busted a big hole in the window?”

 

“Just under the size of a softball. It was elongated. It looked like the eye of a Chinaman staring out the window.”

 

“You don’t remember the license number, do you?”

 

Pete was still holding the sixteen-ouncer. He set it on the ground outside the booth. He pushed it over with the sole of his boot. “One letter and maybe two numbers. Y’all already got a report on it?”

 

“You could say we may have had contact with the driver.”

 

A few moments later, Pete picked up the cans he had dropped and took them back inside the store and set them on the counter. “Can I get a refund?” he said.

 

“If you hold your mouth right,” the cashier said.

 

“What?”

 

“That’s a joke.” She opened the register drawer and counted out his cash. “There’s some showers in back. Hang around if you feel like it, cowboy.”

 

“I got someone waiting on me.”

 

She nodded.

 

“You’re a nice lady,” he said.

 

“I hear that lots of times,” she said. She stuck another filter-tip in her mouth and lit it with a BIC, blowing the smoke at an upward angle, gazing through the window at the way the two-lane warped in the heat and dissolved into a black lake on the horizon.

 

“I didn’t mean anything, ma’am.”

 

“I look like a ‘ma’am’? It’s ‘miss,’” she said.

 

 

TWO DAYS AFTER the invasion of his home by Jack Collins, Hackberry Holland and Pam Tibbs flew in the department’s single engine plane to San Antonio, borrowed an unmarked car from the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office, and drove into Nick Dolan’s neighborhood. The enclave atmosphere and the size of the homes, the Spanish daggers and hibiscus and palm and umbrella trees and crepe myrtle and bougainvillea in the yards, and the number of grounds workers made Hackberry think of a foreign country, in the tropics, perhaps, or out on the Pacific Rim.

 

Except he was not visiting a neighborhood as much as a paradox. The dark-skinned employees—maids retrieving the trash cans from the curb, yardmen with ear protectors clamped on their heads operating mowers and leaf blowers, hod carriers and framers constructing an extension on a house—were all foreigners, not the repressed and indigenous people Somerset Maugham and George Orwell and Graham Greene had described in their accounts of life inside dying European and British empires. Those who owned and lived in the big houses in Nick Dolan’s neighborhood were probably all native-born but had managed to become colonials in their own country.

 

When Hackberry had called Nick Dolan’s restaurant and asked to interview him, Dolan had sounded wired to the eyes, clearing his throat, claiming to be tied up with business affairs and trips out of state. “I got no idea what this is about. I’m dumbfounded here,” he said.

 

“Arthur Rooney.”

 

“Artie Rooney is an Irish putz. I wouldn’t piss in his mouth if he was dying of thirst. Let me rephrase that: I wouldn’t cross the street to see a pit bull rip out his throat.”

 

“Has the FBI talked with you, Mr. Dolan?”

 

“No, what’s the FBI got to do with anything?”

 

“But you talked to Isaac Clawson the ICE agent, didn’t you?”

 

“Maybe that name is familiar.”

 

“I appreciate your help. We’ll be out to see you this evening.”

 

“Hold on there.”

 

It was late when Hackberry and Pam arrived at Nick’s house, and shadows were spreading across the lawn, fireflies lighting in smoky patterns inside the trees. Nick Dolan ushered them right through the house into his backyard and sat them down on rattan chairs by a glass-topped table already set with a pitcher of limeade and crushed ice and a plate of peeled crawfish and a second plate stacked with pastry. But there was no question in Hackberry’s mind that Nick Dolan was a nervous wreck.

 

Nick began talking about the grapevine that laced the trellises and the latticework over their heads. “Those vines came from my grandfather’s place in New Orleans,” he said. “My grandfather lived uptown, off St. Charles. He was a friend of Tennessee Williams. He was a great man. Know what a great man is? A guy who takes things that are hard and makes them look easy and doesn’t complain. Where’s your gun?”

 

“In the vehicle,” Hackberry said.

 

“I always thought you guys had to have your gun on you. You want some limeade? Try those crawfish. I had them brought live from Louisiana. I boiled and veined them myself. I made the sauce, too. I mash up my own peppers. Go ahead, stick a toothpick in one and slop it in the sauce and tell me what you think. Here, you like chocolate-and-peanut-butter brownies? Those are my wife’s specialty.”

 

Pam and Hackberry looked at Nick silently, their eyes fastened on his. “You’re making me uncomfortable here. I got high blood pressure. I don’t need this,” Nick said.

 

“I think you’re the anonymous caller who warned me about Jack Collins, Mr. Dolan. I wish I’d taken your warning more to heart. He put a couple of dents in my head and almost killed Deputy Tibbs.”

 

“I’m lost.”

 

“I also think you’re the person who called the FBI and told them Vikki Gaddis and Pete Flores were in danger.”

 

Before Hackberry had finished his last sentence, Nick Dolan began shaking his head. “No, no, no, you got the wrong guy. We’re talking about mistaken identity here or something.”

 

“You told me Arthur Rooney wants to murder both you and your family.”

 

Nick Dolan’s small round hands were closing and opening on the glass tabletop. His stomach was rising and sinking, his cheeks blading with color. “I got in some trouble,” he said. “I wanted to get even with Artie for some things he did to me. I got mixed up with bad people, the kind who got no parameters.”

 

“Is one of them named Hugo Cistranos?”

 

“Hugo worked for Artie when Artie ran a security service in New Orleans. We all got flooded out by Katrina and ended up in Texas at the same time. I don’t got anything else to say about this.”

 

“I’m going to find Jack Collins, Mr. Dolan. I’d like to do it with your help. It’ll mean a lot for you down the line.”

 

“You mean I’ll be a friend of the court, something like that?”

 

“It’s a possibility.”

 

“Stick your ‘friend of the court’ stuff up your nose. This crazy fuck Collins, excuse my language, is the only guy keeping us alive.”

 

“I’m not sympathetic with your situation.”

 

“You don’t have a family?”

 

“I looked into Collins’s face. I watched him machine-gun my deputy’s cruiser.”

 

“My wife beat the shit out of him with a cooking pot. He could have killed both of us, but he didn’t.”

 

“Your wife beat up Jack Collins?”

 

“There’s something wrong with the words I use that you can’t understand? I got an echo in my yard?”

 

“I’d like to speak with her, please.”

 

“I’m not sure she’s home.”

 

“You know what obstruction of justice is?” Pam Tibbs said.

 

“Yeah, stuff they talk about on TV detective shows.”

 

“Explain this,” Pam said. She picked up a brownie from the plate and set it back down. “It’s still hot. Tell your wife to come out here.”

 

Nick Dolan stared into space, squeezing his jaw with one hand, his eyes out of sync. “I caused all this.”

 

“Caused what?” Pam said.

 

“Everything.”

 

“Where’s your wife, Mr. Dolan?” Pam asked.

 

“Drove away. Fed up. With the kids in the car.”

 

“They’re not coming back?” she asked.

 

“I don’t know. Vikki Gaddis came to my restaurant and applied for a job as a singer. I wish I’d hired her. I could have made a difference in those young people’s lives. I told all this to Esther. Now she thinks maybe I’m unfaithful.”

 

“Maybe you can still make a difference,” Hackberry said.

 

“I’m through talking with y’all. I wish I’d never left New Orleans. I wish I had helped the people rebuild in the Ninth Ward. I wish I’d done something good with my life.”

 

Pam looked at Hackberry, blowing her breath up into her face.

 

 

THAT NIGHT A storm that was more wind and dust and dry lightning than rain moved across Southwest Texas, and Hackberry decided not to fly back home until morning. He and Pam ate in a Mexican restaurant on the Riverwalk, a short distance from the Alamo. Their outdoor table was situated on flagstones and lit by gas lamps. A gondola loaded with mariachi musicians floated past them on the water, all of the musicians stooping as they went under one of the arched pedestrian bridges. The river was lined with banks of flowers and white stucco buildings that had Spanish grillwork on the balconies, and trees that had been planted in terraced fashion, creating the look of a wooded hillside in the middle of a city.

 

Pam had spoken little during the plane ride to San Antonio and even less since they had left Nick Dolan’s yard.

 

“You a little tired?” Hackberry said.

 

“No.”

 

“So what are you?”

 

“Hungry. Wanting to get drunk, maybe. Or catch up with Jack Collins and do things to him that’ll make him afraid to sleep.”

 

“Guys like Collins don’t have nightmares.”

 

“I think you’ve got him figured wrong.”

 

“He’s a psychopath, Pam. What’s to figure?”

 

“Why didn’t Collins shoot you when your revolver snapped empty?”

 

“Who knows?”

 

“Because he’s setting you up.”

 

“For what?”

 

“To be his executioner.”

 

Hackberry had just raised his fork to his mouth. He paused under a second, his eyes going flat. He put the forkful in his mouth. He watched a gondola emerge from under a stone bridge, the musicians grinning woodenly, a tree trailing its flowers across their sombreros and brocaded suits. “I wouldn’t invest a lot of time thinking about this guy’s complexities,” he said.

 

“They all want the same thing. They want to die, and they want their executioner to be worthy of them. They also want to leave behind as much guilt and fear and depression in others as they can. He aims to mess you up, Hack. That’s why he tried to take me out first. He wanted you to watch it. Then he wanted you to pop him.”

 

“I’ll try to honor his wishes. You don’t want a glass of wine or a beer?”

 

“No.”

 

“It doesn’t bother me.”

 

“I didn’t say it did. I just don’t want any.” She wiped her mouth with her napkin and looked away irritably, then back at him again, her gaze wandering over the stitches in his scalp and the bandage across the bridge of his nose and the half-moons of blue and yellow bruising under his eyes.

 

“Would you stop that?” he said.

 

“I’m going to fix that bastard.”

 

“Don’t give his kind power, Pam.”

 

“Is there anything else I’m doing wrong?”

 

“I’ll think about it.”

 

She set down her knife and fork and kept staring at him until she forced him to look directly at her. “Lose the cavalier attitude, boss. Collins is going to be with us for the long haul.”

 

“I hope he is.”

 

“You still don’t get it. The feds are using Nick Dolan as bait. That means they’re probably using us, too. In the meantime, they’re treating us like beggars at the table.”

 

“That’s the way it is. Sometimes the feds are—”

 

“Assholes?”

 

“Nobody is perfect.”

 

“You ought to get yourself some Optimist Club literature and start passing it out.”

 

“Could be.”

 

She pulled at an earlobe. “I think I’ll have a beer.”

 

He fought against a yawn.

 

“In fact, a beer and a shot of tequila with a salted lime on the side.”

 

“Good,” he said, filling his mouth with a tortilla, his attention fixed on the mariachi band blaring out Pancho Villa’s marching song, “La Cucaracha.”

 

“You think I should go back to school, maybe get a graduate degree and go to work for the U.S. Marshals’ office?”

 

“I’d hate to lose you.”

 

“Go on.”

 

“You have to do what’s right for yourself.”

 

She balled her hands on her knees and stared at her plate. Then she exhaled and started eating again, her eyes veiled with a special kind of sadness.

 

“Pam?” he said.

 

“I’d better eat up and hit the hay. Tomorrow is another day and another dollar, right?”

 

 

HACKBERRY WOKE AT one A.M. in his third-story motel room and sat in the dark, his mind cobwebbed with dreams whose details he couldn’t remember, his skin frigid and dead to the touch. Through a crack in the curtains, he could see headlights streaming across an overpass and a two-engine plane approaching the airport, its windows brightly lit. Somehow the plane and cars were a reassuring sight, testifying to the world’s normality, the superimposition of light upon darkness, and humanity’s ability to overcome even the gravitational pull of the earth.

 

But how long could any man be his own light bearer or successfully resist the hands that gripped one’s ankles more tightly and pulled downward with greater strength each passing day?

 

Hackberry was not sure what an alcoholic was. He knew he didn’t drink anymore and he was no longer a whoremonger. He didn’t get into legal trouble or associate himself for personal gain with corrupt politicians; nor did he drape his cynicism and bitterness over his shoulder like a tattered flag. But there was one character defect or psychological impairment that for a lifetime he had not been able to rid himself of: He remembered every detail of everything he had ever done, said, heard, read, or seen, particularly events that involved moral bankruptcy on his part.

 

Most of the latter occurred during his marriage to his first wife, Verisa. She had been profligate with money, imperious toward those less fortunate than herself, and narcissistic in both her manner and her sex life, to the degree that if he ever thought of her at all, it was in terms of loathing and disgust. His visceral feelings, however, were directed at himself rather than his former wife.

 

His drunkenness and constant remorse had made him dependent on her, and in order not to hate himself worse for his dependence, he had convinced himself that Verisa was someone other than the person he knew her to be. He gave himself over to self-deception and, in doing so, lost any remnant of self-respect he still possessed. Southerners had a term for the syndrome, but it was one he did not use or even like to think about.

 

He paid Verisa back by driving across the border and renting the bodies of poor peasant girls who twisted their faces away from the fog of testosterone and beer sweat he pressed down upon them.

 

Why was he, the vilest and most undeserving of men, spared from the fate he had designed for himself?

 

He had no answer.

 

He turned on the night-light and tried to read a magazine. Then he slipped on his trousers and walked down to the soda machine and bought an orange drink and drank it in the room. He opened the curtain so he could see the night sky and the car lights on the elevated highway and the palm trees on the lawn swelling in the wind.

 

Not far away, 188 men and boys had died inside the walls of the Spanish mission known as the Alamo. At sunrise on the thirteenth day of the siege, thousands of Mexican soldiers had charged the mission and gotten over the walls by stepping on their own dead. The bodies of the Americans were stacked and burned, and no part of them, not an inch of charred bone, was ever located. The sole white survivors, Susanna Dickinson and her eighteenth-month-old child, were refused a five-hundred-dollar payment by the government and forced to live in a San Antonio brothel.

 

Pam Tibbs had taken the room next to his. He saw the light go on under the door that connected their rooms. She tapped lightly on the door. He got up from his chair and stood by the door, not speaking.

 

“Hack?” she said.

 

“I’m fine.”

 

“Look out your window in the parking lot.”

 

“At what?”

 

“Look.”

 

He went to the window and gazed down at the rows of parked cars and the palm trees on the lawn and the tunnels of smoky light under the surface of the swimming pool. He could see nothing of note in the parking lot. But for just a second he thought he saw a shadow cross the clipped grass between two palms that were scrolled with strings of tiny white lights, then disappear through a piked gate on the far side of the pool.

 

He went back to the door that connected his and Pam’s rooms and slid the bolt. “Open your side,” he said.

 

“Just a minute,” she said.

 

A few seconds later, she pulled open the door, wearing jeans, her shirt hanging outside her belt. Her hairbrush lay on top of her bedspread.

 

“What did you see?” he asked.

 

“A guy in a tall hat like the Mad Hatter’s. He was standing by our car. He was looking up at the motel.”

 

“He do anything to the car?”

 

“Not that I saw.”

 

“We’ll check it out tomorrow.”

 

“You couldn’t sleep?” she said.

 

“About every third night, a committee holds a meeting in my head.”

 

She sat down on the stuffed chair in front of him. She was wearing moccasins without socks and no makeup, and the side of her face was printed with the pillow. “I need to tell you something, and I need to do so because it involves something you won’t acknowledge yourself. Collins cuffed you to your bed, but you tore it apart trying to stop him from killing me. You went after him when you had only a pistol and he had a Thompson machine gun. He could have cut you in half, but you went after him anyway.”

 

“You would have done the same.”

 

“It doesn’t matter. You did it. A woman never forgets something like that.”

 

He smiled at her in the darkness and didn’t reply.

 

“Don’t you like me physically? Do you think I’m not pretty? Is it something like that?”

 

“The problem isn’t you, Pam. It’s me. I misused women when I was young. They were poor and illiterate and lived in hovels across the river. My father was a university professor. I was an attorney and a war hero and a candidate for Congress. But I used these women to hide my own failure.”

 

“What does that have to do with me?”

 

“I don’t want to use someone.”

 

“That’s what it would be, then? ‘Use’?”

 

“How about we kill this conversation?”

 

She got up and walked past his chair, beyond his line of vision. He felt her fingers touch his collar and the hair on his neck. “Everybody is made different. Gay people. Young women who want father figures. Men who need their mothers. Fat girls who need a thin man to tell them they’re beautiful. But I like you for what you are and not out of a compulsion. I never put strings on a relationship, either.” She rested her palm on his shoulder blade. “I admire you more than any human being I’ve ever met. Make of that what you want.”

 

“Good night, Pam,” he said.

 

“Yeah, good night,” she said. She leaned over him, folding her arms on his chest, her chin on his head, pressing her breasts against him. “Fire me for this if you like. You were willing to give your life to save mine. God love you, Hack. But you sure know how to hurt someone.”

 

 

 

 

 

21

 

BOBBY LEE HAD driven through the darkness and into the morning with the sunrise at his back, the flood of warm air and light spreading before him across the plains, lifting mesas and piles of rock out of the shadows that had pooled on the hardpan, none of it offering any balm to his soul.

 

He had put his money on Preacher because Preacher was smart and Artie Rooney wasn’t. He was double-crossing Hugo because Hugo was a viper who’d park one behind your ear the first time the wind vane swung in the opposite direction. Where did that leave him? He had teamed up with a guy who was smart and had large amounts of money in offshore accounts and had probably read more books than most college professors. But Preacher was not necessarily smart in the way a survivor was smart. In fact, Bobby Lee was not sure Preacher planned to be a survivor. Bobby Lee wasn’t sure he liked the prospect of becoming the copilot of a guy who had kamikaze ambitions.

 

He drove across a cattle guard onto Preacher’s property and stared disbelievingly at the stucco house that the bikers had destroyed and Preacher had paid a dozer operator to blade into a two-story pile of scorched debris. Preacher was now living in a polyethylene tent at the foot of the mountain behind the concrete slab the dozer had scraped clean. His woodstove sat outside it, and next to it was a vintage icebox with an oak door and brass hinges and handle and a drawer underneath that could be filled with either crushed or chopped-up block ice. Behind the tent, against the mountain, was a portable blue chemical toilet.

 

Clouds had moved across the sun, and the wind was blowing hard when Bobby Lee entered the tent, the flap tearing loose from his hands before he could retie it. He sat down on Preacher’s cot and listened to the brief silence when the wind slackened. “Why do you stay out here, Jack?”

 

“Why shouldn’t I?”

 

“The cops aren’t interested in your house getting blown up?”

 

“It was caused by an electrical short. I make no trouble for anyone. I’m a sojourner who checks books out of the library. These are religious people. Disrespect their totems and feel their wrath. But they don’t take issue with a polite and quiet man.”

 

Preacher was sitting in a canvas chair in front of a writing table, wearing a soiled long-sleeve white shirt and small nonprescription reading glasses and unpressed dark slacks with pin stripes and a narrow brown belt that was notched tightly into his rib cage. On the table was a GI mess kit with a solitary fried egg and blackened wiener in it. A Bible was open next to it, the pages stiff and rippled and tea-colored, as though they had been dipped in creek water and left to dry in the sun.

 

“You’re losing weight,” Bobby Lee said.

 

“What are you not telling me?”

 

Bobby Lee’s brow furrowed, the implicit criticism like the touch of a cigarette to his skin. “Holland was at the Dolan house. Then he went to a motel with the woman who capped Liam. That’s all I know. Jack, let go of the Dolan family. If we got to take care of the Gaddis girl, let’s get on with it. Hugo told you where she’s working. We grab her and the soldier boy, and you finish whatever it is you got to do.”

 

“Why do you think Hugo told us where she was working?”

 

“If we see Hugo or any of his talent around, we splatter their grits. That number you did on those bikers was beautiful, man. A hooker dimed them for you after she screwed them? You know some interesting broads. Remind me not to get in the sack with any of them.”

 

“My mother is buried here.”

 

Bobby Lee wasn’t making the connection. But he seldom did when Preacher started riffing. The wind was blowing harder against the tent, vibrating the aluminum poles, straining the ropes tied to the steel pins outside. A ball of tumbleweed smacked against the side, freezing momentarily against it, then rolling away.

 

“You asked why I live here. My mother married a railroad man who owned this land. He died of ptomaine,” Preacher said.

 

“You inherited the place?”

 

“I bought it at a tax sale.”

 

“Your mom didn’t leave a will?”

 

“What business is it of yours?”

 

“It isn’t, Jack,” Bobby Lee said. “Those guys you had to deal with in the motel room? They were Josef Sholokoff’s people?”

 

“They didn’t have time to introduce themselves.”

 

“I have to line out something to you. About Liam. It’s eating my lunch. I set him up in that café. I called him on my cell and said that Holland had made him. I split and let him take the fall.”

 

Preacher gazed at Bobby Lee, his legs crossed, his wrists hanging off the arms of the chair. “Why you telling me this, boy?”

 

“You said I was like a son to you. You meant that?”

 

Preacher crossed his heart, not speaking.

 

“I got a bad feeling. I think you and me might go down together. But I don’t see that I’ve got a lot of choices right now. If we get cooled out, I don’t want a lie between us.”

 

“You’re a mixed bag of cats, Bobby Lee.”

 

“I’m trying to be straight up with you. You’re a purist. There’s not many of your kind around anymore. That doesn’t mean I like eating a bullet.”

 

“Why do you think we’re going to get cooled out?”

 

“You tried to machine-gun a deputy sheriff. Then you had a chance to clip the sheriff and didn’t. I think maybe you’ve got a death wish.”

 

“That’s what Sheriff Holland probably thinks. But you’re both wrong. In this business, you recognize the great darkness in yourself, and you go inside it and die there, and then you don’t have to die again. Why do you think the Earp brothers took Doc Holliday with them to the OK Corral? A man coughing blood on his handkerchief with one hand and covering your back with a double-barrel ten-gauge won’t ever let you down. So you fed ole Liam to the wolves, did you?”

 

Bobby Lee looked away from Preacher. Then he corrected his expression and stared straight into Preacher’s face. “Liam made fun of me after I stood up for him. He said I was lots of things, but I would never be a soldier. What was that about a great darkness inside us?”

 

If Bobby Lee’s question registered on Preacher, he chose to ignore it. “I’m going to rebuild my house, Bobby Lee. I’d like for you to be part of that. I’d like for you to feel you belong here.”

 

“That makes me proud, Jack.”

 

“You look like you want to ask me something.”

 

“Maybe we could put some flowers on your mother’s grave. Where’s she buried?”

 

The wind was thumping the tent so hard, Bobby Lee could not be sure what Preacher said. He asked him to repeat the statement.

 

“I never quite get through to you,” Preacher shouted.

 

“The wind’s howling.”

 

“She’s underneath your feet! Where I planted her!”

 

 

ON THE FAR end of the same burning, windswept day, one on which the monsoonal downpour had been baked out of the topsoil and dust devils formed themselves out of nothing and spun across the plains and, in the blink of an eye, broke apart against monument rocks, Vikki Gaddis walked from the Fiesta motel to the steak house where she waited tables and sometimes sang with the band. The sky had turned yellow as the heat went out of the day, the sun settling into a melted orange pool among the rain clouds in the west. In spite of the humidity and dust, she felt a change was taking place in the world around her. Maybe her optimistic mood was based on the recognition that no matter what a person’s situation was, eventually it would have to change, for good or bad. Perhaps for her and Pete, change was at hand. There was a greenish tint to the land, as though a patina of new life had been sprinkled on the countryside. She could smell the mist from the grass sprinklers on the center ground and the flowers blooming in the window boxes of the motel at the intersection, a watered date-palm oasis in the midst of a desert, a reminder that a person always had choices.

 

Pete had told her of his conversation with the sheriff whose name was Hackberry Holland and the offer of protection the sheriff had made. The offer was a possibility, a viable alternative. But to step across a line into a world of legal entanglement and processes that were irreversible was easier said than done, she thought. They would be risking the entirety of their future, even their lives, on the word of a man they didn’t know. Pete kept reassuring her that Billy Bob would not have given him Hackberry’s name if he were not a good person, but Pete had an incurable trust in his fellow man, no matter how much the world hurt him, to the point where his faith was perhaps more a vice than a virtue.

 

She remembered an incident that had occurred when she was a little girl and her father had been awakened at two in the morning by the chief of police in Medicine Lodge and told to pick up an eighteen-year-old black kid who had escaped from a county prison in Oklahoma. The boy, who had been arrested for petty theft, had crawled through a heating duct in January and had almost been fried before he kicked a grille from an air vent that, by sheer chance, gave onto an unsecured part of the building. He had ridden a freight train into Kansas with two twisted ankles and had hidden out in his aunt’s house, where in all probability he would have been forgotten, since his criminal status was marginal and not worth the expense of finding and bringing him back.

 

Except the escapee had the IQ of a seven-year-old and phoned the county prison collect and asked the jailer to mail his possessions to Medicine Lodge. He made sure the jailer wrote down his aunt’s correct address. A ninety-day county bit had now been augmented by a mandatory minimum of one year in McAlester Pen.

 

Three days later, Vikki watched her father and an Oklahoma sheriff’s deputy lead the escapee in an orange jumpsuit and waist and leg chains to the back of an Oklahoma state vehicle and lock him to a D-ring inset in the floor. The escapee was limping badly and could not have weighed over a hundred pounds. His arms were like sticks. His skin seemed to be possessed of a disease that leached it of color. His hair had been cut so that it resembled a rusty Brillo pad glued to his scalp.

 

“What’s gonna happen to him, Daddy?” Vikki had asked.

 

“He’ll be cannibalized.”

 

“What’s that mean?”

 

“Honey, it means on a day like this, your old man would like to be a full-time musician.”

 

What would her father say about her and Pete’s situation now? She had always identified her father more with his music than with his career as a lawman. He was always happy, his tanned skin crinkling at the corners of his eyes, and seldom let the world injure him. He lent money to people who could not pay it back and befriended drunkards and minorities and didn’t allow either politics or organized religion to carry him away. He had collected all the Carter Family’s early music and was immensely proud to have known the patriarch of the family, Alvin Pleasant Carter, who, in a postcard to Vikki’s father, had called him “a fellow musicianer.” His favorite Carter family song was “Keep on the Sunny Side of Life.”

 

Where are you now, Daddy? In heaven? Out there among the mesas or inside the blowing clouds of dust and rain? But you’re somewhere, aren’t you? she said to herself. You always said music never dies; it lives on the trade winds and wraps all the way around the world.

 

She had to wipe a tear from her eye before she went inside the steak house.

 

“A couple of famous fellows were asking about you,” the bartender said.

 

“How do you define ‘famous’?”

 

The bartender was an ex–rodeo rider nicknamed Stub, for the finger he had pinched off when he caught it in a calf-rope at the Calgary Stampede. He was tall and had a stomach shaped like a water-filled enema bottle and hair that was as slick and black as patent leather. He wore black trousers and a long-sleeve white shirt and a black string tie and was drying champagne glasses and setting them upside down on a white towel while he talked. “They were in last night and wanted to meet you, but you were busy.”

 

“Stub, would you just answer the question?”

 

“They said they were from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.”

 

“They’re hanging out here rather than Malibu because they like the weather in late August?”

 

“They didn’t say.”

 

“Did you give them my name?”

 

“I said your name was Vikki.”

 

“Did you give them my last name or tell them where I live?”

 

“I didn’t tell them where you live.”

 

“What are their names?”

 

“They left a card here. Or I think they did.” He looked behind him at two or three dozen business cards in a cardboard box under the cash register. “They liked your singing. One of them said you sounded like Mother something.”

 

“Maybelle?”

 

“What?”

 

“I sound like Mother Maybelle?”

 

“I don’t remember.”

 

“Stub—”

 

“Maybe they’ll come in tonight.”

 

“Don’t talk about me to anyone. No one, not for any reason. Do you understand?”

 

Stub shook his head and dried a glass, his back to her.

 

“Did you hear me?”

 

He sighed loudly, as though a great weight had been unfairly set on his shoulders. She wanted to hit him in the head with a plate.

 

Until nine-thirty P.M. she served dinners from the kitchen and drinks from the bar to tourists on their way to Big Bend and family people and lonely utility workers far from home who came in for a beer and the music. Then she took her guitar from a locked storage compartment in back and removed it from the case and tuned the strings she had put on only last week.

 

The Gibson had probably been manufactured over sixty years ago and was the biggest flattop the company made. It had a double-braced red spruce top and rosewood back and sides. It was known as the instrument of choice of Elvis and Emmylou or any rockabilly who loved the deep-throated warm sound of early acoustic guitars. Its sunburst finish and pearl and flower-motif inlay and dark neck and silver frets seemed to capture light and pools of shadow at the same time and, out of the contrasts, create a separate work of art.

 

When she made an E chord and ticked the plectrum across the strings, the reverberation through the wood was magical. She sang “You Are My Flower” and “Jimmie Brown the Newsboy” and “The Western Hobo.” But she could hardly concentrate on the words. Her gaze kept sweeping the crowd, the tables, the utility workers at the bar, a group of European bicyclists who came in sweaty and unshaved with backpacks hanging from their shoulders. Where was Pete? He was supposed to meet her at ten P.M., when the kitchen closed and she usually started cleaning tables and preparing to leave.

 

A man who was alone at a front table kept spinning his hat on his finger while he watched her sing; one side of his face was cut with a grin. He wore exaggerated hillbilly sideburns, cowboy boots, a print shirt that looked ironed on his tanned skin, jeans that were stretched to bursting on his thighs, and a big polished brass belt buckle with the Stars and Bars embossed on it. When she glanced at him, he gave her a wink.

 

Over the heads of the crowd, she saw Stub answer the phone. Then he replaced it in the cradle and said something to a drink waitress, who walked up to the bandstand and told Vikki, “Pete said to tell you not to eat dinner, he’s going to the grocery to fix y’all something.”

 

“He’s going to the grocery at ten o’clock?”

 

“They stay open till eleven. Count your blessings. My old man is watching rented porn at his mother’s house.”

 

Vikki laid her guitar in its case, fastened the clasps, and locked the case in the storage room. At closing time, Pete still had not shown up. She went to the bar and sat down, her feet hurting, her face stiff from smiling when she didn’t feel like it.

 

“Pretty fagged out?” a voice beside her said.

 

It was the cowboy with the Confederate belt buckle. He had not sat down but was standing close enough that she could smell the spearmint and chewing tobacco on his breath. He was holding his hat with both hands, straightening the brim, pushing a dent out of the crown, brushing a spot out of the felt. He put it on his head and took it back off, his attention focusing on Vikki. “You off?” he said.

 

“Am I what?”

 

“You need a ride? Every foot of wind out there has got three feet of sand in it.”

 

Stub compressed a small white towel in his palm and dropped it on the bar in front of the cowboy. “Last call for alcohol,” he said.

 

“Include me out.”

 

“Good, because this is a family-type joint that closes early. Then Vikki helps me clean up. Then I walk her home.”

 

“Glad to hear it,” the cowboy said. He put a breath mint in his mouth and cracked it between his molars, grinning while he did it.

 

Stub watched him leave, then set a cup of coffee in front of Vikki. “Those guys come back?” he asked.

 

“The ones who claim they’re with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band?”

 

“You don’t believe they’re the genuine article?”

 

She was too tired to talk about it. She lifted her coffee cup, then replaced it in the saucer without drinking from it. “I won’t be able to sleep,” she said.

 

“You want me to walk you home?”

 

“I’m fine. Thanks for your help, Stub.”

 

He picked up a business card tucked under the register. “I dug this one out of the box,” he said. He set it in front of her.

 

She picked it up and looked at the printing across the face. “It says ‘Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.’”

 

“The guy wrote something on the back. I didn’t read it.”

 

She turned the card over in her palm. “It says he loved my singing.”

 

“Who?”

 

“Jeff Hanna. His name is right there.”

 

“Who’s Jeff Hanna?”

 

“The guy who founded the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.”

 

She walked back to the motel. The stars had come out, and in the west, the bottom of the sky was still lit with a glow that was like a flare burning inside a green vapor. But she could take no comfort in the beauty of the stars and late-summer light on a desert plain. Each time a car or truck passed her, she unconsciously moved away from the asphalt, averting her face, her eyes searching for a sidewalk that led to a building, a driveway to a house, a swale that fronted a filling station.

 

Would they live this way the rest of their lives?

 

She unlocked her door and went inside her motel room. The air conditioner was cranked up all the way, moisture running down its side onto the rug. Pete had not returned from the grocery store, and she was exhausted and hungry and scared and incapable of thinking about the next twenty-four hours. Only Pete would choose to prepare a late and complicated dinner on the night they had to make a decision that would either confirm their status as permanent fugitives or place them in the hands of a legal system they didn’t trust.

 

She undressed and went into the shower and turned on the hot water. The steam rolled out of the stall in a huge cloud and fogged the mirror and glistened on the plaster walls and puffed through the partially open door into the bedroom.

 

When she had been a teenager, her father had always teased her about her love for stray animals. “If you’re not careful, you’ll find a fellow just like one of those cats or dogs and run off with him,” he had said.

 

Who had she found?

 

Pete, bumbling his way into the maw of mass murderers.

 

As she stared at her reflection through a small hole in the fogged mirror, she was stricken with shame and guilt by her own thoughts. Today was her birthday. She had forgotten it, but Pete had not.

 

She was filled with unrelieved anger at herself and the intractability of their situation. For the first time in her life, she understood how people could deliberately injure and even kill themselves. Their desperation didn’t have its origins in depression. The warm tub of water was cosmetic; the quick downward movement across the forearms was born out of rage at the self.

 

She got into the shower and washed her hair and lathered her breasts and underarms and thighs and abdomen and buttocks and calves, holding her face so close to the hot spray that her skin turned as red as a blister. How would they take back their lives? How would they free themselves from the fear that waited for them every morning like a hungry animal? The only sanctuary they had was a motel room with a clanking air conditioner dripping rust on the rug, a bed stained with the fornications of others, and curtains they could close on a highway that led back to a rural crossroads and a mass burial ground she couldn’t bear to think about.

 

She propped her forehead against the stall, the jet of shower water exploding on her scalp, the steam seeping into the bedroom where the night chain on the door hung down on the jamb. She had started out the evening thinking about choices. The rain had changed the land, and the sunset had reshaped the mountains and cooled the desert. He who was the alpha and the omega made all things new, didn’t He? That was the promise, wasn’t it?

 

But when you were in a room that seemed to have no exit except false doors painted on the walls, how were you supposed to choose? What kind of cruel joke was that to play on anyone, much less on those who had tried to do right with their lives?

 

She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and kept her head pressed so hard against the shower wall that she thought her skin would split.

 

 

PETE STEERED HIS basket to the deli counter and dropped a rotisserie chicken, a carton of potato salad, and a carton of coleslaw inside. Then he lifted a six-pack of ice-cold Dr Pepper out of the cooler and a half-gallon of frozen yogurt from the freezer and headed for the bakery. He picked up an angel food cake and found a loaf of French bread that was still soft. The baker was working late and was cleaning up behind the pastry counter. Pete asked her to scroll “Happy Birthday, Vikki” on his cake.

 

“Special girl, huh?” she said.

 

“Yes, ma’am, ain’t none better,” he replied.

 

He paid up front and, with a grocery bag in each arm, began the one-mile walk toward the motel. The sun’s afterglow had finally died on the horizon, and he could see the evening star bright and twinkling above a rock ridge that looked carved from decaying bone. The wind had stopped completely, and under an overhang of trees, he thought he could smell an autumnal odor like gas and chrysanthemums in the air. An eighteen-wheeler passed him, its brakes hissing, a backwash of heat and diesel fumes enveloping him. He veered away from the road’s edge, walking now on an uneven surface, gravel breaking under his feet, his coned-up Mexican straw hat bobbing on his head. Up ahead, under a chinaberry tree, was a shut-down Sno-Ball stand, a cluster of bright red cherries painted on a wood sign above its shuttered serving counter. In the distance, when a vehicle approached from the west, he could dimly see the abandoned drive-in theater and the weed-grown miniature-golf course and the silhouettes of the Cadillac car bodies buried nose-down in the hardpan. Vikki must be at the motel by now, he thought. Waiting for him, worrying, maybe secretly regretting she had ever hooked up with him.

 

He thought the word “Vikki,” so it became a sound in his head rather than a word. He thought it in a way that turned the word into a heart with blood pumping in it and curly hair and strangely colored recessed eyes and breath that was sweet and skin that smelled as fresh as flowers opening in the morning. She was smart and pretty and brave and talented and took no credit for any of it. If he had money, they could go to Canada. He had heard about Lake Louise and the blue Canadian Rockies and places where you could still cowboy for a living and drive a hundred miles without seeing a man-built structure. Vikki talked all the time about Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston and the music of the Great American West and the promise the land had held for the generation that came out of the 1940s. Montana, British Columbia, Wyoming, the Cascades in Washington, what did it matter? Those were the places for a new beginning. He had to turn things around and make it up to Vikki for what he had done. He had to separate himself from the nine murdered Asian women and girls who lived in his dreams. Didn’t all dead people grow weary and eventually go toward a white light and leave the world to its illusions?

 

If it cost him his life, he had to make these things happen.

 

He shifted the sack that was cupped in his right forearm so he wouldn’t bruise the cake inside. Behind him, he heard the tires of a diesel-powered vehicle pulling off the asphalt onto the gravel.

 

“Pete, want a ride?” the driver of the pickup said. He was grinning. A felt hat with a wilted brim hung on the gun rack behind him. He wore a print shirt that was as taut on his torso as his sun-browned skin.

 

“I don’t have far to go,” Pete replied, not recognizing the driver.

 

“I work with Vikki. She said y’all are cooking up a meal tonight. Special occasion?”

 

“Something like that,” Pete said, still walking, looking straight ahead.

 

“That sack looks like it’s fixing to split.” The driver was steering with one hand, keeping his pickup on the road’s shoulder, tapping the brake to keep the idle from accelerating his vehicle past Pete.

 

“Don’t remember me? That’s ’cause I’m in the kitchen. Bending over the sink most of the time.”

 

“Don’t need a lift. Got it covered. Thanks.”

 

“Suit yourself. I hope Vikki feels better,” the driver said. He started to pull back on the asphalt, craning out the window to see if the lane was clear, his shoulders hunched up over the wheel.

 

“Hang on. What’s wrong with Vikki?” Pete said.

 

But the driver was ignoring him, waiting for a church bus to pass.

 

“Hey, pull over,” Pete said, walking faster, the bottom of one bag starting to break under the weight of the damp six-pack of Dr Pepper. Then the bottom caved, cascading the six-pack and a box of cereal and a quart of milk and a container of blueberries onto the gravel.

 

The driver of the pickup pulled his vehicle back onto the safety of the shoulder, leaning forward, waiting for Pete to speak again.

 

“Vikki’s sick?” Pete said.

 

“She was holding her stomach and looking kind of queasy. There’s a nasty kind of flu going around. It gives you the red scours for about a day or so.”

 

“Park up yonder,” Pete said. “It’ll take me a minute.”

 

The driver didn’t try to conceal his vexation. He looked at the face of his watch and pulled into darkness under the chinaberry tree and cut his lights, waiting for Pete to pick up his groceries from the roadside and carry them to the bed of the truck. The driver did not get out of his vehicle or offer to help. Pete made one trip, then returned to pick up the bag that had not broken. The back window of the truck was black under the tree’s overhang, the hood ticking with heat. The driver sat with his arm propped casually on his window, rolling a matchstick on his teeth.

 

Pete walked to the passenger side and got in. A pair of handcuffs hung from the rearview mirror.

 

“Them are just plastic,” the driver said. He grinned again, his pleasant mood back in place. He wore a brass buckle on his belt that was embossed with the Stars and Bars and was burnished the color of browned butter. “You got a knife?”

 

“What for?”

 

“This floor rug keeps tangling in my accelerator. It like to got me killed up the road.”

 

Pete worked his Swiss Army knife out of his jeans and opened the long blade and handed it to the driver. The driver started sawing at a piece of loose carpet with it. “Strap yourself in. The latch is right there on your left. You got to dig for it.”

 

“How about we get on it?”

 

“State law says you got to be buckled up. I tend to be conscious of the law. I did a postgraduate study in cotton-picking ’cause I wasn’t, know what I mean?” The driver saw the expression in Pete’s face. “Ninety days on the P farm for nonsupport. Not necessarily anything I’d brag to John Dillinger about.”

 

Pete stretched the safety belt across his chest and pushed the metal tongue into the latch and heard it snap firmly into place. But the belt felt too tight. He pushed against it, trying to adjust its length.

 

The driver tossed the piece of sawed fabric out the window and folded the knife blade back into the handle with his palm. “My niece was wearing it. Hang on. We ain’t got far to go,” he said. He took the gearshift out of park and dropped it into drive.

 

“Give me my knife.”

 

“Just a second, man.”

 

Pete pressed the release button on the latch, but nothing happened. “What’s the deal?” he said.

 

“Deal?”

 

“The belt is stuck.”

 

“I got my hands full, buddy,” the driver replied.

 

“Who are you?”

 

“Give it a break, will you? I got a situation here. Do you believe this asshole?”

 

An SUV had pulled off the road beyond the Sno-Ball stand and was now backing up.

 

“What the fuck?” the driver of the pickup said.

 

The SUV was accelerating, its bumper headed toward the pickup, the tires swerving through the gravel. The driver of the pickup dropped his gearshift into reverse and mashed on the accelerator, but it was too late. The trailer hitch on the SUV plowed into the truck’s grille, the steel ball on the hitch and the triangular steel mount plunging deep into the radiator’s mesh, ripping the fan blades from their shaft, jolting the pickup’s body sideways.

 

Pete jerked at the safety belt, but it was locked solid, and he realized he’d been had. But the events taking place around him were even more incongruous. The driver of the SUV had cut his lights and leaped onto the gravel, holding an object close to his thigh so it could not be seen from the road. The man moved hurriedly to the driver’s door of the pickup, jerked it open, and, in one motion, thrust himself inside and grabbed the driver by the throat with one hand and, with the other, jammed a blue-black .38 snub-nose revolver into the driver’s mouth. He fitted his thumb over the knurled surface of the hammer and cocked it back. “I’ll blow your brains all over the dashboard, T-Bone. You’ve seen me do it,” he said.

 

T-Bone, the driver of the pickup, could not speak. His eyes bulged from his head, and saliva ran from both sides of his mouth.

 

“Blink your eyes if you got the message, moron,” the man from the SUV said.

 

T-Bone lowered his eyelids and opened them again. The driver of the SUV slid the revolver from T-Bone’s mouth and lowered the hammer with his thumb and wiped the saliva off the steel onto T-Bone’s shirt. Then, for no apparent reason other than unbridled rage, he hit him in the face with it.

 

T-Bone pressed the flat of his hand to the cut below his eye. “Hugo sent me. The broad is at the Fiesta motel,” he said. “We couldn’t find the Fiesta ’cause we were looking for the Siesta. We had the wrong name of the motel, Bobby Lee.”

 

“You follow me to the next corner and turn right. Keep your shit-machine running for three blocks, then we’ll be in the country. Don’t let this go south on you.” Bobby Lee Motree’s eyes met Pete’s. “It’s called a Venus flytrap. Rapists use it. It means you’re screwed. But ‘screwed’ and ‘bullet in the head’ aren’t necessarily the same thing. You roger that, boy? You’ve caused me a mess of trouble. You can’t guess how much trouble, which means your name is on the top of the shit list right now. Start your engine, T-Bone.”

 

T-Bone turned the ignition. The engine coughed and blew a noxious cloud of black smoke from the exhaust pipe. Something tinkled against metal, and antifreeze streamed into the gravel as the engine caught, then steam and a scorched smell like a hose or rubber belt cooking on a hot surface rose from the hood. Pete sat silent and stiff against the seat, pushing himself deeper into it so he could get a thumb under the safety strap and try to work it off his chest. His Swiss Army knife was on the floor, the red handle half under the driver’s foot. A car went by, then a truck, the illumination of their headlights falling outside the pool of shadow under the chinaberry tree.

 

“My piece is under the seat,” T-Bone said.

 

“Go ahead.”

 

“I need to talk to Hugo.”

 

“Hugo doesn’t have conversations with dead people. That’s what you’re gonna be unless you do what I say.”

 

T-Bone bent over, his gaze straight ahead, and lifted a .25 auto from under the seat. He kept it in his left hand and laid it across his lap so it was pointed at Pete’s rib cage. A thin whistling sound like a teakettle’s was building inside the hood. “I didn’t mean to get in your space, Bobby Lee. I was doing what Hugo told me.”

 

“Say another word, and I’m going to seriously hurt you.”

 

Pete remained silent as T-Bone followed Bobby Lee’s SUV out of town and up a dirt road bordered by pastureland where black Angus were clumped up in an arroyo and under a solitary tree by a windmill. Pete’s left hand drifted down to the latch on the safety belt. He worked his fingers over the square outline of the metal, pushing the plastic release button with his thumb, trying to free himself by creating enough slack in the belt to go deeper into the latch rather than pull against it.

 

“You’re wasting your time. It has to be popped loose with a screwdriver from the inside,” T-Bone said. “By the way, I ain’t no rapist.”

 

“Were you at the church?” Pete asked.

 

“No, but you were. Way I see it, you got no kick coming. So don’t beg. I’ve heard it before. Same words from the same people. It ain’t their fault. The world’s been picking on them. They’ll do anything to make it right.”

 

“My girlfriend is innocent. She wasn’t part of anything that happened at that church.”

 

“A child is created from its parents’ fornication. Ain’t none of us innocent.”

 

“What were you told to do to us?”

 

“None of your business.”

 

“You’re not on the same page as the guy in the SUV, though, are you?”

 

“That’s something you ain’t got to worry about.”

 

“That’s right. I don’t. But you do,” Pete said.

 

Pete saw T-Bone wet his bottom lip. A drop of blood from the cut under his eye slipped down his cheek, as though a red line were being drawn there with an invisible pencil. “Say that over.”

 

“Why would Hugo send you after us and not tell Bobby Lee? Bobby Lee is working on his own, isn’t he? How’s the guy named Preacher fit into all this?”

 

T-Bone glanced sideways, the shine of fear in his eyes. “How much you know about Preacher?”

 

“If Bobby Lee is working with him, where’s that leave you?”

 

T-Bone sucked in his cheeks as though they were full of moisture. But Pete guessed that in reality, his mouth was as dry as cotton. The dust from the SUV was corkscrewing in the pickup’s headlights. “You’re a smart one, all right. But for a guy who’s so dadburned smart, it must be strange to find yourself in your current situation. Another thing I cain’t figure out: I talked with your girlfriend at the steak house. How’d a guy who looks like a fried chitling end up with a hot piece of ass like that?”

 

Up ahead, the brake lights on the SUV lit up as brightly as embers inside the dust. To the south, the ridges and mesas that flanged the Rio Grande were purple and gray and blue and cold-looking against the night sky.

 

Bobby Lee got out of his vehicle and walked back to the truck, his nine-millimeter dangling from his right hand. “Cut your lights and turn off your engine,” he said.

 

“What are we doing?”

 

“There’s no ‘we.’” Bobby Lee’s cell phone hung from a cord looped over his neck.

 

“I thought we were working together. Call Hugo. Call Artie. Straighten this out.”

 

Bobby Lee screwed the muzzle of a nine-millimeter against T-Bone’s temple. The hammer was already cocked, the butterfly safety off.

 

“You use your nine on your—”

 

“That’s right, I do,” Bobby Lee said. “A fourteen-rounder, manufactured before the bunny huggers got them banned. Hand me your piece, butt-first.”

 

T-Bone lifted his hand to eye level, his fingers clamped across the frame of his .25. Bobby Lee took it from him and dropped it in his pocket. “Who’s down here with you?”

 

“A couple of new people. Maybe Hugo’s around. I don’t know. Maybe—”

 

“Maybe what?”

 

“There’s a lot of interest in Preacher.”

 

Bobby Lee removed the nine-millimeter’s muzzle from T-Bone’s temple, leaving a red circle that seemed to glow against the bone. “Get out.”

 

T-Bone stepped carefully from the door. “I was supposed to grab the girl and call Hugo and not do anything to her. I didn’t pull it off, so I saw the kid carrying his groceries on the road, and I took a chance.”

 

Bobby Lee was silent, busy with thoughts inside of which people lived or died or were left somewhere in between; his thoughts shaped and reshaped themselves, sorting out different scenarios that, in seconds, could result in a situation no human being wanted to experience.

 

“If you see Preacher—” T-Bone said.

 

“I’ll see him.”

 

“I just carry out orders.”

 

“Do I need to jot that down so I got the wording right?”

 

“I ain’t worth it, Bobby Lee.”

 

“Worth what?”

 

“Whatever.”

 

“Tell me what ‘whatever’ is.”

 

“Why you doing this to me?”

 

“Because you piss me off.”

 

“What’d I do?”

 

“You remind me of a zero. No, a zero is a thing, a circle with air inside it. You make me think of something that’s less than a zero.”

 

T-Bone’s gaze wandered out into the pasture. More Angus were moving into the arroyo. There were trees along the arroyo, and the shadows of the cattle seemed to dissolve into the trees’ shadows and enlarge and darken them at the same time. “It’s fixing to rain again. They always clump up before it rains.”

 

Bobby Lee was breathing through his nose, his eyes unfocused, strained, as though someone were shining a light into them.

 

T-Bone closed his eyes, and his voice made a clicking sound, but no words came from his throat. Then he hawked loudly and spat a bloody clot on the ground. “I got ulcers.”

 

Bobby Lee didn’t speak.

 

“Don’t shoot me in the face,” T-Bone said.

 

“Turn around.”

 

“Bobby Lee.”

 

“If you look back, if you call Hugo, if you contact anybody about this, I’m gonna do to you what you did to that Mexican you tied up in that house in Zaragoza. Your truck stays here. Don’t ever come in this county again.”

 

“How do I know you’re not—”

 

“If you’re still sucking air after about forty yards, you’ll know.”

 

Bobby Lee rested his forearm on the truck window and watched T-Bone walk away. He slowly turned his gaze on Pete. “What are you looking at?”

 

“Not a whole lot.”

 

“You think this is funny? You think you’re cute?”

 

“What I think is you’re standing up to your bottom lip in your own shit.”

 

“I’m the best friend you got, boy.”

 

“Then you’re right. I’m in real trouble. Tell you what. Pop me out of this safety belt, and I’ll accept your surrender.”

 

Bobby Lee walked around to the other side of the vehicle and opened the door. He pulled a switchblade from his jeans and flicked it open. He sliced the safety strap in half, the nine-millimeter in his right hand, then stepped back. “Get on your face.”

 

Pete stepped out on the ground, got to his knees, and lay on his chest, the smell of the grass and the earth warm in his face. He twisted his head around.

 

“Eyes front,” Bobby Lee said, pressing his foot between Pete’s shoulder blades. “Put your hands behind you.”

 

“Where’s Vikki?”

 

Bobby Lee didn’t reply. He stooped over and hooked a handcuff on each of Pete’s wrists, squeezing the teeth of the ratchets as deep as he could into the locking mechanism. “Get up.”

 

“At the A.A. meeting, you said you were in Iraq.”

 

“What about it?”

 

“You don’t have to do this stuff.”

 

“Here’s a news flash for you. Every flag is the same color. The color is black. No quarter, no mercy, it’s ‘burn, motherfucker, burn.’ Tell me I’m full of shit.”

 

“You were kicked out of the army, weren’t you?”

 

“Close your mouth, boy.”

 

“That guy, T-Bone, you saw yourself in him. That’s why you wanted to tear him apart.”

 

“Maybe I can work you in as a substitute.”

 

Bobby Lee opened the back door of the SUV and shoved Pete inside. He slammed the door and lifted the cell phone from the cord that hung around his neck, punching the speed dial with his thumb. “I got the package,” he said.

 

 

 

 

 

22

 

VIKKI DRIED HERSELF and wrapped the towel around her body and began brushing her teeth. The mirror was heavily fogged, the heat and moisture from her shower escaping through the partially opened door into the bedroom. She thought she heard a movement, perhaps a door closing, a half-spoken sentence trailing into nothingness. She squeezed the handle on the faucet, shutting off the water, her toothbrush stationary in her mouth. She set the toothbrush in a water glass. “Pete?” she said.

 

There was no response. She tucked the towel more securely around her. “Is that you?” she said.

 

She heard electronic laughter through the wall and realized the people in the next room, a Hispanic couple with two teenage children, had once again turned up the volume on their television to full jet-engine mode.

 

She opened the door wide and tied a hand towel around her head as she walked into the bedroom. She had left only one light burning, a lamp by the table in the far corner. It created more shadows than it did illumination and softened the neediness of the room—the bedspread that she avoided touching, the sun-faded curtains, the brown water spots on the ceiling, the molding that had cracked away from the window jambs.

 

She felt his presence before she actually saw him, in the same way one encounters a faceless presence in a dream, a protean figure without origins, from an unknown place, who can walk through walls and locked doors, and in this instance place himself in the cloth-covered chair by the closet, on the far side of the bed, the only telephone in the room two feet from his hand.

 

He had made himself comfortable, one leg crossed on his knee, his pin-striped suit in need of pressing, his white shirt starched, his shoes buffed, his knit necktie not quite knotted, his shave done without a mirror. Like the dream figure, he was a study in contradiction, his shabby elegance not quite real, his rectangularity that of a grandiose poseur sitting in a soup kitchen.

 

He kept his eyes on hers and did not lower them to her body, but she could see the flicker of hunger around his mouth, the hollows in his cheeks, his suppressed need to lick his tongue across his bottom lip.

 

“You,” she said.

 

“Yes.”

 

“I hoped I would never see you again.”

 

“Worse men than I are looking for you, missy.”

 

“Don’t you talk down to me.”

 

“You don’t wonder how I got in?”

 

“I don’t care how you got in. You’re here. Now you need to leave.”

 

“But that’s not likely, is it?”

 

“By your foot.”

 

“What?”

 

“What’s that by your foot?”

 

He looked down at the carpet. “This?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“A twenty-two derringer. But it’s not for you. If I were a different sort of fellow, it might be. But it’s not.” He cupped his hand to lift his leg gingerly off his knee and set it down. “You did me up proper on the highway.”

 

“I stopped to help you because I thought you had a flat. You repaid the kindness by trying to abduct me.”

 

“I don’t ‘abduct’ people, miss. Or Ms.”

 

“Excuse me. You kill them.”

 

“I have. When they came after me. When they tried to kill me first. When they were part of a higher plan that I didn’t have control over. Sit down. Do you want your bathrobe?”

 

“I don’t have one.”

 

“Sit down anyway.”

 

She felt as if a hot coal had been placed on her scalp. Moisture was leaking out of the towel she had wrapped on her head. Her face stung, and her eyes burned. She could feel drops of sweat networking down her thighs like lines of ants. His eyes dropped to her loins, then he looked away quickly and pretended to be distracted by the noise the air conditioner made. She sat down at the small table against the wall, her knees close together, her arms folded across her chest. “Where’s Pete?” she asked.

 

“He was rescued by a friend of mine.”

 

“Rescued?” She paused and said the word a second time. “Rescued?” She could taste the acidity in her saliva when she spoke.

 

“Do you want me to leave without resolving our problem? Do you want to leave Pete’s situation undecided? He’s out there somewhere on a dark road in the hands of a man who believes he’s a descendant of Robert E. Lee.”

 

“Who are you a descendant of? Who the fuck are you?”

 

The fingers of Preacher’s right hand twitched slightly. “People don’t speak to me that way.”

 

“You think a mass killer deserves respect?”

 

“You don’t know me. Maybe I have qualities you’re not aware of.”

 

“Did you ever fight for your country?”

 

“You might say in my own way I have. But I don’t make claims for myself.”

 

“Pete was burned in his tank. But the real damage to him happened when he came back home and met you and the other criminals you work with.”

 

“Your friend is a fool or he wouldn’t be in this trouble. I don’t appreciate the coarseness of your remarks to me.”

 

Again she could feel a pool of heat building inside her head, as though the sun were burning through her skull, cooking her blood, pushing her out on the edges of a place she had never been. Her towel was starting to slip loose, and she gathered it more tightly around her, pressing its dampness against her skin with her arms.

 

“I’d like for you to go away with me. I’d like to make up for any harm I did to you. Don’t speak, just listen,” he said. “I have money. I’m fairly well educated for a man without much formal schooling. I have manners, and I know how to care for a fine woman. I have a rented house on a mountaintop outside Guadalajara. You could have anything you want there. There would be no demands on you, sexual or otherwise.”

 

She thought she heard a train in the distance, the massive weight and power of the locomotive grinding dully on the track, the vibrations spreading through the hardpan like the steady tremors given off by an abscessed wisdom tooth.

 

“Give Pete back to me. Don’t hurt him,” she said.

 

“What will you give me in turn?”

 

“Take my life.”

 

“Why would I want to do that?”

 

“I put two bullets in you.”

 

“You don’t know me very well.”

 

“You know why you’re here. Go ahead and do it. I won’t resist you. Just leave Pete alone.” Her eyes seemed to go in and out of focus, the room shimmering, a dark liquid swelling up from her stomach into her throat.

 

“You offend me.”

 

“Your thoughts are an offense, and you don’t hide them well.”

 

“What thoughts? What are you talking about?” The skin under his left eye wrinkled, like putty drying up.

 

“The thoughts you don’t want to admit are yours. The secret desires you mask with your cruelty. You make me think of diseased tissue with insects crawling on it. Your glands are filled with rut, but you pretend to be a gentleman wishing to care for and protect a woman. It’s embarrassing to look at the starvation in your face.”

 

“Starvation? For a woman who insults me? Who thinks she can tongue-lash me after I saved her from a man like Hugo Cistranos? That’s right, Hugo plans to kill you and your boyfriend. You want me to hit the speed dial on my cell phone? I can introduce your friend to an experience neither of you can imagine.”

 

“I need to get dressed. I don’t want you to watch me.”

 

“Dressed to go where?”

 

“Out. Away from you.”

 

“You think you’re controlling the events that are about to happen around you? Are you that naive?”

 

“My clothes are in the dresser. I’m going to take them into the bathroom and dress. Don’t come in there. Don’t look at me while I’m removing my clothes from the drawer, either. After I’m dressed, I’ll be going somewhere. I’m not sure where. But it won’t be with you. Maybe I’ll end here, in this room, in this dirty room, in this godforsaken place on the edge of hell. But you won’t be a part of it, you piece of shit.”

 

His facial expression seemed divided in half, as though his motor controls were shutting down and the muscles on one side of his face were collapsing. His right hand trembled. “You have no right to say these things.”

 

“Kill me or get out. I can’t stand being around you.”

 

He stooped over and picked up the blue-black white-handled derringer from the carpet. He was breathing raggedly through his nose, his eyes small and hot under his brow. He approached her slowly, his white shirt catching the pink glow of the neon outside the window, giving his face a rosy hue it didn’t possess on its own. He stood in front of her, his stomach flat behind his shirt and his tightly notched belt, an odor of dried perspiration wafting from his suit. “Say that last part again.”

 

“I hate being in the presence of a man like you. You’re what every woman dreads. Your physical touch causes nausea.”

 

He lifted the barrel of the derringer to her mouth. Through the wall, she could hear the electronic laughter from the neighbor’s television set. She could hear the locomotive pulling a mile-long string of gondolas and boxcars between the hills, the reverberations shaking the foundation of the motel. She could hear Preacher’s dry exhalations just above her forehead. He put his left hand under her chin and lifted her line of vision to his. When she tried to turn away, he pinched her jaws and jerked her head straight. “Look into my eyes.”

 

“No.”

 

“You’re afraid?”

 

“No. Yes.”

 

“Of what?”

 

“Of what I’ll see there. You’re evil. I think you carry the abyss inside you.”

 

“That’s a lie.”

 

“In your sleep, you hear a howling wind, don’t you? It’s like the sound the wind makes at night on the ocean. Except the wind is inside you. I read a poem once by William Blake. It was about the worm that flies at night in the howling storm. I think he was writing about you.”

 

He released her, almost flinging her face from his hand. “I couldn’t care less about your literary experience. It’s you who’s the agent of the devil. It’s inherent in your gender. From Eden to the present.”

 

Her head was lowered, her arms still folded across her bosom, her back starting to tremble. He reached in his pocket with his left hand. She felt something touch her cheek. “Take it,” he said.

 

She showed no response other than to wrap herself more tightly in her own skin, and curl her shoulders and spine into a tighter ball, and keep her eyes fixed on the tops of her folded arms.

 

He pushed an object that was both sharp and yielding against her cheek, jabbing the jawbone, trying to force her head up. “I said take it.”

 

“No.”

 

“There’s six hundred dollars in the clip. Cross into Chihuahua. But don’t stop till you get to Durango. Hugo Cistranos’s people are everywhere. South of Durango, you’ll be safe.” He held the money clip with two fingers in front of her. “Go ahead. No strings.”

 

She spat on the money clip and on the bills and on his fingers. Then she began to weep. In the silence that followed, the pink glow of his shirt and the odor of his perspiration and the proximity of his loins to her face seemed to crush the air out of her lungs, as though the only reality in the world were the figure of Preacher Jack Collins hovering inches from her skin. She had never realized that silence could be so loud. She believed its intensity was like the creaking sounds a drowning person hears as he sinks to the bottom of a deep lake.

 

He traced the double muzzles of the derringer across her temple and hairline and along her cheek. She closed her eyes, and for a moment she thought she heard the electronic laughter from the television set subsumed by a train engine blowing through a tunnel, its whistle screaming off the walls, a lighted dining car filled with revelers disappearing into the darkness.

 

When she opened her eyes, she saw a cell phone in his hand, saw his thumb touch a single button, saw the phone go out of her line of vision toward his ear. “Cut him loose,” he said.

 

Then the room was quiet again, and she felt the hot wind of the desert puffing through the door and saw an eighteen-wheeler driving by on the state highway, its trailer outlined with strings of festive lights, the stars winking above the hills.

 

 

EVEN BEFORE THE sun had broken the edge of the horizon, Hackberry Holland knew the temperature would reach a hundred degrees by noon. The influence of the rainstorm and the promise it had offered had proved illusory. The heat had lain in abeyance through the night, collecting in stone and warm concrete and sandy river bottoms that boiled with grasshoppers; at dawn it had come alive again, rising with the sun inside a warm blanket of humidity that shimmered on the fields and hills and made the eyes water when you stared too long at the horizon.

 

At seven-thirty A.M. Hackberry raised the flag on the pole in front of his office, then went inside and tried again to reach Ethan Riser. He did not know what had happened to Pete Flores since Pete had called from a phone booth and told Hackberry he remembered one letter and two numbers from Jack Collins’s car tag, or at least the tag of the tan Honda that Flores had showered rocks on. Hackberry had given the Texas DMV the single letter and two digits and asked that they run every combination possible through the computer until they found a match with a Honda. He had also called Riser and told him of the call from Flores.

 

The DMV had come back with 173 possibles. Riser not only did not get back to him; he had stopped returning Hackberry’s calls altogether. Which raised another question: Was Riser like too many of his colleagues, cooperative and helpful as long as the locals were useful, then down the road and gone after he got what he needed?

 

Or maybe Riser had been told by his superiors to stay away from Hackberry and worry less about local problems and concentrate on putting Josef Sholokoff out of business.

 

On occasion, federal agencies practiced a form of triage that went beyond the pragmatic into a marginal area that was one step short of ruthless. Psychopaths were sprung from custody without their victims or the prosecution’s witnesses being notified. People who had trusted the system with their lives discovered they had been used and discarded as casually as someone flicking away a cigarette butt. Most of these people usually had the power and social importance of fish chum.

 

By ten A.M. Hackberry had left two messages with Riser. He opened his desk drawer and removed a thick brown envelope that contained the eight-by-ten crime-scene photos taken behind the church at Chapala Crossing. Besides their morbid subject matter, the photos contained a second kind of peculiarity: None of the uniformed deputies, the paramedics, the federal personnel, or the forensic team from Austin wore any expression. In photo after photo, their faces were empty of emotion, their mouths down-hooked at the corners, as though they were playing roles in a film that was not supposed to make use of sound or any display of feeling. The only photography he could compare it with was the black-and-white news footage taken during the mass burials at the death camps liberated by American forces in early 1945.

 

He returned the photos to the drawer.

 

What had happened to Pete Flores and Vikki Gaddis? What was the next move Preacher Jack Collins would make? What kind of cage could contain the evil that had perpetrated the slaughter at Chapala Crossing?

 

 

AT TWO-THIRTY THAT afternoon Danny Boy Lorca was driving his converted army-surplus flatbed truck up the two-lane from the Mexican border, the wind as hot as a blowtorch through the window, the unmuffled roar of the engine shaking the cab, his fuel gauge ticking on empty. He saw the hitchhikers in the distance, standing on the roadside between two low hills whose sides had been scorched by a wildfire. There was no other traffic on the road. The outlines of the two hitchhikers were warping in the heat, the glaze on the road like a pool of tar. As he drew closer, he realized one of the hitchhikers was a woman. A guitar case rested by her foot. Her denim shirt was pasted to her skin with perspiration. The man next to her wore a coned-up straw hat and a shirt he had sawed off at the armpits. The top of one arm was wrinkled with scar tissue that looked like the material in an overheated lampshade.

 

Danny Boy pulled to the side of the road, glancing warily in the rearview mirror. “Y’all came back,” he said through the passenger window.

 

“Will you give us a ride?” the woman asked.

 

Danny Boy never answered questions whose answer seemed obvious, in the same way he did not say hello or goodbye to people when their actions or presence were obvious.

 

Pete Flores swung a duffel bag onto the truck bed and placed Vikki’s guitar case between it and the cab. He opened the passenger door, blowing on his hand after he did, waiting for Vikki to get inside. “Wow,” he said, looking at his hand. “How long has your truck been in the sun?”

 

“It’s a hunnerd and seven,” Danny Boy said.

 

“Thank you for stopping,” Vikki said.

 

Pete climbed inside and shut the door. He started to offer his hand, but Danny Boy was concentrating on the wide-angle mirror.

 

“You know the cops are looking for you? Federal agents and state people and Sheriff Holland, too. A federal agent got killed.”

 

“I reckon they found us,” Pete said.

 

Danny Boy pulled back onto the road, his shirt open on his leathery chest, his neck beaded with dirt rings. “Maybe this ain’t the best place for y’all.”

 

“We don’t have any other place to go,” Pete said.

 

“If it was me, I’d get on a freight and go to Canada and follow the harvest, maybe. A cook on them crews can make good money. I’d find a place that ain’t been ruined and settle down.”

 

Pete stuck his arm out the window, turning his palm into the airflow so it would vane up his arm and inside his shirt. “We’re working on it,” he said.

 

“Them people you got mixed up with? They’re out there.”

 

“Which people? Out where?” Vikki asked.

 

“They’re out there at night. They come up the arroyos. They ain’t wets, either. They go past my place. I see them in the field.”

 

“Those are harmless farmworkers,” Pete said.

 

“No, they ain’t. See the sky. We had one night of hard rain, the way it used to be. But we didn’t get no more. Them rain gods were giving us a chance. But they ain’t coming back while all these drug dealers and killers are here. There’s a hole in the earth, and down inside it is the place where all the corn came from. That’s where all power comes from. Don’t nobody know where the hole is anymore.”

 

Vikki looked sideways at Pete.

 

“Tell her,” Danny Boy said.

 

“Tell her what?”

 

“That I ain’t drunk.”

 

“She knows that. Danny Boy is okay, Vikki.” Pete gazed out the window, the wind climbing up his bare arm, puffing inside his shirt. “That’s Ouzel Flagler’s place. I wish I hadn’t been there when some bad hombres came in.”

 

“That’s where you met them guys?”

 

“Probably. I’m not sure. I was in a blackout most of the day. I know I bought mescal from Ouzel that day. Ouzel’s mescal always leaves its mark, like an earth grader has rolled over your head.”

 

Ouzel Flagler’s brick bungalow, cracked down the middle, with a plank bar built on one side of the house, was veiled briefly by a cloud of dust blowing off the hardpan, balls of tumbleweed skipping across its roof. Under a white sun, amid the tangled wire and all the rusted construction equipment Ouzel had hauled onto his property, a cluster of rheumy-eyed longhorns was standing by a recessed pool of rainwater, the sides of the depression strung with green feces.

 

“Don’t look at it,” Vikki said.

 

“At what?”

 

“That place. It’s not part of your life anymore.”

 

“What I did that night is on me, not on Ouzel.”

 

“Will you stop talking about it, Pete? Will you just stop talking about it?”

 

“I got to get gas up yonder,” Danny Boy said.

 

“No, not here,” Vikki said.

 

Danny Boy looked at her, his eyes sleepy, the muscles in his face flaccid. “The needle is below the E. It’s three miles to the next station.”

 

“Why didn’t you tell us you were out of gas when we got in?” she said.

 

Danny Boy shifted down and angled the truck off the road into the filling station, steering with his hands in the ten-two position, bent slightly forward like a student driver beginning his first solo, his face impassive. “You can walk across the highway and maybe catch a ride while I’m inside,” he said. “I got to use the restroom. I forgot to tell you about that when you got in, even though it’s my truck. If you don’t have a ride by the time I leave, I’ll pick y’all up again.”

 

“We’ll wait in the truck. I’m sorry,” Vikki said.

 

Danny Boy went inside the station and paid for ten dollars’ gas in advance.

 

“Why were you getting on his case?” Pete said.

 

“Ouzel Flagler’s brother owns this station.”

 

“Who cares?”

 

“Pete, you never learn. You just never learn.”

 

“Learn what? About Ouzel? He has Buerger’s disease. He’s a sad person. He sells a little mescal. What’s the big deal? You stood up to that killer. I’m really proud of you. We don’t have to be afraid anymore.”

 

“Please shut up. For God’s sake, for once just shut up.” She blotted the humidity out of her eyes with a Kleenex and stared at the highway winding into the sun’s white brilliance. The terrain, untouched by shade or shadows, glaring and coarse and rock-strewn, made her think of a dry seabed and huge anthills or a planet that had already gone dead.

 

Danny Boy pulled the gas spigot out of the tank and clanked it back into place on the pump, then used the outside washroom and climbed back into the cab, his face still wet from a rinse in the lavatory. “On a day like this, ain’t nothing like cold water,” he said.

 

None of them took note of the man on the other side of the black glare on the filling station window. He had just come out of the back of the store and was drinking a soda, upending it, his neck swollen by a chain of tumors. His head seemed recessed into his shoulders, reminiscent of a perched carrion bird’s. He finished his soda, dropped the can into the wastebasket, and seemed to think for a long time. Then he picked up the telephone.

 

 

 

 

 

23

 

PETE AND VIKKI had climbed down from Danny Boy Lorca’s truck cab, retrieved a duffel bag and guitar case from the truck bed, and entered the building dehydrated, sunburned, and windblown with road grit. Their clothes stiff with salt, they sat down in front of Hackberry’s desk as though his air-conditioned office were the end of a long journey out of the Sahara. They told him of their encounter with Preacher Jack Collins and Bobby Lee and the man named T-Bone and the fact that Collins had let them go.

 

“We got on the bus early this morning, but it broke down after twenty miles. So we hitchhiked,” Pete said.

 

“Collins just cut you loose? He didn’t harm you in any way?” Hackberry let his gaze linger on Vikki Gaddis.

 

“It happened just like we told you,” Vikki said.

 

“Where do you think Collins went?” Hackberry asked.

 

“Collins is y’all’s business now. Tell us what you want us to do,” Pete said.

 

“I haven’t quite thought it through,” Hackberry said.

 

“Repeat that, please?” Vikki said.

 

“I’ve got two empty cells. Go up the iron stairs in back and check them out.”

 

“You’re offering us jail cells?” she said.

 

“The doors would stay unlocked. You can come and go as you like.”

 

“I don’t believe this,” she said.

 

“You can use the restroom and the shower down here,” Hackberry said.

 

“Pete, would you say something?” Vikki said.

 

“Maybe it’s not a bad idea,” he replied.

 

Pam Tibbs came into the office and leaned against the doorjamb. “I’ll go with you, honey.”

 

“With luck, we can probably find an iron staircase by ourselves,” Vikki said. “Excuse me, I forgot to call you ‘honey.’”

 

“Suit yourself, ma’am,” Pam said. She waited until they were out of earshot before she spoke again. “How do you read all that stuff about Collins and Bobby Lee Motree and this character T-Bone?”

 

“Who knows? Collins probably has psychotic episodes.”

 

“Vikki Gaddis has a mouth on her, doesn’t she?”

 

“They’re just kids,” Hackberry said.

 

“That doesn’t mean you should put your ass in a sling for them.”

 

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

 

Maydeen Stoltz walked into the room. “Ethan Riser is on the phone. Want me to take a message?”

 

“Where’s he calling from?” Hackberry asked.

 

“He didn’t say.”

 

“Ask him if he’s in town.”

 

“Like that? ‘Are you in town?’”

 

“Yeah, tell him I want to ask him to dinner. Would you please do it, Maydeen?”

 

She went back into the dispatcher’s office, then returned. “He’s in San Antonio.”

 

“Put him through.”

 

“I’m going to get a job on a spaceship,” she said.

 

A moment later, the light on Hackberry’s desk phone went on, and he picked up the receiver. “Hey, Ethan. How are you?”

 

“You called me by my first name.”

 

“I’m trying to get a perspective on a couple of things. Is there any development with Nick Dolan’s situation?”

 

“Not a lot.”

 

“Have y’all interviewed him yet?”

 

“No comment.”

 

“So he’s still bait?”

 

“I wouldn’t use that particular term.”

 

“Hang on.” Hackberry covered the receiver with his palm. “Keep those kids out of here.”

 

“I’m kind of busy,” Riser said. “What can I help you with?”

 

“How valuable is Pete Flores to you?”

 

“He’s the weak sister in the mass killing. He can give us names. It takes just one thread to pull a sweater loose.”

 

“I don’t think ‘weak sister’ is a good term for a kid like that.”

 

“Maybe not. But Flores made his choice when he signed on with the bunch who murdered those women and girls. We can use him to testify against the others. That means he goes into custody as a material witness.”

 

“Custody? In the can?”

 

“That’s a certainty. Flores has made an art form out of flight.”

 

“How about witness protection?”

 

“Maybe down the line. But he cooperates or he takes the weight for the others. Let’s be honest. These guys running skag and meth and girls into the country are Mobbed up all the way to Mexico City. Our jails are full of MS-13 and Mexican Mafia hitters. Flores may have his throat cut before he ever sees a grand jury. It’s too bad. The kid might be a war hero, but those women and girls who ate the forty-five rounds aren’t here to mourn for him.”

 

Hackberry took the phone from his ear and opened and closed his mouth to clear a sound like cellophane crinkling inside his head. Outside, the flag was popping and straightening in a flume of yellow dust.

 

“You still with me, Sheriff?” Riser said.

 

“Yeah, copy that. Listen, isn’t Hugo Cistranos the key? Don’t tell me y’all don’t have dials on this guy. Why aren’t you squeezing him instead of chasing Flores and Vikki Gaddis around?”

 

“I don’t get to call all the shots, Sheriff.”

 

Hackberry could sense the change in Riser’s mood. Through his office door, he could see Pam Tibbs escorting Flores and Gaddis to a small room that was used for interviews. “I can appreciate your situation,” he said.

 

“Sorry I haven’t gotten back to you. I had to go back to Washington, and I’ll probably have to take off again tomorrow. What’s all this about? If I were you, I’d ease up. You’re a combat veteran. Sometimes you have to lose a few for the greater good. That might sound Darwinian, but those who believe different belong in monasteries.”

 

“This is all about nailing Josef Sholokoff, isn’t it?”

 

“Neither of us makes the rules.”

 

“Have a good trip to Washington.”

 

“Let me be up-front again. I’ll try to keep you in the loop. But the word is ‘try.’”

 

“You couldn’t be more clear, Mr. Riser.” Hackberry replaced the receiver in the cradle. Pam Tibbs stood in the doorway. He looked woodenly at her.

 

“I hope Bonnie and Clyde appreciate this,” she said.

 

“Bring a cruiser around to the back door. Bonnie and Clyde were never here. Indicate that to Maydeen on your way out.”

 

“You got it, boss man.”

 

“Don’t call me that.”

 

 

THE THERMOMETER HAD just peaked at 119 degrees when Nick Dolan carried his bag out of the Phoenix airport and hailed a cab, one with more dents than it should have had. The driver was from the Mid-east and had festooned the inside of the cab with beadwork and pictures of mosques and words from the Koran and was burning incense on the dashboard and playing Arabian music on a tape deck. “Where to, sir?” he said.

 

“I’m not sure. Where can you get a blow job in Mecca?”

 

“Excuse me, sir?”

 

“The Embassy Suites.”

 

“In Phoenix?”

 

“What’s your name?”

 

“Mohammed.”

 

“I’m shocked. No, I want to go to the Embassy Suites in Istanbul. Do you hand out earplugs with that music?”

 

“Earplugs? What earplugs, sir?”

 

“The Embassy Suites off Camelback.”

 

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Hang on, sir.” The driver floored the cab, swinging out into traffic, throwing Nick across the seat with his luggage.

 

“Hey, we’re not on a hijack mission here,” Nick said. He knew his histrionic display at the driver’s expense was a mask for the fear that once again had taken up residence in his breast and was feeding at his heart. He had gotten the phone number of Josef Sholokoff from his old partner in the escort business and had made an appointment to meet Sholokoff at his house at nine P.M. that evening. The fact that Sholokoff had given Nick easy access to his home only increased Nick’s sense of insecurity.