It was pointless. A strange transformation had begun to take place in T-Bone’s eyes, one Hackberry had seen in battalion aid stations and triage situations and in a subfreezing POW shack where men with ice crystals in their beards and death in their throats stared intently at everything around them, as though taking the measure of the world, when in reality they saw nothing, or at least nothing they ever told the world about.

 

“My roast,” T-Bone said.

 

“Say again?”

 

“My pot roast is burning. It’s addax. It cost five grand to kill it.”

 

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll handle it,” Hackberry said, looking up at Pam Tibbs.

 

“I’m a good cook. Always was,” T-Bone said. Then he closed his eyes and died.

 

Pam Tibbs walked away, her hands on her hips. She stood still, looking at the floor, her back turned to Hackberry.

 

“What is it?” he said.

 

“I saw a security camera mounted on the corner of the building. The lens is pointed at the parking lot,” she said.

 

He glanced at the TV mounted above the bar. Below it was a VCR. “See if it has a tape.”

 

 

BOBBY LEE MOTREE placed his hand on Hugo Cistranos’s shoulder and walked with him to the cliff’s edge, like two friends enjoying a panoramic view of topography that seemed as old as the first day of creation. Down below, Hugo Cistranos could see the tops of cottonwood trees along a streambed that had gone dry in late summer and whose banks were flanged with automobile scrap jutting from the soil like pieces of rusted razor blades. Farther out from the cliff was a cluster of trees that still had flowers in the branches. Beyond the streambed and the trees was a long flat plain where the wind was troweling thick curds of yellow dust into the air. The vista that lay before Hugo Cistranos’s eyes was like none he had ever seen, as though this place and the events transpiring in it had been invented for this moment only, unfairly, without his consent as a participant. He hawked and spat downwind, leaning away from Bobby Lee, anxious to show his deference and care. “I was just delivering the money,” he said.

 

“You bet, Hugo. We’re glad you did that, too,” Bobby Lee replied.

 

The plateau was limestone, topped with a soft carpet of soil and grass that was surprisingly green. The wind was cool, flecked with rain, and smelled of damp leaves and perhaps the beginning of a new season. Twenty yards away, Preacher Collins was talking in Spanish to two Mexican killers who had a great gift for listening while he spoke, absorbing every word, never challenging or advising, their taciturnity an affirmation of his will.

 

Their pickup truck was parked next to Preacher’s Honda, the compact’s back window pocked with a hole that looked like a crystalline eye. The Jewish woman sat in the backseat, her expression less one of anger than of thought, her purse and a box of brownies next to her. What did Preacher intend to do with her? Not harm her, certainly. And if Preacher wasn’t going to harm her, maybe he would not harm Hugo, at least not in her presence, Hugo told himself.

 

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Bobby Lee said. “Puts me in mind of the Shenandoah Valley, without the greenery and all.”

 

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Hugo said. He lowered his voice. “Bobby Lee, I’m a soldier just like you. I take orders I don’t like sometimes. We’ve been on a lot of gigs together. You hearing me on this, son?”

 

Bobby Lee squeezed Hugo’s shoulder reassuringly. “Look yonder. See the deer running inside the wind. They’re playing. They know fall is in the air. You can smell it. It’s like wet leaves. I love it when it’s like this.”

 

As Hugo looked into Bobby Lee’s face, he knew for the first time in his life the distinction between those who had a firm grasp on the day and the expectation of the morrow and those who did not.

 

Preacher finished his conversation with the Mexicans and walked toward the cliff. “Let me have Hugo’s cell phone,” he said to Bobby Lee.

 

Preacher wore a suit coat and a rumpled fedora and slacks that had no crease, one cuff tucked inside a boot. The wind was blowing his coat as he dialed a number on the cell phone. “When Arthur Rooney answers, you say, ‘I did what you told me to, Artie. Everything went fine.’ Then you hand the phone back to me.”

 

Hugo said, “Jack, Artie is going to be confused. Why would I say ‘Everything went fine’? I was just bringing the money up. Artie could say anything, because he wouldn’t know what I meant. And give you the wrong impression. See?”

 

Preacher took a tin of Altoids from his pocket and snicked open the lid and put one on his tongue. He gave one to Bobby Lee and offered one to Hugo, but Hugo shook his head.

 

“See those trees down yonder with the flowers inside their branches?” Preacher said. “Some people call them rain trees. Others say they’re mimosas. But a lot of people call them Judas trees. Know why?”

 

“Jack, I’m not up on that crap, you know that.” And for just a moment the confidence and sense of familiarity in his own voice almost convinced Hugo that things were as they used to be, that he and Jack Collins were still business partners, even brothers in arms.

 

“The story is that Judas was in despair after he betrayed Jesus. Before he hanged himself, he went out on a cliff in the desert and flung his thirty pieces of silver into the darkness. Every place those coins landed, a tree grew. On each tree were these red flowers. Those flowers represent the blood of Jesus. That’s the story of how the Judas tree came to be. You cold? You want a coat?”

 

“Talk to him, Bobby Lee.”

 

“It’s out of my hands, Hugo.”

 

Jack winked at Hugo, then pushed the send button with his thumb and placed the phone in Hugo’s palm.

 

Hugo shrugged, his expression neutral, as though he were placating an unreasonable friend. The five rings that he hoped would deliver him to voice mail were the longest rings he had ever heard. When he thought he was home free, Artie Rooney picked up.

 

“That you, Hugo?” Artie said.

 

“Yeah, I—”

 

“Where are you? I heard that crazy sonofabitch kidnapped Nick Dolan’s old lady.”

 

“I did what you said. Everything is fine.”

 

Preacher pulled the cell phone from Hugo’s hand and pressed it against his ear.

 

“I hope he went out shivering like a dog passing broken glass,” Rooney said. “Tell me Mrs. Dolan was with him. Make my day perfect. Don’t hold back on me, Hugo. I want every detail. You parked one in her mouth, right? I’m getting hard thinking about it.”

 

Preacher folded the cell phone in his palm and dropped it in the pocket of his trousers. He stared out at the dust and mist blowing across the canyon, his expression contemplative, his mouth like a surgical wound. He stuck his little finger in one ear and removed something from his ear canal. Then he smiled at Hugo.

 

“Everything okay?” Hugo said.

 

“Right as rain,” Preacher said.

 

“Because words can get mixed up over the phone, or people can misunderstand each other.”

 

“No problem, Hugo. Take a walk with me.”

 

“Walk where?”

 

“A man should always have choices. Ever read Ernest Hemingway? He said death is only bad when it’s prolonged and humiliating. When I brood on things like this, I take a walk.”

 

“I don’t get what you’re saying. Where we going?”

 

“That’s the point. It’s for you to choose. Pancho Villa always gave his prisoners a choice. They could stand against a wall with a blindfold over their eyes or take off running. If it was me, I don’t think I’d run. I’d say screw that. I’d eat a round from one of those Mausers. Winchesters and Mausers were the standard issue for Villa’s troops. Did you know that?”

 

“Jack, let’s talk a minute. I don’t know what Artie said, but he gets excited sometimes. I mean, you’d think that two hundred grand I brought you was drained out of his veins. He’s always yelling about what you did to his hand, like he didn’t bring it on himself, which everybody knows he did. Come on, Jack, slow down here. It’s a matter of keeping things in perspective, like the lady in your car there, I know you want to care for her and everybody knows you’ve always been a gentleman that way and you got a code most people in the life don’t have, wait, we don’t need to keep walking anywhere, let’s just stay right here a second, I mean right here where we’re talking, I’m not real big on heights, I never have been, I’m not afraid, I just want to be reasonable and make sure you understand I always thought you and Bobby Lee here were stand-up, and look, man, you got your two hundred large and I’m never gonna breathe a word about this stuff, you got my word, you want me to blow the country, you want my condo in Galveston, you name it, hey, Jack, come on, whoa, I’m telling you the truth, I get vertigo, my heart won’t take it.”

 

“Don’t fault yourself for this, Hugo. You’ve made a choice. Bobby Lee and I respect that,” Preacher said. “Keep looking at me. That’s right, you’re a stand-up guy. See, it’s nothing to be afraid of.”

 

Hugo Cistranos stepped backward onto a shelf of air, his eyes closed and his fingers extended in front of him, like a blind man feeling in the dark. Then he plummeted three hundred feet, straight down, through the top of a cottonwood into the streambed filled with rocks that were the color of dirty snow.

 

 

 

 

 

27

 

HACKBERRY DID NOT get back home until almost ten that night. When he tried to sleep, the insides of his eyelids were dry and abrasive, as though there were sand in them or his corneas had been burned by the flash of an arc welder. Each time he thought he was successfully slipping off to sleep, he would feel himself jerked awake by the images of the dead men in the game farm’s lounge or, less dramatically, by the banality of an evil man who, when dying, had grieved over the wasted pot roast that had come from the exotic animal he had paid five thousand dollars to kill.

 

The tape Pam Tibbs had retrieved from the security camera had proved of little help. It had shown the arrival of a Honda and a Ford pickup truck. It had shown the back of a man wearing a fedora and a suit coat and slacks that flattened against his body in the wind. It had shown two tall unshaved men in colorful western shirts and bleached tight-fitting jeans that accentuated their genitalia. One of the tall men carried an elongated object wrapped loosely in a raincoat. The tape also showed a man in a dented and sweat-ringed top hat, his face shadowed, his striped overalls starched and pressed.

 

But it did not show the license tag on the pickup truck, and it showed only one letter and one number on the Honda: an S and the numeral 2. The value of the tape was minimal, other than the fact that the S and 2 confirmed that the vehicle Pete Flores had attacked with rocks was being driven by Jack Collins and perhaps was even registered to him, although under an alias.

 

Maybe the grouping of the letters and the numbers on the plate would narrow down the list provided earlier by the Texas DMV. In the morning Hackberry would call Austin again and start over. In the meantime, he had to sleep. He had learned long ago as a navy corpsman that Morpheus did not bestow his gifts easily or cheaply. The sleep that most people yearned for rarely came this side of the grave, except perhaps to the very innocent or to those willing to mortgage tomorrow for tonight. Tying off a vein, watching the blood rise inside a hypodermic needle, staining a mint-bruised mug of crushed ice with four fingers of Black Jack Daniel’s were all guaranteed to work. But the cost meant taking up residence in a country no reasonable person ever wanted to enter.

 

Throughout the night, he could hear the wind stressing the storm shutters against their hooks and swelling under his house. He saw flashes of lightning in the clouds, the windmill in his south pasture shivering in momentary relief against the darkness, his horses running in the grass, clattering against the railed fence. He heard thunder ripping across the sky like a tin roof being slowly torn asunder by the hands of God. He sat on the side of his bed in his skivvies, his heavy blue-black white-handled revolver clenched in his hand.

 

He thought of Pam Tibbs and the way she had always covered his back and incessantly brought him food. He thought of the way her rump filled out her jeans and the bold way she carried herself and her mercurial moods that vacillated from a martial flash in the eyes to an invasive warmth that made him step back from her and put his hands in his back pockets.

 

Why think about her now, at this moment, as he sat on the side of his bed with the coldness of a pistol on his naked thigh, like an old fool who still thought he could be the giver of death rather than its recipient?

 

Because he was alone and his sons were far away, and because every unused second that clicked on the clock was an act of theft to which he was making himself party.

 

He went into the office at seven on Monday morning, hung his dove-colored hat on a wood peg on the wall, and pulled from his desk drawer the DMV fax that contained the 173 possible registrants of the Honda driven by Preacher Jack Collins. He flattened the pages on his ink blotter, placed a ruler under the name of the first registrant, and began working his way down the list. He had gotten through six names when the phone rang. The caller was not one he cared to hear from.

 

“Ethan Riser,” Hackberry said, trying to hide the resignation in his voice.

 

“I heard you had a bad day up at the game farm,” Riser said.

 

“Not as bad as the guys Jack Collins eased into the next world.”

 

“A couple of my colleagues say it was a real mess. They appreciated your help.”

 

“That’s funny, I don’t remember their saying that.”

 

“So you know about Nick Dolan’s wife?”

 

“No, not the particulars. Just what I got from this guy T-Bone Simmons.” Hackberry leaned forward on his desk, his back stiffening. “What about her?”

 

“She was carjacked or kidnapped, I guess it depends on how you want to put it. Her vehicle was found on a side road off I-10, just east of Segovia.”

 

“When did you know about this?”

 

“The day it happened, Saturday afternoon. Mr. Dolan is a little distraught. I thought maybe he’d called you by now.”

 

“Tell me this again. You knew Mrs. Dolan was abducted Saturday afternoon, but I have to hear about it from a dying criminal a day later? And you thought I had probably gotten word from the husband of the victim?”

 

“Or from my colleagues,” Riser said wearily. “Look, Sheriff, this is not the reason I called. We have information that indicates you may be giving sanctuary to Vikki Gaddis and Pete Flores.”

 

“I don’t know where you got that from, but I don’t really care. You know why the right-wing nutcases around here don’t trust the government?”

 

“No, I don’t.”

 

“That’s the point, sir. You don’t know. That’s the entire point.”

 

Hackberry hung up. Thirty seconds later, the phone rang again. He glanced at the caller ID, picked up the receiver, and without speaking, hung up a second time, his eyes returning to the list of names on the DMV fax.

 

Pam Tibbs came into his office and looked over his shoulder. “It sounded like you were talking to Ethan Riser,” she said.

 

“There’s no such thing as a conversation with Riser. The two voices you hear are Riser talking and his voice echoing.”

 

“Get enough sleep last night?”

 

He raised his head. She was silhouetted against the light from the window, the tips of her hair lit by the early sun. Behind her, he could see the silver flagpole and the flag popping hard in the breeze. “I didn’t eat breakfast. Let’s go down to the café.”

 

“I have a pile of stuff in my intake basket,” she said.

 

“No, you don’t,” he said, lifting his hat off the wood peg.

 

At the café, he ordered a steak, three scrambled eggs, grits, hash browns and gravy, fried tomatoes, toast and marmalade and orange juice and coffee.

 

“Think you can make it to lunch?” she said. Her fingers were knitted on top of the table. Her nails were clean and unpainted and closely clipped. There was a shine in her hair just like the light in polished mahogany. Behind her, tumbleweeds were bouncing through the streets, the tin roof on an old mechanic’s shed rattling, forked lightning striking the hills in the south. “You trying to make me uncomfortable?” she said.

 

“Why do you say that?”

 

“Looking at me like that.”

 

“Like what?”

 

Her eyes went away from him and came back. “You think I’m your daughter?”

 

“No.”

 

“Well—”

 

“Well, what?” he said.

 

“God!” she replied.

 

A calendar hung on a post not far from their booth. No one had folded back a page on it since June. The days in June had been marked off with a black felt-tip pen, up to the twenty-first. He wondered what event in June had been so important that someone had in effect indicated all the previous days were to be gotten past and rid of. Then he wondered why the events after June 21 were so lacking in significance that no one had even bothered to turn the calendar page to the following month.

 

“Know why people in jail use the term ‘stacking time’?” he said.

 

“It makes a collection of dimwits sound clever?”

 

“No, it makes them sound normal. The goal for most people is to get time out of the way. I learned that in No Name Valley, under the sewer grate. I counted the threads in my sweater so I wouldn’t have to think about the time being stolen from my life.”

 

She turned a University of Houston class ring on her finger. The waitress brought coffee and went away. Pam watched a church bus pass on the street, its headlights on in the mixture of blowing dust and rain. “You’re the most unusual man I’ve ever known, but not for the reasons you might think,” she said.

 

He tried to smile but was disturbed by the tenor in her voice.

 

“You’re blessed with an innate goodness the Communists couldn’t take away from you. But I think in your mind, Jack Collins has become the prison guard who tormented you in North Korea. Collins wants to make you over in his image. If you let him do that, he wins, and so does that prison guard in the POW camp.”

 

“You’re wrong. Collins is a defective amoeba. He’s not worth thinking about.”

 

“Lie to God, lie to your friends, but don’t lie to yourself.”

 

“If you’re going to talk church-basement psychology to me, would you lower your voice?”

 

“There’s no one sitting around us.”

 

He looked sideways and didn’t reply.

 

“Don’t blow me off, Hack.” She pushed her right hand across the table and bumped the tips of her stiffened fingers hard against his.

 

“Do you think I’d do that? Do you think any intelligent man would ever treat a woman like you with disrespect?”

 

She bit a hangnail on her thumb and looked at him in a peculiar fashion.

 

 

IN FRONT OF the office, Hackberry took one glance at the sky and unhooked the chain on the flagpole and lowered the flag in advance of the impending storm. He folded the flag in a tuck and placed it in his desk drawer. Then he went back to work on the list of registrants given to him by the DMV. He went through the entire list twice, his eyes starting to swim. What was the point? If the FBI couldn’t locate Collins, how could he? Did Collins actually possess magic? Was he a griffin loosed from the pit, a reminder of the bad seed that obviously existed in the gene pool? It was always easier to think of evil as the work of individuals rather than the successful and well-planned efforts of societies and organizations operating with a mandate. Men like Collins were not created simply by their environments. Auschwitz and the Nanking massacre hadn’t happened in a vacuum.

 

His phone rang again. The caller ID was blocked. “See if that’s Ethan Riser,” Hackberry called through the doorway. He heard Maydeen take the call in the other room. A moment later, she was standing in the doorway. “Better pick up,” she said.

 

“Who is it?”

 

“Same asswipe—pardon me—same dude who called yesterday and said you two were the opposite sides of the same coin.”

 

Hackberry lifted the receiver and put it to his ear. “Collins?” he said.

 

“Good morning,” the voice said.

 

“I’m getting pretty tired of you.”

 

“I watched you through binoculars yesterday afternoon.”

 

“Revisiting our murderous handiwork, are we?”

 

“I’m afraid your thinking is muddled once again, Sheriff. I didn’t murder anybody. They tried to set me up. They also threw down on me first. I wasn’t even armed. An associate was carrying my weapon for me.”

 

“An associate? That’s a great term. The guy with the raincoat on his arm?”

 

“The security camera caught that?”

 

“You left the camera intact deliberately, didn’t you?”

 

“I didn’t give it a lot of thought.”

 

“Why’d you kidnap Mrs. Dolan?”

 

“What makes you think I did?”

 

“Because you left a witness.”

 

Hackberry heard Collins breathe in, as though sucking air across his teeth while he thought of a clever response.

 

“I don’t think I did,” he said.

 

“You thought wrong. You’ll get to meet him at your trial. I have to ask you something, bub.”

 

“‘Bub’?”

 

Hackberry leaned forward in his chair, one elbow on the desk blotter, rubbing one temple with his fingers. Both Maydeen and Pam were watching from his office door. “I don’t know you well, but you seem like a man with a code. In your way, maybe you’re a man of honor. Why do you want to do so much injury to Mrs. Dolan? She has three children and a husband who need her. Set her free, partner. If you have an issue with me, that’s fine. Don’t punish the innocent.”

 

“Who are you to lecture me?”

 

“A drunkard and a whoremonger with no moral authority at all, Mr. Collins. That’s the man you’re talking to. Let Esther Dolan go. She’s not a character out of the Bible. She’s flesh and blood and is probably afraid she’ll never see her husband or children again. You want that on your conscience?”

 

“Esther knows she’s safe with me.”

 

“Where’s Hugo Cistranos?”

 

“Oh, you’ll find him. Just watch the sky. It takes two or three days, but you’ll see them circling.”

 

“And you don’t think she’s afraid?”

 

There was a long beat.

 

“Good try. I’ve always heard the inculcation of guilt is a papist trait.”

 

“I have an envelope filled with photos of the nine terrified women and girls you machine-gunned and buried. Did they scream when they died? Did they beg in a language you couldn’t understand? Did they dissolve into a bloody mist while you sprayed them with a Thompson? Am I describing the scene accurately? Correct me if I haven’t. Please tell me in your own words what it was like to shoot nine defenseless human beings who were so desperate for a new life they’d allow their stomachs to be filled with balloons of heroin?”

 

He could hear Collins breathing hard. Then the line went dead.

 

Maydeen filled a cup with coffee in the other room and brought it to him on a saucer. Both she and Pam watched him without speaking.

 

“Y’all got something to do?” he said.

 

“We’re going to get him,” Pam said.

 

“I’ll believe it when it happens,” he said, picking up the fax sheets from his desk blotter again, his thumbs crimping the edges of the paper to the point of tearing them.

 

 

AS THE MORNING passed, a seemingly insignificant detail from his conversation with Jack Collins had burrowed itself into his memory and wouldn’t leave him alone. It was the sound of Collins breathing. No, that wasn’t it. It was the way Collins breathed and the image the sound conjured up from the Hollywood of years gone by. Collins seemed to draw his air across his teeth. His mouth became a slit, his speech laconic and clipped, his face without expression, like a man speaking not to other people but to a persona that lived inside him. Perhaps speaking like a man who had a nervous twitch, who was wrapped too tight for his own good, who was at war with the Fates.

 

A man with dry lips and a voice that rasped as if his larynx had been fried by cigarettes and whiskey or clotted with rust. A man who wore his hair mowed on the sides and combed straight back on top, a man who wore a hat and clothes from another era, his narrow belt hitched tightly into his ribs and his unpressed slacks tucked into western boots, perhaps like a prospector of years past, his whole demeanor that of tarnished frontier gentility.

 

Hackberry re-sorted the fax sheets and found the third page in the transmission. He stared at one listing as though seeing it for the first time. How dumb does one lawman get, particularly one who considered himself a student of his own era? “Come in here, Pam,” he said.

 

She stood in the doorway. “What’s up?”

 

“Take a look at the names on this page.”

 

“What about them?”

 

“Which one of them sticks in your mind?”

 

“None.”

 

“Look again.”

 

“I’m a blank.”

 

He put his thumb on the edge of one name. She stood behind him, leaning down, one arm propped on his desk, her arm touching his shoulder.

 

“F. C. Dobbs. What’s remarkable about that?” she said.

 

“You remember the name Fred C. Dobbs?”

 

“No.”

 

“Did you see The Treasure of the Sierra Madre?”

 

“A long time ago.”

 

“Humphrey Bogart played the role of a totally worthless panhandler and all-around loser whose clothes are in tatters and his lips are so chapped they’re about to crack. When he thinks he’s about to be slickered, he grimaces at the camera and says, ‘Nobody is putting anything over on Fred C. Dobbs.’”

 

“Collins thinks he’s a character in a film?”

 

“No, Collins is a chameleon and a clown. He’s a self-educated guy who believes a library card makes him more intelligent than an MIT graduate. He likes to laugh at the rest of us.”

 

“Maybe F. C. Dobbs is a real person. Maybe it’s just coincidence.”

 

“There are no coincidences with a guy like Jack Collins. He’s the thing that’s wrong with all the rest of us. He just has more of it and nowhere to leave it.”

 

“There’s no physical address for Dobbs, just a post office box in Presidio County?” she said.

 

“So far.”

 

“Give Maydeen and me a few minutes,” she said.

 

But it was almost quitting time before Pam and Maydeen got off the phones. In the meantime, Hackberry had his hands full with Nick Dolan, who had called three times, each time more angry and irrational.

 

“Mr. Dolan, you have my word. As soon as I learn anything about your wife, I’ll call you first,” Hackberry said.

 

“That’s what the FBI says. I look like a douche bag? I sound like a douche bag? I am a douche bag? I’m stupid here? Tell me which it is,” Nick said.

 

“We’ll find her.”

 

“They were following me around. They were bugging my phones. But they couldn’t protect my wife.”

 

“You need to take that up with the FBI, sir.”

 

“Where are you?”

 

“I’m sitting in my office, the place you just called up for the third time.”

 

“No, like where are you on the map?”

 

“You don’t need to be here, Mr. Dolan.”

 

“I’m supposed to play with my joint while this crazoid kidnaps my wife?”

 

“Stay home, sir.”

 

“I’m getting in my car now. I’m on my way.”

 

“No, you’re not. You’re—”

 

Dead connection.

 

Pam Tibbs tapped on the doorjamb. She had a legal pad folded back in her left hand. “This is what we’ve got. A man using the name F. C. Dobbs had a Texas driver’s license two years ago but doesn’t have one now. His rent on his post office box in Presidio has lapsed. Ten years ago a man named Fred Dobbs, no middle initial, bought five hundred acres of land down toward Big Bend at a tax sale. There were four big parcels strung all over the place. He sold them six months later.”

 

Hackberry fiddled with his ear. “Who owned the land before Dobbs?”

 

Pam looked back at her notes. “A woman named Edna Wilcox. I talked to the sheriff in Brewster. He said the Wilcox woman had been married to a railroad man who died of food poisoning. He said she died of a fall and didn’t leave any heirs.”

 

“What happened to Dobbs?”

 

“The clerk of court didn’t know, and neither did the sheriff.”

 

“So we’ve got a dead end?” Hackberry said.

 

“The state offices are closing now. We can start in again tomorrow. Was that Nick Dolan calling again?”

 

“Yeah, he said he’s on his way here.” Hackberry leaned back in his swivel chair. Rain was blowing against the window, and the hills surrounding the town were disappearing inside the grayness of the afternoon. “Who did Fred Dobbs, no middle initial, sell the land to?”

 

Pam turned the page on her legal pad and studied her notes. “I don’t know if I wrote it down. Wait a minute, here it is. The buyer was Bee Travis.”

 

Hackberry knitted his fingers behind his head. “T-R-A-V-I-S, you’re sure that’s the right spelling?”

 

“I think so. There was static on the line.”

 

Hackberry clicked his nails on the desk blotter and looked at his watch. “Call the clerk of court again before the courthouse closes.”

 

“Has anyone ever talked to you about OCD problems?” She looked at his expression. “Okay, sorry, I’m on it.”

 

Two minutes later, she came back into his office. “The first name is actually the initial B, not ‘Bee’ with a double e. The last name is Traven, not Travis. I wrote it down wrong.” She glanced away, then looked back at him and held her gaze on his face, her chest rising and falling.

 

But he wasn’t thinking about her chagrin. “Collins sold the land to himself. He laundered his name and laundered the deed.”

 

“I’m not following you at all.”

 

“B. Traven was a mysterious eccentric who wrote the novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

 

“Sell that one to Ethan Riser.”

 

“I’m not even going to try. Sign out a cruiser and pack your overnight bag.”

 

She went to the door and closed it, then returned to his desk. She leaned on the flats of both her hands, her breasts hanging down heavily inside her shirt. “Think about what you’re doing. If anybody could figure out Collins’s aliases, it would be someone with your educational background. You don’t think he knows that? If he’s there now, it’s because he wants you to find him.”

 

“Maybe he’ll get his wish.”

 

 

 

 

 

28

 

THAT’S HAIL,” PREACHER said to the woman sitting on the cot across from him. “Hear it? It’s early this year. But at this altitude, you cain’t ever tell. Here, I’ll open the flap. Look outside. See, it looks like mothballs bouncing all over the desert floor. Look at it come down.”

 

The woman’s face was gray, her eyes dark and angry, her black hair pulled straight back. In the gloom of the tent, she looked more Andalusian than Semitic. She wore a beige sundress and Roman sandals, and her face and shoulders and underarms were still damp from the wet cloth she had washed herself with.

 

“A plane will be here tomorrow. The wind is too strong for it to land today,” he said. “The pilot has to drop in over those bluffs. It’s hard to do when the wind is out of the north.”

 

“You’ll have to drug me,” she said.

 

“I just ask you to give me one year. Is that a big price, considering I protected your family and spared your husband’s life when Arthur Rooney wanted him dead? You know where Arthur Rooney is today, maybe at this very moment?”

 

He waited for her to reply, but the only sound in the tent was the clicking of hailstones outside.

 

“Mr. Rooney is under the waves,” he said. “Not quite to the continental shelf, but almost that far.”

 

“I wouldn’t give you the parings from my nails. I’ll open my veins before I let you touch me. If you fall asleep, I’ll cut your throat.”

 

“See, when you speak like that, I know you’re the one.”

 

“One what?”

 

“Like your namesake in the Book of Esther. She was born a queen, but it took Xerxes to make her one.”

 

“You’re not only a criminal, you’re an idiot. You wouldn’t know the Book of Esther from a telephone directory.”

 

Bobby Lee Motree bent inside the open tent flap, wearing a denim jacket, his top hat tied down with a scarf. He held a tin plate in each hand. Both plates contained a single sandwich, a dollop of canned spinach, and another one of fruit cocktail.

 

“Molo picked up some stuff at the convenience store,” Bobby Lee said. “I seasoned the spinach with some bacon bits and Tabasco. Hope y’all like it.”

 

“What the hell is that?” Preacher said, looking down at his plate.

 

“What it looks like, Jack. Fruit cocktail, spinach, and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches,” Bobby Lee said.

 

Preacher threw his plate outside the tent into the dirt. “Go to town and buy some decent food. You clean that shit out of the icebox and bury it.”

 

“You eat sandwiches every day. You eat in cafés where the kitchen is more unsanitary than the washroom. Why are you always on my case, man?”

 

“Because I don’t like peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Is that hard to understand?”

 

“Hey, Molo, Preacher says your food sucks!” Bobby Lee shouted.

 

“You think this is a joke?” Preacher said.

 

“No, Jack, I’m just indicating maybe you don’t know who your friends are. What do I have to do to prove myself?”

 

“For starters, don’t serve me shit to eat.”

 

“Then get your own damn food. I’m tired of being somebody’s nigger.”

 

“I’ve told you about using language like that in my presence.”

 

Bobby Lee flipped the tent flap shut and walked away without securing it to the tent pole, his hobnailed boots crunching on the hailstones. Preacher heard him talking to the Mexican killers, most of his words lost in the wind. But part of one sentence came through loud and clear: “His Highness the child in there…”

 

At first Esther Dolan had set down her plate on the table, evidently intending not to eat. But as she had listened to the exchange between Bobby Lee and the man they called Preacher, her dark eyes had grown steadily more thoughtful, veiled, turned inward. She picked up the plate and set it in her lap, then used the plastic knife to cut her sandwich into quarters. She bit off a corner of one square and chewed it slowly, gazing into space, as though disconnected from any of the events taking place around her.

 

Preacher tied the flap to the tent pole and sat down heavily on his cot. He drank the coffee from his cup, his fedora snugged low on his brow, the crown etched with a thin chain of dried salt.

 

“You should eat something,” she said.

 

“My main meal is always at evening. And it’s a half meal at that. Know why that is?”

 

“You’re on a diet?”

 

“A horse always has a half tank in him. He has enough fuel in his stomach to deal with or elude his enemies, but not too much to slow him down.”

 

She feigned attention to his words but was clearly not listening. Bobby Lee had put a paper napkin under her plate. She slipped it out and set one of the sandwich squares on it. “Take this. It’s high in both protein and sugar.”

 

“I don’t want it.”

 

“Your mother gave you too many peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches when you were little? Maybe that’s why you’re always out of sorts.”

 

“My mother fixed whatever a gandy dancer brought to the boxcar where we lived. That was where she made her living, too. Behind a blanket hung over a rope.”

 

“What happened to her?”

 

“She took a fall off some rocks.”

 

When Esther didn’t reply, he said, “That was after she poisoned her husband. Or deliberately fed him spoiled food. It took him a while to die.”

 

“You’re making that up.” Before he could answer, she wrapped the piece of sandwich in the napkin and set it on his knee.

 

“I’ve always heard Jewish women are compulsive feeders. Thanks but no thanks,” he said, setting the sandwich square on the table.

 

She continued to eat, her shoulders slightly stooped, a demure quality settling over her that seemed to intrigue and arouse him.

 

“A woman like you is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of person,” he said.

 

“You’re very kind,” she said, her eyes lowered.

 

 

BY DARK HACKBERRY Holland and Pam Tibbs had had no luck finding the residence that might have been occupied by the man using the name B. Traven. On the back roads, in the blowing rain and tumbleweeds and darkness, they could find few mile markers or rural mailboxes with numbers or houses that were lighted. A crew on a utility truck told them there had been a giant power failure from Fort Stockton down to the border. No one, including the sheriff’s department, had any knowledge of a man by the name of B. Traven. One deputy who had worked previously at the tax assessor’s office volunteered that Traven was an absentee landowner who resided in New Mexico and rented his property to hippies or people who came and went with the season or tended to live off the computer.

 

At nine-thirty P.M. Hackberry and Pam took adjoining rooms at a motel south of Alpine. The motel had a generator that created enough power to keep the motel functional during the storm, the outside lights glowing with the low intensity and yellow dullness of sodium lamps. A number of revelers had taken refuge there, talking loudly in the parking lot and on the concourse, slamming metal doors so hard the walls shook, carrying twelve-packs and fast food to their rooms. As Hackberry looked out the window at the darkness of the night, at the lightning flashes in the clouds, at the leak of electric sparks from a damaged transformer that was trying to come back on line, he thought of candles flickering in a graveyard.

 

He closed the curtain and sat on the bed in the dark and called the department. Maydeen Stoltz picked up.

 

“You’re not on duty tonight,” he said.

 

“You and Pam are. Why shouldn’t I be?”

 

“So far we haven’t gotten any leads on B. Traven or the guy calling himself Fred C. Dobbs. Did you hear anything from Ethan Riser?”

 

“Nothing. But Nick Dolan was here. Boy, was he here.”

 

“What happened?”

 

“I put some earplugs in. I mean that literally. That guy has a voice like a herd of pygmies. He went into your office without permission and said he’d wait there until you got back. That’s not all.”

 

“What’s the rest of it?”

 

“Did you have the flag folded up in your drawer?”

 

“Yeah, I did.”

 

“I think he took it. The drawer was open when he left, and the flag wasn’t in it.”

 

“What does he want with our flag?”

 

“Ask him.”

 

“Where is he now?”

 

“I’m not real sure. He went to your house.”

 

“Don’t tell me that.”

 

“What can Dolan do at your house?”

 

“I gave Vikki Gaddis and Pete Flores an approximate idea where we were going. I thought Collins might have said something to Gaddis that would link him to the properties he’s bought and sold under an alias.”

 

“That was the right thing to do, Hack. Don’t worry about it.”

 

“Early in the morning, get on the horn to Riser.”

 

“What do you want me to tell him?”

 

“Give him all the information we have on Collins. Tell him to send the cavalry or stay home. It’s his call.”

 

“Hack?”

 

“What?”

 

“Pam thinks Collins is trying to steal your soul.”

 

“So?”

 

“Pam’s feelings are not objective.”

 

“What are you telling me?”

 

“Don’t take chances with Collins.”

 

“The man has a hostage.”

 

“In one way or another, they all do. It’s what they use most effectively against us. You blow that bastard out of his socks.”

 

“Maydeen, you’re a good woman, but you’ve got a serious character defect. I can never be quite sure where you stand on an issue.”

 

After he closed his cell phone, he continued to sit on the side of the bed in the dark, the long day starting to catch up with him. Someone had left the engine running on a diesel-powered vehicle immediately outside Hackberry’s window. The sound vibrated through the wall and floor, staining the air with noxious fumes and a ceaseless hammering that was like a deliberate assault on the sensibilities. It was the signature act of the modern correspondent of the classical Vandal—senseless and stupid and at war with civilization, like someone graffiti-spraying a freshly painted white wall or smearing his feces on someone’s furniture.

 

Nazis were not ideologues. They were bullies and sackers of civilization. Their logos and ethos were that simple. Hackberry felt that he had lived into a time when gangbangers who sold crack to their own people and did drive-bys with automatic weapons were treated as cultural icons. Concurrently, outlaw white bikers muled crystal meth into every city in the United States. When they went down, it was only because they were murdered by their own kind. They were like creatures that had been incarnated from a Mad Max script. And like any form of cognitive dissonance in a society, they existed because they were given sanction and even lionized.

 

Who was to blame? Maybe no one. Or maybe everyone.

 

He opened the door and stepped out on the concourse. A bright red oversize pickup truck with an extended cab was parked two feet from him. The sound of the diesel engine was so loud he had to open and close his mouth to clear his ears. He could hear a party roaring two doors down. He walked out onto the lawn by the parking lot and picked up a brick from the border of the flower garden. The brick felt cool and heavy in his hand and smelled faintly of moist soil and chemical fertilizer.

 

He returned to the pickup truck and broke the driver’s window with the brick, setting off the alarm. Then he reached inside and unlocked the door and ripped the wiring from under the dashboard. He tossed the brick into a shrub.

 

A minute later, the driver, an unshaved man in greasy denims, was at his truck, aghast. “What the fuck?” he said.

 

“Yeah, too bad,” Hackberry said. “I’d file a report if I was you.”

 

“You saw it?”

 

“A guy with a brick,” Hackberry said.

 

Pam Tibbs had opened the door to her room and was drinking a beer in the doorway. She was dressed in jeans and a maroon Texas Aggie T-shirt. “I saw him running across the lawn,” she said.

 

“Look at my fucking truck.”

 

“The world is really sliding down the bowl,” Pam said.

 

A few minutes later, she tapped on the bolted door that connected her room to Hackberry’s. “Are you having a nervous collapse?” she said.

 

“Not me,” he said.

 

“Can I come in?”

 

“Help yourself.”

 

“Why are you sitting in the dark?”

 

“Why waste electrical power?”

 

“You thinking about Jack Collins?”

 

“No, I’m thinking about everything.” He was sitting at the small wood table against the wall. There was a telephone on it and nothing else. The chair on which he sat was as utilitarian as wood was capable of being. She walked into a blade of light from the window so he could see her face. “You think we’re firing in the well?” she said.

 

“No. Collins is out there. I know it.”

 

“Out where?”

 

“Someplace we don’t suspect. It won’t be part of a pattern. It won’t be in a place we look for the bad guys. He won’t be surrounded by whores or dope or stolen goods or even weapons. He’ll be in a place that’s as ordinary as rocks and dirt.”

 

“What are you saying, Hack?”

 

He shrugged and smiled. “Where’s your beer?”

 

“I drank it.”

 

“Open another one. It doesn’t bother me.”

 

“I only bought one.”

 

He stood up, towering over her. Her shadow seemed to dissolve against his body. She lowered her head and folded her arms across her breasts. He could hear her breathing in the dark.

 

“I’m really old,” he said.

 

“You’ve said that.”

 

“My history is suspect, my judgment poor.”

 

“Not to me.”

 

He cupped his hands on her shoulders. She hooked her thumbs in her back pockets. He could see the gray part in the shine on her hair. He bent over her, his arms circling her back, his hands touching her ribs and sliding up between her shoulder blades into the stiffness of her hair on the nape of her neck. Then he drifted his fingers across her cheek and the corner of her eye, brushing a lock of hair back from her forehead.

 

He felt her step on top of his feet, and before he knew it, she had raised her mouth inches from his, the yeasty smell of beer touching his lips.

 

 

WHEN PREACHER UNZIPPED the flap on Bobby Lee’s polyethylene tent, the storm had passed and the heavens were ink-black again, bursting with stars that stretched from horizon to horizon, the mesas in the east pink and barely visible against the few distant thunderheads that still flickered with lightning.

 

Bobby Lee pushed his head out of his sleeping bag, his hair matted, his eyes bleary with sleep. “Is the plane here?”

 

“Not yet. But I made coffee. Get up. I want to take care of some business,” Preacher said.

 

“It’s cold.”

 

“Put your coat and hat on. Take my gloves.”

 

“I’ve never seen it this cold this time of year.”

 

“I’ll get your coffee. Where are your boots?”

 

“What’s going on, Jack?”

 

Preacher lowered his voice. “I want to give you your money now. Don’t wake up Molo and Angel. Nor the woman.”

 

“You’re really taking her with us?”

 

“What did you think I was going to do?”

 

“Shoot your wad and get it out of your system?”

 

Preacher was squatting, balancing on his haunches. He looked at the fire curling and then flattening under the tin coffeepot he had set on the refrigerator grille propped across a ring of blackened rocks. His eyes were as empty as glass in the firelight, his shoulders poking through his suit coat. “Coarseness toward women doesn’t behoove a man, son.”

 

“You slept in the tent with her?” Bobby Lee said, pulling on his boots.

 

“No, I wouldn’t do that, not unless I was invited.”

 

“She invited us to kidnap her? You’re one for the books, Jack.” Bobby Lee climbed out of the tent, pulling on a black sheep-lined leather coat that was spiderwebbed with cracks. “Where’s the spendolies—”

 

Preacher placed a finger to his lips and began walking up the compacted footpath to the cave opening in the side of the mountain, his body bent slightly forward into the incline, his right hand hooked through the bail of a battery-powered lantern. He glanced back at the large tent where the two Mexican killers slept, then smiled enigmatically at Bobby Lee. “The freshness of the predawn hour has no equivalent,” he said. When he stepped inside the cave, the darkness enveloped him like a cloak.

 

“Jack?” Bobby Lee said.

 

“In here,” Preacher said, turning on the lantern, which gave off a glow that was gray and dim and created wispy shadows on the cave walls.

 

Bobby Lee sat down on a rock and watched Preacher pull a suitcase from behind a wood pallet that he sometimes dried his clothes on.

 

“I promised you ten percent. That’s twenty thousand dollars,” Preacher said, squatting to unlatch the suitcase. “Looks nice bundled in rubber bands, doesn’t it? What are you going to do with all that money, Bobby Lee?”

 

“I’m thinking about leasing a building in Key West and starting up an interior decorating business there. The place is full of rich fudge-packers building condos.”

 

“I’ve got a question to ask you,” Preacher said. “Remember when you told me you and Liam had been talking about my health, about what I ate and didn’t eat, that sort of thing? I just cain’t quite get that image out of my head. Why would you two be so concerned about my food intake? It seems a peculiar subject for young fellows to have any investment in. Wouldn’t you say so?”

 

“I don’t even remember what we were talking about.” Bobby Lee yawned, his eyes going out of focus with fatigue. He turned his face to the cold air puffing through the cave entrance. “The stars are beautiful over those bluffs.”

 

“I don’t talk about what you eat and drink, Bobby Lee. It’s of no consequence to me. So why would you and Liam be having these discussions about my diet?”

 

Bobby Lee shook his head. “It’s too early in the morning for this stuff.”

 

“You’ve always been loyal to me, Bobby Lee. You have, haven’t you? No temptations, so to speak?”

 

“I’ve modeled my life on you.”

 

“Can you see the little crack of light in the east? It’s behind those thunderheads. A little rip in all that blackness. Our pilot is going to fly us right through that hole into the sunlight. Then we’ll make a wide turn to the south and cross into Mexico and fly all the way to the ocean. This afternoon we’ll be eating pineapple and mangoes on a beach and watch people race horses in the surf. But first you have to tell me the truth, or our relationship will remain permanently damaged. We cain’t allow that to happen, boy.”

 

“Truth about what? How’d I damage our relationship?”

 

“You were plotting with Liam to hurt me, Bobby Lee. People are frail. They get scared and betray their friends. I forgive you for it. You thought you’d go where the smart bet was. But you’ve got to own up to it. Otherwise I can only conclude you think I’m a stupid man. You think I’ll abide someone letting on like I’m a stupid man?”

 

“You’re not stupid, Jack.”

 

“Then what am I?”

 

“Pardon?”

 

“If I’m not stupid or ignorant, then what am I? Somebody you can deceive and not pay any price for it? Somebody with no honor or self-respect who lets other people wipe their feet on him? Which is it?”

 

Bobby Lee propped his hands on his thighs. He stared at his feet and at the cave opening and at the landscape starting to gray with the coming of dawn. “Everybody thought you were losing it. I did, too, at least for a while. You’re right, though, I was selfish and thinking of myself. Then I realized you were the only guy I admired, that Liam and Artie and Hugo and the others weren’t real soldiers, but you were.”

 

“You and Liam were going to pop me?”

 

“It didn’t get that far.”

 

Preacher was smiling. “Come on, Bobby Lee. You’ve given honest witness about your failure. Don’t water the drink now. You’ll undo the courage and the principle you’ve shown me.”

 

“Yeah, we talked about popping you.”

 

“You and Liam?”

 

“I told Liam that was the order from Artie Rooney and Hugo. But I decided all of them were a bunch of dirtbags, and I called you up on my cell phone and told you how much I respected you.”

 

“That was just before you decided to let Liam eat a bullet point-blank in the women’s restroom? I’ll hand it to you. You can slide around and reshape yourself faster than quicksilver.”

 

Bobby Lee started to speak, then realized Preacher had already disengaged from the conversation and was standing in the cave’s entrance, his hands on his hips, watching the wind ripple the tents down below, watching the mysterious transformation of the desert from darkness to a pewterlike stillness that resembled a photograph defining itself inside developing fluid. Then Preacher said something Bobby Lee couldn’t quite hear.

 

“Say again?” Bobby Lee asked.

 

Preacher turned and reached behind the wood pallet. Unconsciously, Bobby Lee fastened the top button on his cracked sheep-lined coat as though protecting himself from a gust of cold air.

 

“I told you I always wanted you to be a piece of this property,” Preacher said. “That sentiment has not changed one iota.”

 

Down below, the Mexican killers and Esther were wakened by a burst of machine-gun fire and a tinkling of brass hulls on stone. But the sounds were absorbed so quickly inside the earth, they each wondered if they had been dreaming.

 

 

AT FIRST LIGHT Hackberry Holland and Pam Tibbs talked to an elderly man and a small boy at a dirt crossroads where they were picking up trash out of a ditch. The land was level and hard, marked by little other than fence lines and loading pens that were gray with rot and impacted with tumbleweed. Far to the east, the sun was pale and watery behind a low range of hills that looked coated with frost, ragged like glass along the crests.

 

“Traven?” the old man said. “No, there’s nobody here’bouts by that name.”

 

“How about Fred Dobbs?” Hackberry said.

 

“No, sir, never heard of him, either.” The old man was very large and straight in physique for his age, his hands horned with calluses, his face oblong, as big as a jug, the creases so deep there were shadows in them. He wore strap overalls and a yellow canvas coat and no cap. He studied the departmental logo on the cruiser’s door, obviously noting Hackberry was out of his jurisdiction. “It’s the frozen shits this morning, ain’t it?”

 

Hackberry showed him photographs of Jack Collins, Liam Eriksson, Bobby Lee Motree, and Hugo Cistranos.

 

“No, sir, if they live around here, I ain’t seen them. What’d these fellows do?”

 

“Take your choice,” Hackberry said from the passenger window. “Did you know a woman by the name of Edna Wilcox?”

 

“Died of an accident or a fall of some kind?”

 

“I think she did,” Hackberry said.

 

“She owned a big chunk of land about ten miles up the road and to the east. People have rented there off and on, but the house burned down. There’s some Mexicans been working there. Show your pictures to my grandson. Look right at him when you talk. He cain’t hear.”

 

“What’s his name?”

 

“Roy Rogers.”

 

Hackberry opened the passenger door and leaned over so he was eye level with the little boy. The boy’s hair was jet-black, his skin brown, his eyes filled with a black luminosity sometimes characteristic of people who live inside themselves.

 

“You know any of these men, Roy?” Hackberry said.

 

The boy’s eyes slid across the photographs that Ethan Riser had sent to Hackberry’s office. He remained immobile, the wind tousling his hair, his face as expressionless as clay. In the silence, he wiped at his nose with the back of his wrist. Then he glanced sideways at his grandfather.

 

“Want to help me out here?” Hackberry said to the grandfather.

 

“Not much gets by him. Roy’s a smart little boy.”

 

“Sir?”

 

“You wouldn’t tell me what these men had done, but now you want me and him to he’p you out. I suspect that seems like a one-sided deal to him.”

 

Hackberry got out of the vehicle and squatted down, suppressing the pain that flared in the small of his back. “These men are criminals, Roy. They’ve done some very bad things. If I can, I’m going to put them in jail. But I need people like you and your grandfather to tell me where these guys might be. If you’ve seen one of them, just point your finger.”

 

The boy looked at his grandfather again.

 

“Go ahead,” the grandfather said.

 

The boy touched one photograph with the end of his finger.

 

“Where’d you see this fellow?” Hackberry said.

 

“The store, last spring,” the boy said, his words like wood blocks that were rounded on the edges.

 

“We run a store up at the next crossroads,” the grandfather said.

 

Hackberry patted the boy on the shoulder and stood up. “How many houses are there on the old Wilcox property?” he said to the grandfather.

 

“A shack here and there, sweat lodges and tepees and such that a bunch of hippies smoke marijuana in.”

 

“You said there was a place that burned down.”

 

“That’s the place the Mexicans were cleaning up. That’s where the Wilcox woman lived. By the way, y’all are the second people to come by this morning asking about those fellows.”

 

“Who else was here?”

 

“A little round man in a Cherokee with an American flag flying on it and a young fellow and girl with him. The young fellow had a scar on his face like somebody glued a pink soda straw on it. Y’all grow them a little strange back where you come from?”

 

“Where’d they go?”

 

“Up the road. I can tell you how to get there, but the Mexicans will probably run off when they see y’all coming.”

 

“They’re illegals?”

 

“Oh, hell no.”

 

Hackberry got directions and got back in the cruiser. Pam dropped the transmission into gear and drove slowly up the road headed north, waiting for him to speak. A piece of the moon still hung low in the sky, like a carved piece of ice.

 

“The boy picked out Liam Eriksson, the only guy we know for sure is dead,” he said.

 

“You want to talk to the Mexicans?”

 

“For all the good it’s probably going to do, why not?” he replied.

 

 

WITHOUT ANY SENSE of grandiosity, Esther Dolan could say she had never feared mortality. Accepting it in the form it came to most people—in their sleep, in hospitals, or by sudden heart attack—seemed an easy trade-off considering the fact that one did nothing to earn his birth. The stories of violent death told her by her grandparents, who had survived the pogroms in Russia, were another matter.

 

The word “pogrom” came from an early Russian word that meant “thunder.” It meant destruction and death caused by irrational forces. It meant hatred and suffering that descended on helpless people without cause or motivation or reason. And the perpetrators of it were always the same group: those who wished to infect the world with the same self-loathing that had been the three-6 tattoo they had brought with them from the womb.

 

In the aftermath of the gunfire, she had stood motionless outside the polyethylene tent, the cold leaching the strength from her body, the wind swelling the tent on the support poles, the hillside black against a sky that was fading to dark blue in the east.

 

She watched the man called Preacher descend from the cave, his submachine gun clenched against his side with one hand, his coat collar pulled up and the brim of his fedora pulled down, smoke leaking from the barrel of his weapon. He watched each step he took on the compacted path as though his own life and safety and well-being were of enormous importance, whereas the man he had just killed was a disappearing memory.

 

The Mexican killers had also come out of their tent. The smoke from the cook fire contained a dense sweet smell, like burning sage or unopened flowers that had been consumed by the flames. Preacher leaned over the fire and, with his bare hand, picked up the metal pot boiling on the refrigerator grille and poured coffee into a tin cup, never setting down the Thompson. He drank from the coffee, blowing on the cup. He gazed at the frost on the hills. “It’s going to be a fine day,” he said.

 

“żDonde está Bobby Lee?” Angel said.

 

“The boy made his peace. Don’t be worried about him.”

 

“żEstá muerto?”

 

“If he’s not, I’d better get a refund on this gun.”

 

“Chingado, hombre.”

 

“Molo, can you fix up some huevos rancheros? I could eat a washtub load of those. Just cook it on the coals. I didn’t fire the woodstove this morning. A man shouldn’t do more work than is required of him. It’s a form of greed. For some reason, I could never get those concepts across to Bobby Lee.”

 

While Preacher spoke, he had not looked directly at Esther. His back was turned toward her, his bone structure as stiff as a scarecrow’s inside his coat, the Thompson hanging straight down from his arm. His face lifted toward the sky, his nostrils swelling. Now he turned slowly toward her, taking the measure of her mood, his gaze seeming to reach inside her head. “I’ve scared you?” he said.

 

“He was your friend.”

 

“Who?”

 

“The man in the mine.”

 

“It’s not a mine. It’s a cave. You know the story of Elijah sleeping outside the cave, waiting to hear the voice of Yahweh? The voice wasn’t to be found in the wind or a fire or an earthquake. It was to be found at the entrance to a cave.”

 

As she looked into his face and listened to his words, she believed she had finally come to understand the moral vacuity that lived behind his eyes. “You’re going to kill us all, aren’t you?”

 

“No.”

 

“You weren’t listening. I said you’re going to kill us all.”

 

“What does that mean?”

 

“You’re going to kill yourself, too. That’s what this is all about. You have to die. You just haven’t found somebody to do it for you yet.”

 

“Suicide is the mark of a coward, madam. I think you should treat me with more respect.”

 

“Don’t call me madam. Did the man in the cave have a gun?”

 

“I didn’t ask him. When Molo is done cooking, fix me a plate and one for yourself. The plane will be here by ten.”

 

“Prepare you a plate? Who do you think you are?”

 

“Your spouse, and that means you’ll damn well do what I say. Get in the tent and wait for me.”

 

“Seńora, better do what he say,” Angel said, wagging an admonishing finger. “Molo already gave him food that makes him real sick. Seńor Jack ain’t in a very good mood.”

 

She went back inside the tent, her temples pounding. She sat down on the cot and picked up the box of uneaten brownies she had prepared for Mrs. Bernstein. She placed her hand on her chest and waited until her heart had stopped racing. She hadn’t eaten since the previous evening, and her head was spinning and gray spots were swimming before her eyes.

 

She slipped the string off the box and took out one brownie and bit off a corner. She could not be sure, but she believed she might be holding a formidable weapon in her hand, at least if her intuitions about Preacher’s refusal to eat the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches were correct. She had learned the recipe from her grandmother, a woman whose life of privation had taught her how to create culinary miracles from the simplest of ingredients. One of the grandmother’s great successes had been brownies that were loaded with government-staple peanut butter but were baked with enough chocolate and cocoa powder to disguise their mundane core.

 

Esther closed her eyes and saw Nick and her son and her twin daugh ters as clearly as if she were looking out the front window of their home on the Comal River. Nick was cooking a chicken on the barbecue grill, standing downwind, his eyes running, his glossy Hawaiian shirt soaked with smoke, forking the meat as though that would improve the burned mess he was making. In the background, Jesse and Ruth and Kate were turning somersaults on the grass, their tanned bodies netted with the sunlight shining through a tree, the river cold and rock-bottomed and swift-running behind them.

 

For just a moment she thought she was going to lose it. But this was not a time either to surrender or to accept the terms of one’s enemies. How did her grandmother put it? We didn’t give our lives. The Cossacks stole them. A Cossack feeds on weakness, and his bloodlust is energized by his victim’s fear.

 

That was what her grandmother had taught her. If Esther Dolan had her way, the man they called Preacher was about to learn a lesson from the southern Siberian plain.

 

When Preacher opened the tent flap, she caught a glimpse of mesas in the distance, an orange sunrise staining a bank of low-lying rain clouds. He closed the flap behind him and started to fasten the ties to the aluminum tent pole, then became frustrated and flung them from his fingers. He was not carrying his weapon. He sat down on the cot opposite her, his knees splayed, the needle tips of his boots pointed outward like a duck’s feet.

 

“You’ve been around men who didn’t warrant your respect,” he said. “So your disrespect toward males has become a learned habit that isn’t your fault.”

 

“I grew up not far from the Garden District in New Orleans. I didn’t associate with criminals, so I didn’t develop attitudes about them one way or another.”

 

“You married one. And you didn’t grow up by the Garden District. You grew up on Tchoupitoulas, not far from the welfare project.”

 

“Lillian Hellman’s home on Prytania Street was two blocks from us, if it’s any of your business.”

 

“You don’t think I know who Lillian Hellman was?”

 

“I’m sure you do. The public library system gives cards to any bum or loafer who wants one.”

 

“You know how many women would pay money to be sitting where you are right now?”

 

“I’m sure there’re many desperate creatures in our midst these days.”

 

She could see the heat building in his face, the whitening along the rims of his nostrils, the stitched, downturned cast of his mouth. She picked up a small piece of brownie with the ends of her fingers and put it in her mouth. She could feel him watching her hungrily. “You haven’t eaten?” she asked.

 

“Molo burned the food.”

 

“I made these for my friend Mrs. Bernstein. I don’t guess I’ll ever have the opportunity to give them to her. Would you like one?”

 

“What’s in them?”

 

“Sugar, chocolate, flour, butter, sometimes cocoa powder. You’re afraid I put hashish in them? You think I bake narcotic pastries for my friends?”

 

“I wouldn’t mind one.”

 

She held out the box indifferently. He reached inside and lifted out a thick square and raised it to his mouth. Then he paused and studied her face carefully. “You’re a beautiful woman. You ever see the painting of Goya’s mistress? You look like her, just a little older, more mature, without the sign of profligacy on your mouth.”

 

“Without what on my mouth?”

 

“The sign of a whore.”

 

He bit into the brownie and chewed, then swallowed and bit again, his eyes hazy with either a secret lust or a sexual memory that she suspected gave birth to itself every time he pulled the trigger on one of his victims.

 

 

 

 

 

29

 

PAM TIBBS PULLED the cruiser onto the shoulder of the dirt road and stopped between two bluffs that gave onto a breathtaking view of a wide sloping plain and hills and mesas that seemed paradoxically molded by aeons and yet untouched by time. Hackberry got out of the vehicle and focused his binoculars on the base of the hills in the distance, moving the lenses across rockslides and flumes bordered by mesquite trees and huge chunks of stone that had toppled from the ridgeline and looked as hard and jagged as yellow chert. Then his binoculars lit on a large pile of bulldozed house debris, much of it stucco and scorched beams, and four powder-blue polyethylene tents and a chemical outhouse and a woodstove and an elevated metal drum probably containing water. A truck and an SUV were parked amid the tents, their windows dark with shadow, hailstones melting on their metal surfaces.

 

“What do you see?” Pam asked. She was standing on the driver’s side of the cruiser, her arms draped over the open door.

 

“Tents and vehicles but no people.”

 

“Maybe the Mexican construction guys are living there.”

 

“Could be,” he said, lowering the glasses. But he continued to stare at the sloping plain with his naked eyes, at the bareness of the hills, the frost that coated the rocks where the sun hadn’t touched them. He looked to the east and the growing orange stain in the sky and wondered if the day would warm, if the unseasonal cold would go out of the wind, if the ground would become less hard under his feet. For just a second he thought he heard the sound of a bugle echoing down an arroyo.

 

“Did you hear that?” he said.

 

“Hear what?”

 

“The old man back there said hippies were living in tepees and smoking dope out here. Maybe some of them are musicians.”

 

“Your hearing must be a lot better than mine. I didn’t hear a thing.”

 

He got back in the vehicle and shut the door. “Let’s boogie.”

 

“About last night,” she said.

 

“What about it?”

 

“You haven’t said much, that’s all.”

 

He looked straight ahead at the hills, at the mesquite ruffling in the wind, at the immensity of the countryside, beveled and scalloped and worn smooth by wind and drought and streaked with salt by receding oceans, a place where people who may have even preceded the Indians had hunted animals with sharpened sticks and crushed one another’s skulls over a resource as uncomplicated in its composition as a pool of brown water.

 

“You bothered by last night?” she said.

 

“No.”

 

“You think you took advantage of an employee?”

 

“No.”

 

“You just think you’re an old man who shouldn’t be messing with a younger woman?”

 

“The question of my age isn’t arguable. I am old.”

 

“You could fool me,” she said.

 

“Keep your eyes on the road.”

 

“What you are is a damn Puritan.”

 

“Fundamentalist religion and killing people run in my family,” he said.

 

For the first time that morning, she laughed.

 

But Hackberry could not shake the depression he was in, and the cause had little to do with the events of the previous night at the motel. After returning from Korea, he had rarely discussed his experiences there, except on one occasion when he was required to testify at the court-martial of a turncoat who, for a warmer shack and a few extra fish heads and balls of rice in the progressive compound, had sold his friends down the drain. Even then his statements were legalistic, nonemotional, and not autobiographical in nature. The six weeks he had spent under a sewer grate in the dead of winter were of little interest to anyone in the room. Nor were his courtroom listeners interested, at least at the moment, in a historical event that had occurred on a frozen dawn in the third week of November in the year 1950.

 

At first light Hackberry had awakened in a frozen ditch to the roar of jet planes splitting the sky above him, as a lone American F-80 chased two Russian-made MiGs back across the Yalu into China. The American pilot made a wide turn and then a victory roll, all the time staying south of the river, obeying the proscription against entering Red Chinese airspace. During the night, from across a snow-filled rice paddy spiked with brown weeds, the sound of bugles floated down from the hills, from different crests and gullies, some of them blown into megaphones for amplification. No one slept as a result.

 

At dawn there were rumors that two Chinese prisoners had been brought back by a patrol. Then someone said the Korean translator didn’t know pig flop from bean dip about local dialects and that the two prisoners were ignorant rice farmers conscripted by the Communists.

 

One hour later, a marching barrage began that would forever remain for Hackberry as the one experience that was as close to hell as the earth is capable of producing. It was followed throughout the day by a human-wave frontal assault comprised of division after division of Chinese regulars, pushing civilians ahead of them as human shields, the dead strung for miles across the snow, some of them wearing tennis shoes.

 

The marines packed snow on the barrels of their .30-caliber machine guns, running the snow up and down the superheated steel with their mittens. When the barrels burned out, they sometimes had to unscrew and change them with their bare hands, leaving their flesh on the metal.

 

The ditch was littered with shell casings, the BAR man hunting in the snow for his last magazine, the breech of every M-1 around Hack locking open, the empty clip ejecting with a clanging sound. When the marines were out of ammunition, Hackberry remembered the great silence that followed and the hissing of shrapnel from airbursts in the snow and then the bugles blowing again.

 

Now, as he gazed through the windshield of the cruiser, he was back in the ditch, and the year was 1950, and for a second he thought he heard a series of dull reports like strings of Chinese firecrackers popping. But when he rolled down the window, the only sound he heard was wind. “Stop the car,” he said.

 

“What is it?”

 

“There’s something wrong with that scene. The old man said the Mexicans working here were illegals. But the vehicles are new and expensive. Undocumented workers don’t set up a permanent camp where they work, either.”

 

“You think Collins is actually there?”

 

“He shows up where you least expect him. He doesn’t feel guilty. He thinks it’s the rest of us who have the problem, not him.”

 

“What do you want to do?”

 

“Call the locals for backup, then call Ethan Riser.”

 

“I say leave the feds out of it. They’ve been a cluster-fuck from the jump. Where you going?”

 

“Just make the calls, Pam,” he said.

 

He walked twenty yards farther up the dirt track. The wind was blowing harder and should have felt colder, but his skin was dead to the touch, his eyes tearing slightly, his palms so stiff and dry that he felt they would crack if he folded them. He could see a haze of white smoke hanging on the ground near the tents. A redheaded turkey vulture flew by immediately over Hackberry’s head, gliding so fast on extended wings that its shadow broke apart on a pile of boulders and was gone before Hackberry could blink.

 

An omen in a valley that could have been a place of bones, the kind of charnel house one associated with dead civilizations? Or was it all just the kind of burned-out useless terrain that no one cared about, one that was disposable in the clash of cultures or imperial societies?

 

He could feel a pressure band tightening on the side of his head, a cold vapor wrapping around his heart. At what point in a man’s life did he no longer have to deal with feelings as base as fear? Didn’t acceptance of the grave and the possibility of either oblivion or stepping out among the stars without a map relieve one of the ancestral dread that fouled the blood and reduced men to children who called out their mother’s name in their last moments? Why did age purchase no peace?

 

But he no longer had either the time or luxury of musing upon abstractions. Where were the men who lived in the tents? Who was cooking food inside a fire ring no different from those our ancestors cooked on in this same valley over eleven thousand years ago?

 

The cave located up the mountainside from the camp looked like a black mouth, no, one that was engorged, strung with flumes of green and orange and gray mine tailings or rock that had simply cracked and fallen away from constant exposure to heat and subfreezing temperatures.

 

It was the kind of place where something had gone terribly wrong long ago, the kind of place that held on to its dead and the spiritual vestiges of the worst people who had lived inside it.

 

Hackberry wondered what his grandfather, Old Hack, would have to say about a place like this. As though Old Hack had decided to speak to him inside the wind, he could almost hear the sonorous voice and the cynical humor for which his grandfather was infamous: “I suspect it has its moments, Satchel Ass, but truth be known, it’s the kind of shithole a moral imbecile like John Wesley Hardin would have found an absolute delight.”

 

Hackberry smiled to himself and hooked his coat behind the butt of his holstered revolver. He walked back toward the cruiser, where Pam Tibbs was still sitting behind the steering wheel, finishing her call to Ethan Riser.

 

But something in the door mirror had caught her attention. She put down the phone and turned around in the seat and looked back toward the twin bluffs, then got out of the cruiser with the binoculars and focused them on a vehicle that had come to a stop by the twin bluffs. “Better take a look,” she said.

 

“At what?”

 

“It’s a Grand Cherokee,” she said. “It’s flying an American flag on a staff attached to the back bumper.”

 

“Nick Dolan?”

 

“I can’t tell. It looks like he’s lost.”

 

“Forget him.”

 

“Flores and Gaddis are probably with him.”

 

“We’re going in, babe. Under a black flag. You got me?”

 

“No, I didn’t hear that.”

 

“Yes, you did. Collins has killed scores of people in his life. What’s in the pump?”

 

“All double-aught bucks,” Pam said.

 

“Load your pockets with them, too.”

 

 

PREACHER WAS EATING his second brownie when the first cramp hit him. The sensation, or his perception of its significance, was not instantaneous. At first he felt only a slight spasm, not unlike an irritant unexpectedly striking the stomach lining. Then the pain sharpened and spread down toward the colon, like a sliver of jagged tin seeking release. He clenched his buttocks together, still unsure what was happening, faintly embarrassed in front of the woman, trying to hide the discomfort distorting his face.

 

The next spasm made his jaw drop and the blood drain from his head. He leaned forward, trying to catch his breath, sweat breaking on his upper lip. His stomach was churning, the interior of the tent going out of focus. He swallowed drily and tried to see the woman clearly.

 

“Are you sick?” she said.

 

“You ask if I’m sick? I’m poisoned. What’s in this?”

 

“What I said. Chocolate and flour and—”

 

A bilious metallic taste surged into his mouth. The constriction in his bowels was spreading upward, into his lower chest, like chains wrapping around his ribs and sternum, squeezing the air out of his lungs. “Don’t lie,” he said.

 

“I ate the brownies, too. There’s nothing wrong with them.”

 

He coughed violently, as though he had eaten a piece of angle iron. “There must be peanut butter in them.”

 

“You have a problem with peanut butter?”

 

“You bitch.” He pulled open the tent flap to let in the cold air. “You treacherous bitch.”

 

“Look at you. A grown man cursing others because he has a stomachache. A man who kills women and young girls calls other people names because a brownie has upset him. Your mother would be ashamed of you. Where did you grow up? In a barnyard?”

 

Preacher got to his feet and held on to the tent pole with one hand until the earth stopped shifting under his feet. “What right do you have to talk of my mother?”

 

“What right, he asks? I’m the mother you took from her husband and her children. The mother you took to be your concubine, that’s who I am, you miserable gangster.”

 

He stumbled out into the wind and cold air, his hair soggy with sweat under his hat, his skin burning as though it had been dipped in acid, one hand clenched on his stomach. He headed for his tent, where the Thompson lay on top of his writing table, the drum fat with cartridges, a second cartridge-packed drum resting beside it. That was when he saw a sheriff’s cruiser coming up the dirt track and, in the far distance, a second vehicle that seemed part of an optical illusion brought on by the anaphylactic reaction wrecking his nervous system. The second vehicle was a maroon SUV with an American flag whipping from a staff attached to the back bumper. Who were these people? What gave them the right to come on his land? His anger only exacerbated the fire in his entrails and constricted his lungs as though his chest had been touched by the tendrils of a jellyfish.

 

“Angel! Molo!” he called hoarsely.

 

“żQué pasa, Seńor Collins?”

 

“ĄMaten los!” he said.

 

“żQuién?”

 

“Todos que estan en los dos vehiculos.”

 

The two Mexican killers were standing outside their tent. They turned and saw the approaching cruiser. “żNosotros los matamos todos? Hombre, esta es una pila de mierda,” Angel said. “Chingado, son of a beech, you sure you ain’t a marijuanista, Seńor Collins? Oops, siento mucho, solamente estoy bromeando.”

 

But Preacher was not interested in what the Mexicans had to say. He was already inside his tent, gathering up the Thompson, stuffing the extra ammunition pan under his arm, convinced that the voice he had sought in the wind and in the fire and even in an earthquake would speak to him now, with the Jewish woman, inside the cave.

 

 

“A GUY JUST came out of a tent,” Pam said, leaning forward on the steering wheel, taking her foot off the gas. “Dammit, I can’t see him now. The trash pile is in the way. Wait a second. Two other guys are talking to him.”

 

The visual angle from the passenger seat was bad. Hackberry handed her the binoculars. She fitted them to her eyes and adjusted the focus, breathing audibly, her chest rising and falling irregularly. “They look Hispanic,” she said. “Maybe they’re construction workers, Hack.”

 

“Where’s the other guy?”

 

“I don’t know. He’s gone. He must have gone back in one of the tents. We need to dial it down.”

 

“No, it’s Collins.”

 

She removed the binoculars from her eyes and looked hard and long at him. “You thought you heard a bugle. I think you’re seeing and hearing things that aren’t there. We can’t be wrong on this.”

 

He dropped open the glove box and removed a Beretta nine-millimeter. He pulled back the slide and chambered a round and set the butterfly safety. “I’m not wrong. Pull to the back of the trash pile. We get out simultaneously on each side of the vehicle and stay spread apart. If you see Collins, you kill him.”

 

“Listen to me, Hack—”

 

“No, Collins doesn’t get a chance to use his Thompson. You’ve never seen anyone shot with a weapon that has that kind of firepower. We kill him on sight and worry about legalities later.”

 

“I can’t accept an order like that.”

 

“Yes, you can.”

 

“I know you, Hack. I know the thoughts you have before you think them. You want me to protect myself at all costs, but you’ve got your own agenda with this guy.”

 

“We left Dr. Freud back there on the road,” he said. He stepped out on the hardpan just as the sun broke over the hill, splintering like gold needles, the bottom of the hill still deep in shadow.

 

He and Pam Tibbs walked toward the pile of house debris, dividing around it, their eyes fixed on the four tents, their eyes watering in the wind and the smoke blowing from a fire that smelled of burning food or garbage.

 

But because of the angle, they had lost sight of the two Hispanic men, who had gone back in their tent or were behind the vehicles. As Hackberry walked deeper into the shadows, the sunlight that had fractured on the ridgeline disappeared, and he could see the tents and the pickup truck and the SUV and the mountainside in detail, and he realized the mistake he had made: You never allow your enemy to become what is known as a barricaded suspect. Even more important, you never allow your enemy to become a barricaded suspect with a hostage.

 

Pam Tibbs was to his left, the stock of her cut-down pump Remington twelve-gauge snugged against her shoulder, her eyes sweeping from right to left, left to right, never blinking, her face dilated as though she were staring into an ice storm. He heard her footsteps pause and knew she had just seen Collins at the same moment he had, pushing a woman ahead of him up a footpath that led to the opening in the mountainside.

 

Collins had knotted his left fist in the fabric of the woman’s dress and was holding the Thompson by the pistol grip with his right hand, the barrel at a downward angle. He looked back once at Pam and Hackberry, his face white and small and tight under his hat, then he shoved the woman ahead of him into the cave and disappeared behind her.

 

“He’s got the high ground. We’ve got to get one of the vehicles between us and him,” Hackberry said.

 

The tent that the two Hispanic men had been using was the largest of the four. The SUV was parked not far from the tent flap; the pickup truck was parked between two other tents. The only sounds were the ruffling of the wind on the polyethylene surfaces of the tents and a rock toppling from the ridgeline and the engine of the maroon SUV coming up the dirt track from the bluffs.

 

Hackberry turned around and raised one fist in the air, hoping that Pete Flores would recognize the universal military signal to stop. But either Flores did not see him, or the driver, who was undoubtedly Nick Dolan, chose to keep coming.

 

Hackberry shifted his direction, crossing behind Pam Tibbs, his .45 revolver on full cock, the Beretta stuffed through the back of his gun belt. “I’m going to clear the first tent. Cover me,” he said.

 

He opened his Queen pocketknife with his teeth and walked quickly to the back of the tent, taking long strides, watching the other tents and the two parked vehicles, both of which had tinted windows. The blade of his knife could shave hair off his arm. He sliced the cords that were tied to the tent’s support poles and steel ground pins and watched the shape go out of the tent as it collapsed in a pile.

 

Nothing moved under its folds. He crossed behind Pam Tibbs, lifting his eyes to the cave entrance on the mountainside. The pile of building debris was behind them now, the bulldozed stucco powdering, the broken asbestos feathering in the wind. If Collins opened up on them, the only cover available would be the pickup truck or the SUV, and he could not be sure either of them was unoccupied.

 

He felt naked in the way a person feels naked in a dream, in a public place, before a large audience. But the sense of nakedness in his and Pam’s circumstances went beyond that. It was the kind of sensation a forward artillery observer experiences when the first round he has called in for effect strikes home and his position is exposed. It was the kind of nakedness a navy corpsman feels when he runs through automatic-weapons fire to reach a wounded marine. The sensation was akin to having one’s skin pulled off in strips with a pair of pliers.

 

Then he realized that regardless of the criminal background of his antagonists, at least one of them had made the mistake of all amateurs: His vanity or his libido or whatever megalomaniacal passion defined him was more important to him than the utilitarian simplicity of a stone killer and survivor like Jack Collins.

 

One man was wearing lizard-skin cowboy boots, chrome-plated on the heels and toes. They flashed with a dull silvery light beneath the running board on the far side of the pickup truck.

 

“Three o’clock, Pam!” Hackberry said.

 

At the same moment the man behind the truck fired an Uzi or a MAC-10 across the hood, then moved back quickly behind the cab. But his one-handed aim was sloppy, and the bullets hit the trash pile and stitched the water drum and cut a line across the hardpan, flicking dirt into the air and ricocheting off rocks and whining into the distance with the diminished sound of a broken bedspring.

 

Hackberry aimed his .45 with both hands and fired through the tinted window on the driver’s side, cascading glass onto the seats and blowing out the opposite window. He fired two more rounds, one through the window on the extended cab, one through the back door, leaving a clean-edged, polished indentation and hole the size of a quarter. But the three rounds he had let off did no good. The man with the automatic weapon moved behind the back of the cab and sprayed the whole area blindly, probably as masking fire for either the other Hispanic man, who was nowhere in sight, or Jack Collins up in the cave.

 

The shooting stopped. Hackberry had pulled back to the edge of the trash pile, and Pam was somewhere off to his left, in the shadows or behind the concrete foundation of the destroyed house. In all probability, the shooter was changing magazines. Hackberry got down on his hands and knees, then on his stomach. He heard a metallic click, like a latching steel mechanism being inserted into a socket. He extended his .45, gripping it with both hands, his elbows propped in the dirt, the pain along his spine flaring into his ribs.

 

Hackberry saw the chrome-sheathed lizard-skin boots of the shooter move from behind the back tire. He sighted down the long barrel of his .45 at the place where the blue-jean cuff of the shooter’s right pants leg met the top of his foot. He pulled the trigger.

 

The shooter screamed when the 230-grain round tore through his boot. He fell to the ground and yelled out again, holding his destroyed foot and ankle, blood welling through his fingers, his other hand still gripping his weapon.

 

Pam Tibbs ran toward the truck, her pump shotgun held in front of her, the safety off, lifting the barrel, stepping sideways in an arc around the hood of the truck, almost like an erratic dancer, coming into position so that she stood in full view of the shooter. All the time she was yelling, as though to a man with neither sight nor hearing, “Give it up! Give it up! Give it up! Do it now! Do it now! Throw it away! Hands straight out on the ground! You must do it now! No, you do not do that! Both hands in the dirt! Did you hear me?”

 

Then she squeezed the trigger. Five feet away, the man who would not release his weapon ate a pattern of buckshot as wide as his hand and watched his brains splatter across the side panel of his truck.

 

When Hackberry got to her, she had already jacked the spent shell from the chamber and was shoving another one into the magazine with her thumb, her hands still trembling.

 

“Did you see the other guy?” he said.

 

“No, where is he?” she said. Her eyes were as round as marbles, jittering in their sockets.

 

“I didn’t see him. We’re exposed. Get behind the truck.”

 

“Where’s Collins?”

 

“In the cave. Get behind the truck. Did you hear me?”

 

“What’s that sound?”

 

“What sound?” he said. But the .45 rounds he had fired had left his ears ringing, and he couldn’t make out her words.

 

“It’s that idiot Dolan,” she said.

 

They couldn’t believe what they saw next. Nick Dolan’s SUV had veered off the dirt track, swinging wide of the concrete slab on which the stucco house had once stood, and was now coming full-bore across the hardpan, rocks and mud flying up into the undercarriage, the frame jolting on the springs.

 

“Has he lost his mind?” Pam said.

 

Nick Dolan plowed through the tent closest to the mountain, ripping it loose from its steel pins, wrapping the polyethylene material and destroyed aluminum poles across the grille and hood. But inside the sounds of the tent tearing and the tie ropes breaking and the steel pins whipping back against the SUV, Hackberry had heard a solid weight impact sickeningly against the SUV’s hood.

 

Nick slammed on his brakes, and the tangle of material and tent poles and a broken cot rolled off his vehicle into the dirt, with the body of the second Hispanic man inside.

 

“I saw him go into the tent. He had a gun,” Nick said from the window. A pair of binoculars hung from his neck.

 

“Your wife could have been in there,” Pam said.

 

“No, we saw Collins take her into the hole in the mountain. Let’s get up there,” Nick said.

 

Vikki Gaddis sat in the passenger seat, and Pete Flores sat in back, leaning forward against the front seat.

 

“Y’all stay where you are,” Hackberry said.

 

“I’m going up there with you,” Nick said.

 

“No, you’re not,” Hackberry said.

 

“That’s my wife,” Nick said, opening the door.

 

“You’re about to find yourself in handcuffs, Mr. Dolan,” Pam said.

 

Hackberry dumped the spent shells from the cylinder of his revolver into his palm and reloaded the empty chambers. He motioned to Pam Tibbs and began walking with her toward the mountain, ignoring the three new arrivals, hoping his last words to them had stuck.

 

“You don’t want to wait for the locals?” she said.

 

“Wrong move. I’m going straight up the path. I want you to come in from the side and stay just outside the cave.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Collins won’t shoot if he thinks I’m alone.”

 

“Why not?”

 

“He has too much pride. With Collins, it’s not about money or sex. He thinks it’s the twilight of the gods and he’s at center stage.”

 

Nick Dolan and Vikki Gaddis and Pete Flores were all getting out of the SUV.

 

“You three get right back in your vehicle and drive back toward the road and stay there,” Hackberry said.

 

“To hell with that,” Nick said.

 

“Sheriff, give me a weapon and let me go up there with you,” Pete said.

 

“Can’t do it, partner. End of discussion,” Hackberry said. “Ms. Gaddis, you keep these two guys here. If you want to see Mrs. Dolan come out of that cave alive, don’t mess in what’s about to happen.”

 

Hackberry began walking up the path alone, while Pam Tibbs cut across the green and orange and gray tailings that were strung down the incline, carrying her shotgun at port arms.

 

Hackberry paused at the cave’s entrance, his .45 holstered, the Beretta still tucked inside the back of his gun belt. He smelled a dank odor like mouse droppings or bat guano and water pooled in stone. He felt the wind coursing over his skin, flowing into the cave. “Can you hear me, Collins?” he said.

 

There was no answer. Hackberry stepped inside the darkness of the cave as though slipping from the world of light into one of perpetual shade.

 

The body of a man lay behind a boulder. The wounds in his chest and stomach and legs were egregious. The amount of blood that had pooled around him and soaked into his sheep-lined leather coat and bradded orange work pants seemed more than his body could have contained.

 

“You can do a good deed here, Jack,” Hackberry called out.

 

After the echo died, he thought he heard a rattling sound in the dark, farther back in the cave.

 

“Did you hear me, Jack?”

 

“You’re backlit, Sheriff,” a voice said from deep in the cave’s interior.

 

“That’s right. You can pop me any time you want.” Hackberry paused. “You’re not above doing a good deed, are you?”

 

“What might that be?”

 

“Mrs. Dolan has children. They want her back. How about it?”

 

“I’ll take it under advisement.”

 

“I don’t think you’re a man who hides behind a woman.”

 

“I don’t have to hide behind anyone. You hear that sound? Why don’t you come toward me a little more and check out your environment?”

 

“Rattlers are holed up in here?”

 

“Probably not more than a couple of dozen. Just flatten yourself out against the wall.”

 

“Your voice sounds a little strange, Jack.”

 

“He’s had an anaphylactic reaction to peanut butter. It may be fatal,” a woman’s voice said.

 

“You shut up,” Collins said.

 

“Is that right, Jack? You want to go to a hospital?” Hackberry said.

 

But there was no answer.

 

“I was a navy corpsman,” Hackberry said. “Severe anaphylaxis can bring on respiratory and coronary arrest, partner. It’s a bad way to go, strangling in your spit, your sphincter letting go, that sort of thing.”

 

“I can squeeze this trigger, and you’ll be a petroglyph.”

 

“But that’s not what this is about, is it? You’re haunted by the women and girls you killed because your act was that of a coward, not because you robbed them of their lives. You don’t want redemption, Jack. You want validation, justification for an act you know is indefensible.”

 

“Sheriff Holland, don’t bait this man or try to reason with him. Kill him so he doesn’t kill others. I’m not afraid,” the woman said.

 

Hackberry gritted his teeth in his frustration with Esther Dolan. “That’s not why I’m here, Jack. I’m not your executioner. I’m not worthy of you. You already said it—I’m a drunk and the sexual exploiter of poor third-world women. I’ve got to hand it to you, for good or bad, you’re the kind of guy who belongs to the ages. You screwed up behind the church, but I think the order for the mass shooting came from Hugo Cistranos and wasn’t your idea. That’s important to remember, Jack. You’re not a coward. You can prove that this morning. Turn Mrs. Dolan loose and take your chances with me. That’s what real cojones are about, right? You say full throttle and fuck it and sail out over the abyss.”

 

There was a long silence. Hackberry could feel the wind puffing around him, blowing coldly on his neck and the backs of his ears. Again he heard a rattling sound, like the wispy rattling of seeds inside a dried poppy husk.

 

“I’ve got to know something,” Collins said.

 

“Ask me.”

 

“That night I went inside your house, you said my mother wanted me aborted, that I was despised in the womb. Why would you treat me with such contempt and odium?”

 

“My remark wasn’t aimed at you.”

 

“Then who?”

 

Hackberry paused. “We don’t get to choose our parents.”

 

“My mother wasn’t like that, like what you said. She wasn’t like that at all.”

 

“Maybe she wasn’t, sir. Maybe I was all wrong.”

 

“Then say that.”

 

“I just did.”

 

“You think your words will make me merciful now?”

 

“Probably not. Maybe I’ve just been firing in the well.”

 

“Get out of here, Mrs. Dolan. Go back to your family.”

 

Unbelievingly, Hackberry saw Esther Dolan running out of the darkness, her shoulder close to the right wall, her arms gathered across her chest, her face averted from something on the left side of the cave.

 

Hackberry grabbed her and pushed her behind him out into the light. He turned and went back into the cave, lifting his revolver from his holster. “You still there, Jack?”

 

“I’m at your disposal.”

 

“Do I have to come in after you?”

 

“You could wait me out. The fact that you’ve chosen otherwise tells me it’s you who’s looking for salvation, Sheriff, not me. Something happen in Korea you don’t tell a lot of people about?”

 

“Could be.”

 

“I’ll be glad to oblige. I’ve got fifty rounds in my pan. Do you know what you’ll look like when I get finished?”

 

“Who cares? I’m old. I’ve had a good life. Fuck you, Jack.”

 

But nothing happened. Inside the darkness, Hackberry could hear the rilling sound of small rocks, as though they were slipping down a grade.

 

“Maybe I’ll see you down the road, Sheriff,” Collins said.

 

Suddenly, a truck flare burst into flame far back in the cave. Collins hurled it end over end onto a rock shelf where diamondbacks as thick as Hack’s wrists writhed among one another, their rattlers buzzing like maracas.

 

Hackberry emptied his .45 down the cave shaft, then pulled the Beretta from the back of his belt and let off all fourteen rounds, the bullets sparking on the cave walls, thudding into layers of bat guano and mold, ricocheting deep underground.

 

When he finished firing, he was almost deaf, his eardrums as insensate as lumps of cauliflower. The air was dense with smoke and the smell of cordite and animal feces and the musky odor of disturbed birds’ and rats’ nests. He could see the snakes looping and coiling on the shelf, their eyes bright pinpoints in the hot red glare of the truck flare. Tarantulas the diameter of baseballs, with black furry legs, were crawling down the sides of the shelf onto the cave floor. Hackberry opened and closed his mouth and swallowed and forced air through his ears. “I get you, Jack?” he called out.

 

He listened for an answer, his head slightly bowed. All he heard in response were feet moving farther down the shaft, deeper into the mountain, and the voice of an impaired man saying, “Ma, is that you? It’s Jack, your son. Ma?”

 

 

 

 

 

EPILOGUE

 

THE WEEKS PASSED, then months, and Hackberry Holland’s life slipped back into routine. Search teams and spelunkers crawled deep into the tunnel where Jack Collins had disappeared. A geologist borrowed from the University of Texas, with a flair for the poetic in his report, described the tunnel as “serpentine in pattern, in places as narrow as a birth canal, the floor and ceiling ridged with sharp projections that lacerate the palms, knees, and back simultaneously, the air akin in its foulness to a water well with a dead cow in it.”

 

Everyone who went into the cave conceded that somewhere on the other side of the mountain there was an air source, perhaps a small one hidden behind brush growing out of the rock, but an opening of some kind that allowed water and light and small animals into the mountain’s interior, because on the far side of the spot where the tunnel bottomed and then rose at a forty-five-degree angle, there were seeds from pińon trees that had drifted down from above, and on a flat rock a hollowed-out depression that had probably been used as an Indian grinding bowl.

 

The official statement from a government spokesman indicated that Jack Collins had probably been wounded by gunfire and died inside the mountain, and his remains would probably never be found. But local residents began to report sightings of an emaciated man who foraged in landfills and Dumpsters and wore rags that were black with grime and a rope for a belt and whose beard grew in a point to the middle of his chest. The emaciated man also wore cowboy boots whose soles were held on with duct tape, and a fedora with holes in the creases.

 

When a reporter asked Hackberry Holland about his speculations on the fate of Jack Collins, he thought for a moment and said, “What difference does it make?”

 

“Sir?” the reporter said.

 

“Preacher’s kind don’t go away easily. If Jack isn’t out there now, his successor is.”

 

“You sound like y’all had a personal relationship,” the reporter said.

 

“I guess you could say I got to know him in North Korea.”

 

“I’m confused,” the reporter said. “Korea? You’re saying the guy’s a terrorist or something?”

 

“How about I buy you coffee up at the café?” Hackberry said.

 

No charges were ever filed against Pete Flores, in large part because the perpetrators of the massacre behind the church were thought to be dead and no local or federal official wanted to see a basically innocent and decent man inserted into a process that, once started, becomes irreversible and eventually destroys lives for no practical purpose. If there was any drama at all in the aftermath of the events that took place on the mountainside above Jack Collins’s burned and bulldozed cottage, it occurred in an idle moment when Vikki Gaddis was sorting through her purse at the kitchen table and found a business card she had put away and forgotten about.

 

“What’s that?” Pete said. He was drying the dishes, glancing back at her from the kitchen counter.

 

“A guy from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band left it at the steak house. He liked my music.”

 

“Did you call him?”

 

“No.”

 

“Why not?”

 

“Why should I?”

 

He didn’t have an answer. A few minutes later, he picked up the card from the table and walked outside and over a bare knoll dotted with clusters of prickly-pear cactus. From the top of the knoll, he could see a half-dozen oil wells methodically pumping up and down on a rolling plain that seemed to bleed into the sunset. The air smelled of natural gas and creosote and a stack of old tires someone had burned. Behind him, the ever-present dust gusted off the road and floated in a gray cloud over the clapboard house he and Vikki rented. He opened his cell phone and dialed the number on the business card.

 

Six weeks later, Vikki Gaddis cut her first record at Martina and John McBride’s Blackbird Studio in Nashville.

 

For Hackberry Holland, the end of the story lay not in the fate of Jack Collins or Hugo Cistranos and Arthur Rooney or any of their minions. By the same token, it did not lie in the fact that justice was done for Pete Flores and that the talent of his wife, Vikki Gaddis, was recognized by her fellow artists, or even in the fact that Vikki and Pete later bought a ranch at the foot of the blue Canadian Rockies. Instead, the conclusion of Hackberry’s odyssey from Camp Five in No Name Valley to an alluvial floodplain north of the Chisos Mountains was represented by a bizarre event that remained, at least for him, as an emblematic moment larger than the narrative about it.

 

It involved the unexpected arrival of Nick Dolan, the former operator of a skin joint, on Collins’s property, driving an SUV that had the lacquered brilliance of a maroon lollipop, a stolen American flag with a broomstick for a staff mounted on the rear bumper, his passengers a blue-collar community-college student who thought it perfectly natural to sing Carter Family spirituals in a beer joint and a former American soldier who was so brave he had forgotten to be afraid.

 

The three of them made for an improbable cast of heroes. Perhaps like an ancient Roman watching a Vesuvian mountain grow red and translucent until it exploded and rained its sparks on a dark sea, they did not recognize the importance of the events taking place around them or the fact that they were players in a great historical drama. They would be the last to claim they had planned the charge across the hardpan into Jack Collins’s camp. But that was the key to understanding them: Their humility, the disparity in their backgrounds, the courage they didn’t ac knowledge in themselves, the choices they made out of instinct rather than intellect, these characteristics constituted the glue that held them together as individuals and as a people. Empires came and went. The indomitable nature of the human spirit did not.

 

Or at least these were the lessons that Hackberry Holland and Pam Tibbs tried to take from their own story.