“It’s a beaut, isn’t it? I paid eighteen thousand for it. Same model you see John Dillinger carrying in that famous photograph.”
“We can talk this out, pal,” the rock thrower said.
“My biggest problem with you boys is your lack of respect. But maybe the devil can teach y’all manners.”
Against the brilliance of the sun, the spray of rounds from the Thompson seemed like an eruption of lightning bolts from a black cutout. The few rounds that missed their target whanged off the rocks and ricocheted into the distance with a sound like the tremolo in a flopping saw blade. Then the man in the panama hat pulled the ammunition drum from the Thompson’s frame and laid the Thompson and the fifty-round drum inside the guitar case and shut and latched the top. Before leaving, he took the remaining ham sandwich from the lunch box on the rock and unwrapped it from the wax paper and let the paper blow across the landscape. He ate the sandwich with one hand while he walked back to his vehicle, the guitar case knocking against his leg, the soles of his boots clopping on a series of flat stones like the feet of a hoofed animal.
WHEN HACKBERRY AND Pam arrived at the Asian woman’s house, the air was dense and sparkling with humidity, coating every surface in sight, clinging to the skin like damp cotton, as though the sunrise were a source not of light but of ignition. The morning itself seemed divided between darkness and shadow, the clouds overhead roiling and black and crackling with electricity against an otherwise blue and tranquil sky. In the north Hackberry could see a great brown plume of dust lifting out of the hills, and he thought he could smell an odor like baitfish that had been trapped in seaweed and left stranded along the edge of a receding ocean, although he was hundreds of miles from salt water. His eyes burned with his own sweat as he watched the Asian woman approach from the backyard, wearing a white dress and a necklace of black stones.
“Here comes Teahouse of the August Moon,” Pam said.
“Don’t start,” Hackberry said.
“I can’t help it. This woman is a fraud.”
“Time to be quiet, Pam,” he said.
She turned and stared at the side of his face, her nostrils dilating. He stepped forward into the breeze, removing her from the periphery of his vision. He tipped the brim of his hat. “How you doin’, Miss Anton?” he said. “Sorry to bother you, but we’ve got a problem with a guy by the name of Jack Collins.”
“I don’t recall the name,” she replied.
“Collins is a mass killer. Some federal people burned a shack he was using. I think Jack aims to do some serious payback. Your place is probably under surveillance by the feds. I suspect Jack knows that. My bet is he’ll be coming around.”
“Why should this man know I’m under surveillance?”
“Krill knew to come here. Krill is a lamebrain compared to Collins. The Mexicans say he can walk through walls. Collins has killed people for years but has never been arrested or spent one day in jail. He murdered nine Thai girls down by Chapala Crossing. I dug them up.”
“He’s the one who did that?” Anton Ling said, her face frozen as though painted on the air, her eyes elongated and lidless.
“He tried to kill my chief deputy in her cruiser. He executed one of his own men in a cave we had cornered him in. He blew three outlaw bikers all over a motel room. He pushed a corrupt PI off a cliff up in the Glass Mountains. A little earlier in the day, he wiped out a whole collection of gangsters in a hunting lodge. He dressed as a cleaning woman in a San Antonio motel and murdered an ICE agent. Nobody knows his body count across the border.”
Anton Ling seemed to listen less with shock or horror than with the fixed attention of someone revisiting a tape seen before. “You think he’s a threat to the people who come to my house?”
“Probably not. They don’t have anything he wants,” Hackberry said.
“But he could be a threat to me?”
“Possibly.”
“Well, I appreciate your telling me this. But I can’t control what this man does or doesn’t do.”
“It’s not all about you, Ms. Ling. Believe it or not, we’d like to get this guy in custody,” Pam said. “Collins wears suits and fedoras he buys from the Goodwill. His face looks like it was stung by bumblebees. See anybody like that around?”
“No, I haven’t. Otherwise I would have told you.”
“Sure? So far you haven’t been very forthcoming,” Pam said.
“Madam, what did I just say?”
“You can call me Chief Deputy Tibbs, thank you.”
“I’d like to invite you in,” Anton Ling said to Hackberry. “But I have to go to San Antonio. Some of our people are in jail.”
“Your people?” Pam said.
“Yes, that’s what I call them. They’re destitute, cheated out of their money by coyotes, hunted by nativist snipers, and generally treated as though they’re subhuman. The particular woman I’m going to try to bail out watched her two-year-old daughter die of a rattlesnake bite in the desert.”
“I think Pam was just asking a question, Miss Anton,” Hackberry said.
“No, she was making a statement. She’s done it several times now.”
“Why is it we have to keep coming out here to protect you from yourself? To be honest, it’s getting to be a drag,” Pam said.
“Then your problem can be easily solved. Just leave and don’t bother to come back.”
“I think that’s a good idea,” Pam said.
Hackberry was not listening. The thunderheads had blotted out the sun, dropping the countryside into shadow. He had turned his head toward the southeast, where the wind was whipping dust off the hilltops and riffling the mesquite that grew down the slopes. His eyes fixed on a spot where rain had started to tumble out of the sky and a muted sound like crackling foil seemed to leak from the clouds. Hackberry opened and closed his mouth to clear his ears and listen to the sound that had started and now had stopped.
“What is it?” Pam said.
“Somebody was firing a machine gun,” he replied.
“I didn’t hear it,” she said.
Because you were too busy talking, he thought. But he didn’t say it. “You drive. Good-bye, Miss Anton. Thank you for your time.”
“I’ll follow you,” she said.
“That’s not a good idea,” he said.
“My property line goes right through the hills. I have a right to know who’s on my land.”
“In this case, you don’t. Stay here, please. Don’t make me ask you again,” he said.
He got in the passenger side of the cruiser and closed the door, not looking back, then glanced in the outside mirror. Anton Ling was already getting into a skinned-up pale blue truck seamed with rust, the front bumper secured by baling wire. “This stuff has to stop, Pam,” he said.
“Tell her,” Pam said.
“You two are more alike than you think.”
“Which two?”
“You and Miss Anton. Who else?”
“Yeah?” she said, giving him a look. “We’ll talk more about that later.”
“No, we won’t. You’ll drive and not speak for me to others when we’re conducting an investigation.”
“Maybe I should turn in my badge, Hack. That’s how you make me feel. No, I take that back. I can’t even describe how you make me feel,” she said. “You treated me like I was a fence post.” She started the engine, then had to stop and concentrate on what she was doing.
“You’re one of the best cops I’ve ever known,” he said.
“Save it. You hide behind your years. It’s a sorry excuse.”
“My wife died on this date, Pam. I don’t want to participate in this kind of conversation today. We’re on the job. We need to give this nonsense a rest.”
“I went out to the grave this morning. I thought you might be there.”
He looked at her blankly. “Why did you go there?”
“I thought you might need somebody. I put flowers on her grave.”
“You did that?�
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She stared at the hills, her hands tight on the steering wheel, rain striking on the glass. Her expression was wan, her eyes dead. “I think you heard thunder,” she said. “I don’t believe anything is out there.”
“You put flowers on Rie’s grave?”
She would not speak the rest of the way to the place in the hills where Hackberry believed he had heard the staccato firing of a submachine gun. He took a bottle of aspirin from his shirt pocket and ate two of them and gazed out the window, his thoughts poor consolation for the spiritual fatigue that seemed to eat through all his connective tissue.
Pam drove off the main road and up an incline dotted with cactus and small rocks and mesquite and yucca plants whose leaves were darkening in the rain. She squinted at a flat place between two knolls, the sky sealed with black clouds all the way to the southern horizon.
“There’s a telescope on a tripod. It looks like it has a camera on it,” she said.
“Stop here. You go to the left. I’ll come around from the right,” Hackberry said.
She braked the Jeep and turned off the ignition. “Hack?” she said.
“Yes?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“Say it.”
“I’ve got your back.”
“You always do. That’s why I wouldn’t partner with anyone else,” he said.
She looked directly into his face, her lips slightly parted, her teeth white. She made him think of a young girl outside a prom, her face tilted up, waiting to be kissed. Then she opened the door and stepped out into the rain, unsnapping the strap on her .357, her arms pumped and brown and glistening. She looked beyond him, down the incline, and lifted her chin as though pointing. He turned around and saw Anton Ling’s pickup truck approaching from the dirt road, clattering across the rocks, the cactus raking under the bumper and oil pan. “Get down there and stop her,” he said.
“Gladly,” Pam said.
As soon as Pam began walking down the incline, Hackberry headed uphill between the two knolls toward the telescope and camera. He pulled his .45 revolver from its holster and let it hang loosely against his leg, his back straight so the pain that lived in his lower spine would not flare like an electric burn across his back and wrap around his thighs. He glanced once over his shoulder, then continued straight on toward the telescope, knowing already what he would find, knowing also that his nemesis, Jack Collins, had once again written his signature across the landscape with a dirty finger and had disappeared into the elements.
When Hackberry was little more than a teenage boy, in a battalion aid station at Inchon and later on the firing line at the Chosin Reservoir and even later in a giant POW enclosure the prisoners called the Bean Camp, he had acquired an enormous amount of unwanted knowledge about the moribund and the dead and the rites of passage from the world of the living into the land of the great shade. The opalescence in the skin, the wounds that had the glassy brightness of roses frozen inside ice, and the bodies stuffed in sleeping bags and stacked as hard as concrete in the backs of six-bys were the images a war poet might focus on. But the real story resided in the eyes. The marines and soldiers and navy corpsmen who were mortally wounded or dying of disease or starvation had stared up at him with a luminosity that was like ground diamonds, the pupils tiny dots, so small they could not have recorded an image on the brain. Then, in a blink, the light was gone, and the eyes became as opaque and devoid of meaning as fish scale. That was when he had come to believe that the dying indeed saw through the curtain but took their secrets with them.
The two men on the ground, dressed as casual hikers, must have thought they had walked into a Gatling gun. Their clothes were punched with holes from their shoes to their shirt collars. The spray of ejected shell casings showed no pattern, indicating the shooter had probably shifted his position and fired several bursts from different angles, as though enjoying his work. The fact that one man’s hand was twitching at his side seemed almost miraculous, as though the hand were disembodied and the only part of the victim that was still alive.
“Pam! Call for the paramedics and the coroner and tell Felix and R.C. to get out here!” Hackberry shouted down the incline.
He holstered his revolver and walked past a downed tree, the root-ball impacted with dirt. A worthless guitar, the strings coated with rust, lay on the ground. He gazed down a series of flat yellow rocks that descended like stair steps into a wide flume where an SUV was parked and a second vehicle had left a curlicue of tire tracks in the dirt. He strained his eyes against the distance and thought he saw a speck on the horizon that might have been a car, but he couldn’t be sure. Then the speck was lost inside the bolts of lightning that leaped from the earth to the clouds like gold thread.
“Collins?” Pam said behind him.
“Who else kills like this?” he said.
“I think one of them is still alive.”
“He’s brain-dead. The twitching hand doesn’t mean anything.”
“Better tell her that,” Pam replied.
He turned and saw Anton Ling on her knees next to the dying man, trying to resuscitate him, forcing her breath inside his mouth and down his windpipe, mashing on his chest with the heel of her hand. Her dress and hair and chin and cheeks were speckled with his blood. She turned his head to one side and drained his mouth, then bent over him and tried again.
“Miss Anton?” Hackberry said.
She didn’t speak or even look up.
“This fellow is gone, Miss Anton,” he said.
She stared up into Hackberry’s face. Her mouth was smeared, her eyes slightly crossed. “You gave it your best,” he said, putting his hands under her elbows, lifting her up.
“Who did this?” she said.
“The man who calls himself the left hand of God.”
“That’s an insult to God,” she said.
“Jack Collins is an insult to the planet,” Hackberry said. “But Pam and I need to get to work.”
“Are these federal agents?” Anton Ling asked.
“Maybe,” he said. His knees popping, he squatted down, wincing at the pain in his lower back. He slipped the wallet from the back pocket of the man Anton Ling had tried to resuscitate. The leather was warm and sticky, and he had to wipe his fingers on a handkerchief before he opened it. Hackberry sorted through the credit cards, driver’s license, and celluloid photo holders, then set the wallet down by the dead man’s foot. He recovered the wallet from the second victim and did the same. He got to his feet, slightly off balance. “If Collins was trying to do payback on the feds, he screwed up.”
“How?” Pam said.
“These guys worked for a security service out of Houston. My bet is they were doing scut work for Temple Dowling. He’s a defense contractor and the son of a United States senator I was a hump for.”
“I didn’t catch that.”
“I got politically ambitious back in the sixties.”
“Everybody makes mistakes,” Pam said.
“A mistake is something you do when you don’t know better.”
“What’s the guitar doing here?” she said.
“Who knows? Collins is a harlequin. He has contempt for most of the people he kills.”
Pam gazed down the incline. While Hackberry looked through the wallets of the two dead men, Anton Ling had gone back to her truck and was now walking back up the slope with a small silver bottle in her hand. She unscrewed the top and knelt by the man whose life she had tried to save. She put a drop of oil on her finger and drew the sign of the cross on his forehead.
“Miss Anton?” Pam said. “We shouldn’t mess too much with the bodies until the coroner gets here.”
“If you don’t want me to, I won’t,” Anton Ling said.
Pam looked at Hackberry and waited.
“It won’t hurt anything,” he said.
Pam watched Anton Ling kneel by the second man and make the sign of the cross on his forehead with her thumb. Then Pam went back to the Jeep and returned
with an oversize United States Forest Service canteen and a roll of paper towels. She poured water on a clutch of paper sections and squatted down by Anton Ling and began to wipe her hands and her face and then her hair.
“You don’t need to do that,” Anton Ling said.
“I know I don’t,” Pam said.
“I’m quite all right,” Anton Ling said.
“Yeah, you are, ma’am. That’s exactly what you are,” Pam replied. “You’re damn straight you’re all right.”
Anton Ling looked at her quizzically.
Hackberry walked down the slope to the Jeep. He scratched idly at his cheek with three fingers and wondered why men tried to puzzle through the mysteries of heaven when they couldn’t even resolve the ones that lived in the human heart. He picked up the handheld radio from the seat of the cruiser and called R.C. and Felix and asked for their ETA. When a tree of lightning burst on the horizon, he thought he saw a solitary figure standing as starkly as an exclamation point on the deck of a house high up on a plateau. But the raindrops were striking his hat as hard as marbles, and he had to concentrate on his call to Felix and R.C., and he paid no more attention to the solitary figure or the house that resembled the forecastle of a ship, a huge American flag painted on the sandstone bluff behind it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE REVEREND CODY Daniels did not like sleep. During the waking day, he could deal with the past by constantly rebuilding his mental fortifications, alternately suppressing uncomfortable shards of memory or re-creating them so they didn’t detract from his image of himself as the pastor of the Cowboy Chapel. Sleep was another matter. Sleep was a stone jail cell without windows or light, where any number of malformed creatures could reach out of the darkness and touch him at will, their fingers as gelatinous and clinging as giant worms. Sometimes the creatures in the dream pressed their faces to his and ran their tongues along his skin, their breathing labored in his ear, the invasion of his person so complete that he felt his entrails would burst, his pelvis would split apart.
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