“That’s what I was trying to do when you told me to get back inside. Which is it?”
“You need to do what I say, sir.”
“It’s Reverend, if you want to be formal.”
“You will step out of the vehicle and do it now, sir,” she said.
“I have a pistol on the seat. I use it for rabbits. I’m no threat to you.”
She pulled her revolver from its holster and aimed it with both hands at his face. “Put your right hand behind your head, open the door, and get down on the ground.”
“Have you heard of the Cowboy Chapel? Don’t point that at me.” He looked straight into the muzzle of her gun. “I respect the law. You’re not going to threaten me with a firearm. My name is Reverend Cody Daniels. Ask anybody.”
She jerked the door open with one hand and stepped back. “Down on the ground.”
“I will not do that. I will not tolerate your abuse, either. I did nothing to deserve this.”
She was holding her. 357 with both hands again, the checkered grips biting into her palms. “This is your last chance to avoid a very bad experience, sir.”
“Do not call me ‘sir.’ You’re deliberately being disrespectful in order to provoke me. I know your kind, missy.”
She was gripping the pistol so tightly, she could feel the barrel tremble. Her temples were pounding, her scalp tight, her eyes stinging with perspiration. She stared at the driver in the silence. The skin around his mouth was bloodless, his gaze iniquitous, dissecting her face, dropping to her throat and her breasts rising and falling inside her shirt. When she didn’t move or speak, his eyes seemed to sweep the entirety of her person, noting the loops of sweat under her arms, a lock of her hair stuck on her damp forehead, the width of her hips, the way her stomach strained against her gun belt and the button on her jeans, the fact that her upper arms were as thick as a man’s. She saw a smile wrinkle at the corner of his mouth. “You seem a mite unsettled, missy,” he said. “Maybe you should be in another line of work.”
“Thank you for saying that,” she replied. She pulled her can of Mace from her belt and sprayed it in his face and jerked him out of the cab, then sprayed him again. He flailed his arms blindly, his eyes streaming tears, then he slapped at her hands as a child might, as though he were being violated. She threw him against the side of the truck, kicking his feet apart, stiff-arming him in the back of the neck, the tensions of his body coursing like an electric current through her palm.
When he continued to struggle, she slipped her baton from the ring on her belt and whipped it behind his calves. He dropped straight to his knees, as though his tendons had been cut, his mouth open wide, a cry breaking from his throat.
She pushed him facedown on the ground and cuffed his wrists behind him. His left cheek was printed with gravel, his mouth quivering with shock. He wrenched up his head so he could see her. “No hot coal will redeem your tongue, woman. You’re a curse on the race. A pox on you and all your kind,” he said.
She called in her location. “I’ve got a lulu here. Ask Hack to pull all the reports we have on somebody who was shooting at illegals,” she said.
CHAPTER THREE
Hackberry Holland sat behind his desk and listened to Pam Tibbs’s account of the arrest. Outside the window, the American flag was straightening and popping in the wind, the chain rattling on the pole. “What’s our minister friend doing now?” he asked.
“Yelling for his phone call,” she replied. “How do you read that stuff about a hot coal on my tongue?”
“It’s from Isaiah in the Old Testament. Isaiah believed he was a man of unclean lips who dwelled in an unclean land. But an angel placed a burning coal on his tongue and removed his iniquity.”
“I’m iniquitous for not letting him kill himself and others in an auto accident?”
“The sheriff in Jim Hogg told me about this guy a couple of months ago. Cody Daniels was a suspect in the bombing of an abortion clinic on the East Coast. He might not have done it himself, but he was at least one of the cheerleaders. He roams around the country and tends to headquarter in places where there’s not much money for law enforcement. I didn’t know he was here.”
She waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. “You think he could be the guy taking potshots at the illegals coming across the border?” she said.
“Him or a hundred others like him.” Hackberry took off his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Did he threaten you in a specific way?”
“On the way in, he told me I was going to hell.”
“Did he say he was going to put you there or see you there?”
“No.”
“Did he touch the gun on the seat?”
“Not that I saw.”
“Did he make a threatening gesture of any kind?”
“He refused to get out of the vehicle while telling me he was armed.”
“He told R.C. you hit him in the head after you cuffed him.”
“He fell down against the cruiser. What are you trying to say, Hack?”
“We don’t need a lawsuit.”
“I don’t know if I’m more pissed off by this nutcase or what I’m hearing now.”
“It’s the kind of lawsuit that could cost us fifty thousand dollars in order to be right.”
Hackberry looked up at her in the silence. Pam’s eyes were brown, with a reddish tint, and they became charged with light when she was either angry or hurt. She hooked her thumbs in her gun belt and fixed her attention outside the window, her cheeks spotted with color.
“I’m proud of the way you handled it,” he said. “You did all the right things. Let’s see if our man likes his accommodations.”
Hackberry and Pam Tibbs climbed the steel spiral steps in the rear of the building and walked down a corridor of barred cells, past the old drunk tank, to a barred holding unit that contained nothing but a wood bench and a commode with no seat. The man who had identified himself as Reverend Cody Daniels was standing at the window, silhouetted against a sky that had turned yellow with dust.
“I understand you were potting jackrabbits from your pickup truck,” Hackberry said.
“I did no such thing,” Cody Daniels replied. “It’s not against the law, anyway, is it?”
“So you were cruising down the road surveilling the countryside through your binoculars for no particular reason?” Hackberry said.
“What I was looking for is the illegal immigrants and drug transporters who come through here every night.”
“You’re not trying to steal my job, are you?”
“I go where I’ve a mind to. When I got up this morning, this was still a free country.”
“You bet. But you gave my chief deputy a hard time because she made a simple procedural request of you.”
“Check the video camera in your squad car. Truth will out, Sheriff.”
“It’s broken.”
“Pretty much like everything in this town. Mighty convenient, if you ask me.”
“What are you doing in my county?”
“Your county?”
“You’d better believe it.”
“I’m doing the Lord’s work.”
“I heard about your activities on the East Coast. We don’t have any abortion clinics here, Reverend, but that doesn’t mean we’ll put up with your ilk.”
Cody Daniels approached the bars and rested one hand on the cast-iron plate that formed an apron on the bottom of the food slot. The veins in his wrists were green and as thick as night crawlers, his knuckles pronounced, the back of each finger scarred where a tattoo had been removed. He held Hackberry’s gaze. “I have the ability to see into people’s thoughts,” he said. “Right now you got more problems than your department can handle. That’s why you select the likes of me as the target of your wrath. People like me are easy. We pay our taxes and obey the law and try to do what’s right. How many drug dealers do you have locked up here?”
“There’s a kernel of truth in what you say, Reverend, bu
t I’d like to get this issue out of the way so you can go back to your job and we can go back to ours.”
“I think the real problem is you got a romantic relationship going with this woman here.”
“Deputy Tibbs, would you get the reverend’s possessions envelope out of the locker, please?”
Pam gave Hackberry a look but didn’t move.
“I think Reverend Daniels is a reasonable man and is willing to put this behind him,” Hackberry said. “I think he’ll be more mindful of his driving habits and the next time out not object to the requests of a well-meaning deputy sheriff. Is that a fair statement, Reverend?”
“I’m not given to making promises, particularly when I’m not the source of the problem,” Cody Daniels said.
Hackberry drummed his fingers on the apron of the food slot. “Deputy Tibbs, would you get the paperwork started on Reverend Daniels’s release?” he said.
“Yes, sir,” she replied.
Cody Daniels’s eyes followed her down the corridor, his gaze slipping down her back to her wide-ass jeans and the thickness of her thighs. “I guess it’s each to his own,” he said.
“Pardon?” Hackberry said.
“No offense meant, but I think I’d rather belly up to a spool of barbed wire. That’s kind of coarse, but you get the picture.”
“I hope you’ll accept this in the right spirit, Reverend. If you ever sass one of my deputies or speak disrespectfully of Chief Deputy Tibbs again, I’m going to hunt around in that pile of scrap wood behind the jail until I find a long two-by-four, one with sixteen-penny nails sticking out of it, then I’m going to kick it so far up your ass you’ll be spitting splinters. Get the picture? Have a nice day. And stay the hell out of my sight.”
Anton Ling heard the man in the yard before she saw him. He had released the chain on the windmill and cupped water out of the spout, drinking it from his hand, while the blades spun and clattered above his head. He was gaunt and wore a short-sleeve shirt with no buttons; his hair hung on his shoulders and looked like it had been barbered with a knife.
“?Que quieres?” she said.
“Comida,” the man replied.
He was wearing tennis shoes. In the moonlight she could see his ribs stenciled against his sides, his trousers flattening in the wind against his legs. She stepped out on the back porch. The shadows of the windmill’s blades were spinning on his face. “You didn’t come out of Mexico,” she said.
“How do you know?” he replied in English.
“The patrols are out. They would have stopped you if you came out of the south.”
“I hid in the hills during the day. I have no food.”
“What is your name?”
“Antonio.”
“You are a worker?”
“Only for myself. I am a hunter. Will you feed me?”
She went into her kitchen and put a wedge of cheese and three tortillas on a paper plate, then covered them with chili and beans that she ladled out of a pot that was still warm on the stove. When she went back outside, the visitor was squatted in the middle of the dirt lot, staring at the moon and the lines of cedar posts with no wire. He took the paper plate from her hand and ignored the plastic spoon and instead removed a metal spoon from his back pocket and began eating. A knife in a long thin scabbard protruded at an angle from his belt. “You are very kind, senora.”
“Where did you learn English?”
“My father was a British sailor.”
“What do you hunt, Antonio?”
“In this case, a man.”
“Has this man harmed you?”
“No, he has done nothing to me.”
“Then why do you hunt him?”
“He’s a valuable man, and I am poor.”
“You’ll not find him here.”
He stopped eating and pointed at the side of his head with his spoon. “You’re very intelligent. People say you have supernatural gifts. But maybe they just don’t understand that you are simply much more intelligent than they are.”
“The man you are looking for was here, but he’s gone now. He will not be back. You must leave him alone.”
“Your property is a puzzle. It has fences all over it, but they hold nothing in and nothing out.”
“This was a great cattle ranch at one time.”
“Now it is a place where the wind lives, one that has no beginning and no end. It’s a place like you, china. You come from the other side of the earth to do work no one understands. You don’t have national frontiers.”
“Don’t speak familiarly of people you know nothing about.”
The man who called himself Antonio lifted the paper plate and pushed the beans and chili and cheese and pieces of tortilla into his mouth. He dropped the empty plate in the dirt and wiped his lips and chin on a bandanna and stood up and washed his spoon in the horse tank and slipped it into his back pocket. “They say you can do the same things a priest can, except you have more power.”
“I have none.”
“I had three children. They died without baptism.” He looked toward the west and the heat lightning pulsing in the sky just above the hills. “Sometimes I think their souls are out there, outside their bodies, lost in the darkness, not knowing where they’re supposed to go. You think that’s what happens after we’re dead? We don’t know where to go until someone tells us?”
“How did your children die?”
“They were killed by a helicopter in front of the clinic where they were playing.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“You can baptize them, china.”
“Do not call me that.”
“It wasn’t their fault they weren’t baptized. They call you La Magdalena. You can reach back in time before they were dead and baptize them.”
“You should talk to a priest. He will tell you the same thing I do. Your children committed no offense against God. You mustn’t worry about them.”
“I can’t see a priest.”
“Why not?”
“I killed one. I think he was French, maybe a Jesuit. I’m not sure. We were told he was a Communist. I machine-gunned him.”
Her eyes left his face. She remained motionless inside the pattern of shadow and light created by the moon. “Whom do you work for?” she asked.
“Myself.”
“No, you don’t. You’re paid by others. They use you.”
“ Conejo, you are much woman.”
“You will not speak to me like that.”
“You didn’t let me finish. You are much woman, but you’ve lied to me. You’ve given Communion to the people who come here, just like a priest. But you turn me away.”
“I think you’re a tormented man. But you won’t find peace until you give up your violent ways. You tortured and killed the man down south of us, didn’t you? You’re the one called Krill.”
His eyes held hers. They were pale blue, the pupils like cinders. In silhouette, with his long knife-cut hair and torso shaped like an inverted pyramid, he resembled a creature from an earlier time, a warrior suckled in an outworn creed. “The man I killed in the south did very cruel things to my brother. He had a chance to redeem himself by being brave. But he was a coward to the end.”
“Others are with you, aren’t they? Out there in the hills.”
“Others follow me. They are not with me. They can come and go as they wish. Given the chance, some of them would eat me like dogs.”
“When you were a coyote, you raped the women who paid you to take them across?”
“A man has needs, china. But it wasn’t rape. I was invited to their beds.”
“Because they had no water to drink or food to eat? Do not come here again, even if you’re badly hurt or starving.”
The man watched the heat lightning, his hair lying as black as ink on his shoulders. “I can hear my children talking inside the trees,” he said. “You have to baptize them, senora. It doesn’t matter if you want to or not.”
“Be gone
.”
He raised a cautionary finger in the air, the shadow of the windmill blades slicing across his face and body. “Do not treat me with contempt, Magdalena. Think about my request. I’ll be back.”
Three days later, on Saturday, Hackberry rose at dawn and fixed coffee in a tin pot and made a sandwich out of two slices of sourdough bread and a deboned pork chop he took from the icebox. Then he carried the pot and sandwich and tin cup down to the barn and the railed pasture where he kept his two Missouri foxtrotters, a chestnut and a palomino named Missy’s Playboy and Love That Santa Fe. He spread their hay on the concrete pad that ran through the center of the barn, and then he sat down in a wood chair from the tack room and ate his sandwich and drank his coffee while he watched his horses eat. Then he walked out to their tank and filled it to the rim from a frost-proof spigot, using his bare hand to skim bugs and dust and bits of hay from the surface. The water had come from a deep well on his property and was like ice on his fingers and wrist, and he wondered if the coldness hidden under the baked hardpan wasn’t a reminder of the event waiting for him just beyond the edge of his vision-an unexpected softening of the light, an autumnal smell of gas pooled in the trees, a bugle echoing off stone in the hills.
No, I will not think about that today, he told himself. The sunrise was pink in the east, the sky blue. His quarter horses were grazing in his south pasture, the irrigated grass riffling in the breeze, and he could see a doe with three yearlings among a grove of shade trees at the bottom of his property. The world was a grand place, a cathedral in its own right, he thought. How had Robert Frost put it? What place could be better suited for love? Hackberry couldn’t remember the line.
He slipped a halter on each of the foxtrotters and wormed them by holding their head up with the lead while he worked the disposable syringe into the corner of their mouth and squirted the ivermectin over their tongue and down their throat. Both of them were still colts and liked to provoke him by mashing down on the syringe, holding on until he had to drop the lead and use both hands to pry the flattened plastic cylinder loose from their teeth.
Just when he thought he was done, the chestnut, Missy’s Playboy, grabbed his straw hat and threw it on the branch of a tree, then thundered down the pasture, trailing the lead between his legs, kicking at the air with his hind feet. Hackberry did not hear the woman come up behind him. “I let myself in the gate. I hope you don’t mind,” she said.
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