“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?”
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-ba
ll 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.
When he woke, he would have tears in his eyes and would sit on the side of the bed in the dark and beat his fists on his thighs.
Almost twenty-four hours had passed since he had looked through his telescope and had witnessed the machine-gunning of two men by a man wearing a rumpled suit and a panama hat. At first he had not believed what he was watching. The efficiency of the killer, the way he methodically hosed down his victims, blowing them all over the rocks and sand, had made Cody numb with fear and horror but at the same time had left him in awe of the shooter, a man with cheeks like emery paper and whose clothes and hat looked as though they had been stripped from a scarecrow.
Then Cody had watched the arrival of the sheriff, and the female deputy with the wide ass and big shoulders, and the Asian woman who had held his hands in hers and looked into his eyes and read his most private thoughts. But they were not witnesses. He, Cody Daniels, was. He had seen it all and could describe how the victims had raised their arms in front of their faces, their mouths pleading, their eyes squeezing shut, their coffee spilling to the ground. It was Cody Daniels who had experienced an almost omniscient oversight of events that others would have to guess at and reconstruct and debate and analyze in a laboratory. All he had to do was make one phone call, and the sheriff who had threatened to kick a nail-studded two-by-four up his hole would be treating him as a friend of the court, hanging on his words, the female deputy reduced to nothing but an insignificant functionary in the background.
Except Cody didn’t make the call.
Why?
He knew all too well the answer. It was fear, the succubus that had fed at his heart all his life.
Temple Dowling had given him a business card and had told him to report whatever happened on the Asian woman’s property. Krill and the degenerate named Negrito had weighted him with the same obligation, telling him to build a signal fire and pour motor oil on it, like he was an Indian in a loincloth in a John Wayne movie. Dowling claimed to have evidence that could send Cody to prison for the clinic bombing. Krill and Negrito’s potential was even worse. No matter which course of action Cody chose, he had become a human pinata for people he despised, the rich and powerful on one side and a pair of pepper-belly sadists on the o
ther.
Why had all this befallen him? He had bought the oven timer; he didn’t set it. The others had said the bomb would go off in the middle of the night, that no one would be hurt, that the object was to scare the shit out of people who were killing the unborn. It was a noble cause, wasn’t it?
But why had he gone to the scene immediately afterward, hiding in the crowd, fascinated, his head reeling with both exhilaration and guilt? Unfortunately, Cody got to see more than he had planned. He had watched dry-mouthed while the firemen and the paramedics pried the nurse from the rubble. Then he saw the glass and brick that had embedded in her face and eyes, and the blood that had fried in a black veil on one side of her head. He had tried to push his way back through the crowd, away from the paramedics loading the nurse into an ambulance only a few feet away. A fat white woman had blocked his way, virtually shoving him, her face blazing with anger. “Watch it, buster,” she said. “I’ll punch you in the mouth. I’ve seen you around here before.”
She had terrified him. That night he had bought a bus ticket to San Antonio and since then had never picked up the phone when the caller ID indicated the call had originated in the East. But this particular dawn, Cody was strangely at peace. The air was cool, the sun still below the earth’s rim, his bedroom filled with a softness that he associated with the promise of rain and the bloom of desert flowers. He had not done the bidding of either Temple Dowling or the blue-eyed half-breed Krill, and now almost twenty-four hours had passed without incident since he had witnessed the killings in the foothills below his house. Maybe these guys were all bluster, he told himself. Cody had dealt with meth-head bikers and gangbangers and perverts of every stripe on a county prison farm, including the two Hispanic hacks who had walked him out to the work shed where a solitary sawhorse waited for him under a naked lightbulb. What could Krill or Dowling do to him that hadn’t been done to him before? Cody was a survivor. Screw these guys, he thought.
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