“You mean he wants to sleep it off?”
“No, he wants to be locked up. He says he had a visitor this morning.”
Hackberry walked through the hallway and hung his hat on a wood peg in his office. “I hate to ask,” he said.
“The guy didn’t give his name. Danny Boy said he was carrying a pistol. He was wearing a suit and a hat and beat-up needle-nose boots. He said he’d be looking you up and you’d know when it was his ring.”
“Why is Collins pestering Danny Boy?”
“That’s not all that happened this morning. I was down at the cafe, and two SUVs loaded with some cowboy cutie-pies came in. Stonewashed jeans, mustaches, two or three days of beard, stylized haircuts. They looked like porn actors.”
“Like the two guys Collins popped?”
“The guy in charge knew the waitress. He had on a blue suit and a silver western shirt without a tie, like he was one of the boys. After they left, I asked her who he was. She said that was Temple Dowling.”
“Forget about Dowling.”
She closed the office door and approached his desk. “It didn’t quite end there. I heard him talking in the booth. I heard him use your name.”
“We need to get to the point, Pam.”
“He called you a drunk.”
“That’s what I used to be.”
“That’s not all of it. I heard him whispering, then all of them laughed.”
“Blow it off. These guys aren’t worth talking about.”
“Then one guy said, ‘He brought clap home to his wife?’ Dowling said something I couldn’t hear, and they all laughed again, loud enough that everybody in the cafe turned around and looked at them.”
“What that man said isn’t true. But I don’t care whether he says it or not. If he does it in my presence, I’ll do something about it. In the meantime, let’s forget it and talk to Danny Boy.” Hackberry took the ring of cell keys off a peg next to his hat.
“I followed them into the parking lot,” Pam said.
“Did you hit somebody?”
“No.”
“All right, then let it go.”
“I took the motormouth aside, the one who said something about clap. He was the driver of one of the SUVs. I told him I wasn’t going to cite him for his broken taillights, but if I ever heard him slander your name again, I was going to beat the living shit out of him.”
“He had two broken taillights?”
“He did after I broke them.”
“Pam?”
“What?”
“What can I say?”
“I don’t know.”
He stepped closer to her, towering over her, and cupped his hand around the back of her neck. Her skin felt hot against his palm. He could smell the shampoo in her hair and the heat in her body and feel the hardness of the muscles in her neck. “You have to stop protecting me,” he said.
“You’re my boss, and I won’t allow white trash to tell lies about you.”
“You really know how to jump-start a man’s day,” he said.
She lifted her eyes to his. Her mouth looked like a flower that had crumpled in on itself in the shade. “Think so?” she said.
He removed his hand from the back of her neck and tried not to swallow. There was a thickness in his throat, a tightness in his chest, and a weakness in his loins that he did not want to recognize. “Why would Collins bother Danny Boy?” he said hoarsely.
“He wants to hurt you.”
“It’s that simple?”
“You bet your ass,” she replied.
They climbed up the spiral steel stairs in the back of the building and walked down the corridor to a cell whose outer wall was a checkerboard pattern of steel bands and cast-iron plates that had been painted white and were now crosshatched with scratch marks and stained by orange rust around the rivets. Danny Boy was looking out the window when they approached the cell. When he turned around, his head and neck were framed against the window, his body enveloped in shadow, so that his head seemed to rest, decapitated, upon a plate. “I don’t want out,” he said.
“Can’t lock up a man who hasn’t committed a crime,” Hackberry said.
“I’ll drink if I’m back on the street,” Danny Boy said.
“Incarceration is not the best way to find sobriety,” Hackberry said.
“I’m not like you. There’s still liquor at my house. I’ll drink it if I can get back to it. In a few days, I can go without it.”
“Was Preacher Jack Collins at your house?”
“If that’s his name.”
“Who’d he say he was?”
“He didn’t. I said ‘You’re him.’” “What did he say to that?”
“Nothing. Like it wasn’t important. Or it wasn’t important that a guy like me knew. When I told him the girls he’d killed were out there in the desert pointing at him, he told me to watch my mouth.”
“What else did he say?”
“He’s after the guy named Krill. He thought I might know where he was at.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“That I hid when that fellow was murdered.”
“You listen to me,” Hackberry said. “You think I should feel guilty because I hid from the Chinese soldiers who were trying to kill me? You remember the name of General Patton?”
“No, who is he?”
“He was a famous military leader. He said you don’t win wars by giving your life for your country. You win them by making the other son of a bitch give his life.” Hackberry tried to smile and lift Danny Boy’s spirits, but it did no good. “What else did your visitor say?” he asked.
“He’d be looking you up.”
“What else?”
“Nothing. He threw a glass of rum in my face.”
Pam Tibbs tapped her ring on the steel door in order to direct Danny Boy’s attention to her. “Jack Collins has a way of showing up in people’s lives when they’re unarmed and vulnerable,” she said. “He wants to rob people of their self-respect because he has none for himself. Don’t be his victim.”
“Listen to her,” Hackberry said. “You’re a fine man. You have an illness in you that’s not your fault. One day you’ll wake up and decide you don’t want any more of the old life. That’s when you’ll start getting rid of all the problems that kept you drunk. In the meantime, you’re going to take a shower and put on some fresh jeans and a sport shirt I have in my closet, and then you and I are going to have a steak-and-egg breakfast down at the cafe.”
“I saw the Oriental girls standing in the desert. There was nine of them. They’re waiting for him,” Danny Boy said.
“You saw them when you were drinking?”
“It don’t matter what I was doing. They were there. Collins knew about my visions. He knew what was in them. No, that’s not exactly right. He knows things don’t happen in order, like past, present, and future. He knows things happen all at the same time, all around us, people we cain’t see are still living out their lives right next to us. Not many people know that.”
“Collins is a fraud. Don’t pay attention to what he says,” Hackberry said.
“If he’s a fraud, who’s he pretending to be? You ever know anybody like him?”
Pam Tibbs looked at Hackberry and raised her eyebrows. She took the ring of keys from his hand, unlocked the cell, and swung the door back heavily on its hinges, the bottom scraping the concrete. “Time to hit the shower and get something to eat, Danny,” she said.
By eleven A.M. the sun was bright and hot outside Hackberry’s office window, the blocklike sandstone courthouse on the square stark against a blue sky, the courthouse lawn green and cool-looking under the shade trees. A church group had opened a secondhand sale on the sidewalk in front of the Luna Theater, and people were going in and out of the courthouse and the old bank on the corner much as they had in an era when the town was supported by a viable agrarian economy. It was a good day, the kind when boys used to cut school to go bobber-fishing or tubing down a
river. It was not a day when he wanted to deal with the unpleasant realities of his job or the vestiges of his past. But when a black SUV pulled to the curb in front of his office and Temple Dowling got out, followed by three of his men, Hackberry knew exactly how the rest of the morning would go.
There was a class of people who always supported law and order. They believed that police officers and sheriff’s deputies and the law enforcement agencies of the United States government constituted a vast servile army with the same raison d’etre as insurance carriers, tax accountants, medical providers, and gardeners-namely, to take care of problems that busy and productive people shouldn’t be concerned with.
Hackberry watched Temple Dowling stride toward the front door of the building, coatless, his silver shirt crinkling like tin, a martial glint in his eyes, his creamy complexion moist in the heat. But it was the man’s lips that Hackberry couldn’t get out of his mind. They seemed to have the coloration and texture of the rubber in a pencil eraser. They belonged on the mouth of a man who was cruel, whose sentiments were manufactured, whose physical appetites were visceral and base and infantile all at the same time. Watching him stride up the walk, Hackberry decided he had been too kind in assigning Dowling and his peers to that innocent and insular group who treated police officers as they would loyal servants. Temple Dowling, like his father, the senator, was a man who knew the value of the whip and how to turn the screw in order to bend others to his will. The fates may have given Temple Dowling a face that would never allow him to ascend to the throne. But Hackberry guessed that in Dowling’s view, the power behind the throne was gift enough.
Hackberry got up from his chair and met Dowling at the entrance to the building. “What’s your problem?” he said.
“I have a grocery list of them,” Dowling said.
The three men standing behind him had come to a stop. They wore western hats and sunglasses and had the physiques of men who worked out regularly in health clubs. They wore mustaches and a growth of beard that Hackberry guessed was deliberately maintained rather than shaved entirely off. Their hands were folded in front of them, their faces turned at a deferential angle so Hackberry would take note that they were not staring at him from behind their shades. One man had a puncture in his cheek that looked like a hole someone had made by inserting his thumb into putty. One man wore a tattoo inside the growth of beard on his throat. The third man had facial skin that was as dark as saddle leather and flecked with scars that resembled tiny pieces of brown string.
“Lose the entourage and come in,” Hackberry said.
“These men go wherever I go.”
“Not here they don’t.”
“Why do I continue to have trouble with you, Sheriff?”
“Because you asked for it.”
“I had to replace both the brake lights on my vehicle this morning.”
“Yeah, I heard about that. That’s too bad.”
“You’re aware your deputy broke them?”
“Be advised I support my deputy in whatever she does. I’m pretty busy. You want to stand out here in the sun or come inside?”
“Here will be just fine,” Dowling said. He wiped his forehead and upper lip with a handkerchief, then shook it out and wiped the back of his neck. He gazed down the street at the courthouse, a slick of sweat on one cheek, his eyes intense with the words he was preparing to speak. Hackberry realized Dowling’s next remarks would be part of a performance that was not for him but for his employees. “I’ve lost two good men to a psychopath who should have been mulch the first time you saw him. This same man has murdered an untold number of people in this county, your county, but you don’t seem to have a clue where he is, nor do you seem bothered by your ignorance. Instead of conducting an investigation, your personnel are vandalizing people’s SUVs. I understand that mediocrity is a way of life in a place like this, but I won’t abide incompetence when it comes to the welfare of my people or the security of my country. We’ll do your work for you, but you need to stay out of our way.”
“If you interfere in a homicide investigation, you’re going to find yourself in handcuffs, Mr. Dowling.”
“My father said something about you, Sheriff, that maybe you should hear. He said you were one of those rare politicians to whom nobody had to pay money in order to corrupt. All they needed to do was appeal to your Don Quixote complex. He said the only payment you required was a chance to play the role of the knight-errant so you could self-destruct and absolve yourself of your petty sins. I think my father read you like a book.”
“Tell you what, I changed my mind about something I told my chief deputy this morning. I said I couldn’t care less if you tried to slander my name. But on second thought, some might think the elements in your lies refer to my dead wife, Rie, and the nature of my relationship with her. You did make those remarks, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t have to make them. Everyone who knew you already has.”
“I don’t like to humiliate a man in front of his employees, but for you, I’m going to make an exception. I’m probably in the top of the eighth inning or the bottom of the ninth, which means I don’t have a lot to lose. You ever play much baseball, Mr. Dowling? If you crowd the plate with the wrong pitcher, you can bet the next pitch will be a forkball at the head, the kind that hits you like a dull-bladed guillotine.” Hackberry smiled pleasantly and winked at him. “What do you think about that?”
“Considering the source? Not very damn much,” Dowling said.
Hackberry went back inside his office, sat down at his desk, and did not look outside the window until he heard the SUV drive down the street. But the anger that had bloomed in his chest would not go away. A half hour later, the phone on his desk rang. He looked at the caller ID and answered. “?Que tal?”
“?Que tal?” Ethan Riser repeated.
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“I know what it means.”
“Say what’s on your mind.”
“This is a personal call and off the record.”
“I’m the sheriff of this county. I’m sitting at my office desk, on the job, in my official capacity. Nothing that occurs here is off the record.”
“You sound a little short.”
“What do you want, Ethan?”
“I’m taking early retirement. I wanted to tell you that. Plus a couple of other things.”
“Like what?”
“You’re in the way.”
“Say again?”
“This guy Noie Barnum is the Holy Grail. We want him, Krill and his people want him, Al Qaeda wants him, Temple Dowling wants him, and now Josef Sholokoff wants him.”
“Why would a Russian porn dealer risk his immigration status by going into espionage?”
“Josef Sholokoff has been spreading drug and porn addiction around the country since he arrived in Brighton Beach. Why should doing business with third-world bedbugs bother him?”
“You said I was in the way.”
“Guys like you are not team players. You’re a hardhead, you don’t chug pud, and you cause major amounts of trouble. Government agencies might say otherwise, but they don’t care for guys like you.”
“What difference should that make to me?”
“They won’t have your back, bud.”
“Have you been drinking?”
“I’m at a driving range. I wish I’d done more of this a long time ago.”
“When do you retire?”
“Three months, more or less. Yeah, about three months.”
“You’re retiring but you’re not sure when?”
“I’m terminal.”
Hackberry leaned forward on his desk. Before he could speak, Riser cut him off. “I used to smoke three packs a day. Five years ago I quit and thought I’d gotten a free pass. I went in for a blister on my nose last week, and the doc said it was already in my liver and pancreas and had reached the brain.”
“I’m sorry, Ethan.”
“There’s something I never told y
ou about my history with the Bureau. You remember right after 9/11 when a planeload of bin Laden’s relatives was allowed to leave the country without being detained, except for the fifteen minutes we were allowed to interview them on the tarmac? I was one of the agents who went on board the plane. I should have resigned in protest then. But I didn’t. I’ve always regretted that. Take this for a fact. When you get to the end of the track, you don’t regret the things you did. You regret the things you didn’t do. You’re a good man, Hack. But good men are usually admired in retrospect, after they’re safely dead.”
After he had hung up, Hackberry sat for a long time in his chair, the right side of his face numb, a sound like an electrical short humming in his ear.
CHAPTER NINE
Anton Ling woke in the darkness to the flicker of dry lightning and a rumble of thunder that shook the walls of her house in the same way that the reverberations of aerial bombs could travel through the earth and cause a house to rattle miles away. She went to the kitchen and sat at the table in the dark and drank a glass of warm milk and tried not to think about the images reawakened in her unconscious by the thunder and the yellow ignition in the clouds.
The night was unseasonably cold, the sky churning with clouds that looked filled with soot. She thought she heard a coyote’s wail inside the wind, or perhaps the shriek of a rusty hinge twisting violently back on itself. An empty apple basket bounced crazily past the water tank in the backyard. The tank was overflowing, the blades of the windmill ginning, the stanchions vibrating with tension. Had she been so absentminded that she had forgotten to notch down the shutoff chain on the crankshaft?
She put on a canvas coat and went outside and was immediately struck by the severity of the wind and a smell that was like creosote and wet sulfur and the stench off a smokestack in a rendering plant. She hooked the chain on the windmill and realized the doors were slamming on all her sheds, a loose section of the tin roof on the barn clanging against the joists, as though things were coming apart and indeed the center could not hold. Was the odor coming from across the border, where industry did as it wished? The clouds were black and billowing and lighted from the inside, like giant curds of smoke rising from wet straw set ablaze by a chemical starter.
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