“?Que bueno, hombre!” Negrito said.
“Do not talk,” Krill said, shifting the bipod on the rock, depressing the barrel slightly so the hood on the front sight formed a perfect circle around Sholokoff’s tiny head. He tightened his finger on the trigger, letting out his breath, his cheek flush against the dull black finish of the rifle stock.
“ Chingado, go ahead!” Negrito said. “Burn the whole magazine. It’s time we got out of here. I want to fuck my woman tonight.”
Krill had released his finger from the trigger and was staring numbly down the incline at the window. Two little girls and a little boy had just run from a side room and climbed into Sholokoff’s lap. Negrito leaned over Krill’s shoulder to see better, his loins brushing against Krill’s buttocks, his body odor and the smell of onions and garlic and fried meat on his breath enveloping Krill in a toxic cloud.
“Fuck, man, do it,” Negrito said. “I hear a plane. Them hunters come in and out of here all the time. They got a landing strip on the other side of the house.”
“Shut your mouth,” Krill said.
“You ain’t thinking straight. We already killed two guys. You got to finish the job, man. Sholokoff has many friends. We cannot have this man hunting us. Do it now, jefe.”
“Take your hand off my shoulder.”
“Then shoot.”
“You will not give me orders.”
“Then give me the rifle.”
“Remove your hand and take your odor out of my face.”
“Look at the plane. It’s dipping out of the sky. You have to choose between our families and these worthless people. You worry about my odor? What is wrong with you, man?”
“You are like an empty wagon rattling across a bridge,” Krill said. “You speak craziness and nonsense. You are like the demoniac babbling among the swine. We do not kill children. Have you learned nothing? Do you understand nothing except killing?”
“We did not put the children here. This is not our fault. Lupa and Mimo and me will do everything that is necessary inside the house. You will not have to see or hear anything that happens down there. One day you will be right in the head, but now you are not. So we will do these things for you and forget the bad words that you have spoken.”
“You will do nothing without my permission.”
“Take the shot, Krill. Please. You can do it. I’ve seen you shoot the head off a dove at a hundred meters. Concentrate on the Russian and don’t worry about the children. They will be all right. But we cannot leave this man alive.”
Krill’s head was pounding, his ears filled with whirring sounds that were louder than either the wind or Negrito’s incessant talking. Had it been like this for the soldiers in the helicopter who had machine-gunned the clinic built by the East Germans? Had they seen Krill’s children playing in the yard and wondered if they should not abort their mission? Had they fired on the building in hopes that they would not hit the children? Or had they given no thought at all to what they were doing? Did they simply murder his children and fly back to their base and eat lunch and drink warm beer under a palm-shaded table, staring idly at a smokeless blue volcano in the distance? Was that what happened when they slew the innocent children he had loved from the first breath they had drawn?
He bent over the rifle again, feeling the sling tighten on his left arm, his mouth filled with a taste like pennies, a brass band thundering in his head. The little boy was seated firmly in Sholokoff’s lap, watching the television. Krill raised the rifle barrel until the hood on the front sight circled Sholokoff’s head like the frame on a miniature photograph. He took a breath and waited a split second and then exhaled slowly, slowly, slowly, his left eye squinted shut, his right eye bulging like a child’s marble, his index finger tightening as though it had a life of its own.
Suddenly, he stood erect, pulling his hand from the trigger guard as though it had been shocked with a cattle prod. His teeth were chattering, his breath catching in his throat. Murderer, he thought he heard a voice say. Assassin! Man who brought death to his own children . He stared wide-eyed at Negrito.
“You look sick, cabron. You look like your mind has flown into the darkness,” Negrito said.
“We go back through the grass and out the fence,” Krill said. “We are through with this. We will deal with Sholokoff at another time.”
“I cannot believe what you are doing,” Negrito said. “You’re letting us down, man. You are making a great mistake that each of us will pay for. It ain’t fair. You are betraying us, Krill.”
Krill was already walking deep into the mountain’s shadow, his M16 reslung on his shoulder, his eyes empty, like those of a man who has looked into a mirror and is unable to recognize the image staring back at him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Hackberry Holland did not learn of the killings near the Santiago Mountains from another law enforcement agency, because they were not reported the night they occurred or the following morning, either. He learned of them from a questionable source, one in whom he had already induced a sizable dose of paranoia. In fact, he had a hard time concentrating on the telephone conversation. It was raining, and he had forgotten to take down the flag outside his office window. The flag, soggy as a towel, hung twisted and forlorn against a gray sky, its chain vibrating against the pole like a damaged nerve. “Mr. Dowling, I’ve heard nothing about a shooting in this county or anywhere around here,” he said. “It’s been surprisingly quiet.”
“Of course you didn’t. Josef doesn’t want cops crawling all over his property,” Temple Dowling replied.
“You say two men were killed?”
“Right. Two security guys. Somebody cut their noses out of their faces.”
“Sounds a bit strange, doesn’t it? I mean, why is it you know about this but nobody else does?”
“Because maybe I got one or two people inside Josef’s organization.”
“What do you want me to do about this unreported homicide that only you seem to know about?”
“Go out to the game ranch. Investigate the crime. Stuff a hand grenade up his ass. What do I care? Why not just do your fucking job?”
“Because somehow you’re at risk?”
“Josef believes I put a hit on him.”
“Listen to what you’re saying, Mr. Dowling. Two guys got killed outside Sholokoff’s house, but no attempt was made to harm anybody inside the house. Does that seem like a rational scenario to you?”
“That’s because a bunch of hunters had just flown in. Look, my source says Josef went apeshit. He had his grandchildren in the house.” There was a pause. “His guys are coming after me.”
Hackberry could hear the tremor in Dowling’s voice, the frightened boy no longer able to hide behind arrogance and cruelty. “First, you have your own security service, Mr. Dowling. Why not make use of it? If a crime occurred in the place you describe, it’s out of my jurisdiction. Second, maybe it’s time for you to grow up.”
“Time for me to-”
“Everybody dies. Why not go down with the decks awash and the guns blazing? You’ve probably made millions profiteering off of war. Get a taste of the real deal and scorch your name on the wall before you check out. It’s not a bad way to go.”
“You’re a son of a bitch.”
Hackberry rubbed his forehead and started to hang up, then placed the receiver against his ear again. “If you think you’re in danger, get out of town.”
“I’m already out of town. It doesn’t matter. Sholokoff has a network all over the country.”
“I think you’re imagining things.”
“You don’t understand Josef. He doesn’t just do evil. He loves it. That’s the difference between him and the rest of us. Jack Collins is probably a lunatic. Josef isn’t. He creates object lessons nobody ever forgets. He has people taken apart.”
“He does what?”
Perhaps due to his fundamentalist upbringing, R. C. Bevins was not a believer in either luck or coincidence but saw eve
ry event in his life as one that required attention. The consequence was that he never dismissed any form of human behavior as implausible and never thought of bizarre events in terms of their improbability. The sheriff had once told R.C. that if a UFO landed on the prairie, two things were guaranteed to happen: Everyone who witnessed the landing would grab his cell phone to dial 911, and R.C. would knock on the spaceship door and introduce himself.
R.C. had pulled into a convenience store and gas station on a county road just south of the east-west four-lane that paralleled the Mexican border, and had gone inside and bought a chili dog and a load of nachos and jalapeno peppers and a Dr Pepper and had just started eating lunch at a table by the front window when he saw a pickup stop and let out a passenger. The passenger limped slightly, as though he had a stitch in his side. He wore shades and an unlacquered wide-brim straw hat, like one a gardener might wear. His nose was a giant teardrop, his jeans hiked up too high on his hips, his suspenders notched into his shoulders, the way a much older man might wear them. The man went into the back of the store and took a bottle of orange juice and a ham-and-cheese sandwich from the cooler and a package of Ding Dongs from the counter. He paid, sat down, and began eating at a table not far from R.C.’s, never removing his shades. R.C. nodded at him, but the man did not look up from his food.
“Bet you could fry an egg out there,” R.C. said.
“That about says it,” the man replied, chewing slowly, his mouth closed, his gaze seemingly fixed on nothing.
“My uncle says that during the drought of 1953, it got so dry here he saw a catfish walking down a dirt road carrying its own canteen.”
“That’s dry.”
“You looking for a ride? ’Cause the bread-delivery man is fixing to head back to town.”
“No, I’m visiting down the road there. South a piece.” The man drank from his orange juice and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and began eating his sandwich again.
“Did you see any salt and pepper up there at the counter?” R.C. asked.
“I think I did. Where the ketchup and such are. In that little tray.”
“You want some?”
“No, sir, I’m fine.”
R.C. went to the counter by the coffee and cold-drink dispensers and began sorting through the condiments. “Do y’all have any hot sauce?” he said to the cashier.
“It’s there somewhere,” the cashier replied.
“I sure cain’t find it.”
The cashier walked over and picked up the hot sauce and handed it to R.C. He was a short man with a sloping girth who always showed up at work in a dress shirt and an outrageous tie and with polished shoes. He had a tiny black mustache that expanded like grease pencil when he grinned. “Glad it wasn’t a snake.”
“Keep looking straight at me,” R.C. said.
The cashier’s face clouded, but he kept his eyes locked on R.C.’s.
“You know that old boy over yonder?” R.C. said.
“I think he was in yesterday. He bought some Ding Dongs and a newspaper.”
“He was by himself?”
“He came here with another man. The other fellow stayed in the car.”
“What’d the other guy look like?”
“I didn’t pay him much mind.”
“What kind of car?”
The cashier looked into space and shook his head. “It was skinned up. It didn’t have much paint on it. I don’t know what kind it was.”
“You ever see it before?”
The cashier rubbed his eye. “No, sir,” he said. “Are we fixing to have some trouble here? ’Cause that’s something I really don’t need.”
“No. Did the guy in the car buy gas with a credit card?”
“If he did, I didn’t see it. He got air.”
“What?”
“He went to the air pump. I remember that ‘cause he was the last to use it. Somebody ran over the hose, and I had to put an out-of-order sign on it. Ain’t nobody used it since.”
R.C. went back to his table and set the bottle of hot sauce down, then snapped his fingers as though he had forgotten something. He went outside to his cruiser and picked up a clipboard off the seat, then walked past the air pump. The concrete slab around it was covered with a film of mud and dust that had dried into a delicate crust. A set of familiar tire tracks was stenciled across it. “Michelins,” R.C. said under his breath.
R.C. went back to his table with the clipboard. “I got to do these dadburn time logs,” he said to the man at the next table.
“I bet that’s what we’ll all be doing when somebody drops a nuclear missile on us,” the man said.
“I never thought of it like that. I think you got your hand on it.”
“Hope we get some rain. This is about the hottest place I’ve ever been,” the man said.
“You know what General Sherman said when he was stationed here? He said if he owned both Texas and hell, he’d rent out Texas and live in hell,” R.C. said.
The man tilted up his orange juice and drank it empty, swallowing smoothly, never letting a drop run off the side of his mouth. R.C. went back to eating, his long legs barely fitting under the table, his jaw filled with food, one eye on his clipboard. “This stuff is a royal pain in the ass,” he said. “I’m going back on patrol. If they want my time logs filled out, they can fill them out their own self.”
“If I were you, I’d put the times in there somebody wants and not worry about it. That’s how organizations are run. You just got to make things look right. Why beat yourself up over it?”
“You sound like a guy who’s been around.”
“Not really.”
“Where you staying at, exactly?”
“A little vacation spot a buddy of mine has got rented. It’s just a place to go hunting for rocks and arrowheads and such.”
“Look, is somebody coming to pick you up? You looked like you were limping.”
“I’ll hitch a ride. People here’bouts are pretty nice.”
“I don’t mind driving you home. That’s part of the job sometimes.”
“No, I was in an accident a while back. I don’t like to start depending on other people. It gets to be a habit too easy.”
R.C. picked up the remnants of his nachos and chili dog and threw them in the trash, then sat down at the table with the man, who was now feeding a Ding Dong into his mouth. “You seem like a right good fellow,” he said. “The kind of guy who don’t want to hurt nobody but who might get into something that’s way to shit and gone over his head.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“I always figured if a guy makes a mistake, he ought to get shut of it as quick as he can and keep on being the fellow he always was.”
“That could be true, but I think you’ve got somebody else in mind.”
“You’re not from Texas, but you’re from down South somewhere, right?”
“Me and a few million others.”
“But you weren’t raised up to keep company with criminals. It’s got to grate on you. I reckon that’s why you hitched a ride here today.”
“You want a Ding Dong?”
“Not right now,” R.C. said, and fitted one end of his handcuffs onto the man’s left wrist and snicked the ratchet into the locking mechanism. “Mind if I call you Noie?”
“I’ve answered to worse.”
“You have a friend who drives a Trans Am that has Michelin tires on it?”
“Can’t say as I do.”
“Where’s Preacher Collins at, Noie?”
The man squinted thoughtfully and scratched at an insect bite on the back of his neck with his free hand. “Who?” he said.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Maydeen said, standing in Hackberry’s doorway.
He looked up from his desk and waited.
“R.C. says he’s got Noie Barnum hooked up in the back of his cruiser,” she said.
Hackberry stared at her blankly.
“He says Barnum walked into a convenien
ce store down by the four-lane,” she said. “He’d hitched a ride to have lunch there.”
“How does R.C. know it’s Barnum?”
“He says the guy looks just like his photo, except he’s a little leaner. He’s got a limp and maybe has some broken ribs.”
“The guy admits he’s Noie Barnum?”
“R.C. didn’t say. He just says it’s him.”
“What about Jack Collins?”
“R.C. said there were Michelin tire tracks where Collins’s car was parked yesterday. I didn’t get it all, Hack. Want me to notify the FBI?”
“No.”
“You don’t?”
“Did you hear me?”
“Yeah, I did. How about losing the tone?”
He stood up from his desk, staring out the window into the brilliance of the day, at the wind whipping the flag on the pole, at the hard blueness of the sky above the hills. His right hand opened and closed at his side. “Tell R.C. to bring him through the back.”
“Hack?”
“What is it?”
“You always say we do it by the numbers.”
“What about it?”
“Pam told me about you almost shoving a broken pool cue down a bartender’s throat in that Mexican cantina.”
“R.C.’s life was hanging in the balance. Why are you bringing this up?”
“I could have done the same thing to the bartender, maybe worse, and so could Pam or Felix and a few others in the department. We wouldn’t be bothered about it later, either. But we’re not you. All of us know that, even though you don’t. You go against your own nature.”
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