“Maybe I don’t want to leave.”
“Son, you’d better get a lot of gone between you and this jailhouse,” Pam said.
“Well, you’re gonna see me again,” Barnum said.
Pam raised her eyebrows threateningly.
“Yes, ma’am, I’m gone,” he said.
Downstairs, ten minutes later, Pam said, “Hack, what in the hell are you doing?”
“Fixing to call the FBI,” he replied.
But it wasn’t for the reasons she thought.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Pam was still staring at him when he got off the phone. “You told the feds about Dowling’s mutilation but not about Barnum?”
“That’s right,” he replied.
“Why does Barnum get a pass?”
“Because if the feds get him into custody, they’ll probably lose interest in Anton Ling. Second, Barnum isn’t a bad kid and, in my opinion, deserves another chance.”
“You have a funny way of looking at the world, Hack.”
“My father used to say, ‘The name of the game is five-card draw. You never have to play the hand you’re dealt.’ He believed everything we see around us now was once part of the Atlantic Ocean, with mermaids sitting up on the rocks, and that one day I would see the mermaids return.”
“We’d better get some breakfast, kemo sabe.”
“I told you that’s what Rie called me, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, I’m sorry, I forgot,” she said.
“Don’t say you’re sorry. You didn’t know Rie. She’d like for you to call me that. She’d like you.”
She looked at him in a strange way, her mouth slightly parted, her face suddenly vulnerable, but he did not see it. Maydeen had just come out of the dispatcher’s cage, her anger palpable. “He’s on the line, Hack,” she said.
“Who is he?”
“He just told me, ‘Put the sheriff on the line, woman.’”
“Collins?”
“I say we hang up on him. Don’t let him jerk you around like this, Hack.”
“No, I think this is the call we’ve been waiting on,” Hackberry said.
Jack Collins was sitting at a small table under a canvas tarp propped on poles next to an airplane hangar, a corked green bottle of seltzer and a glass and a saucer of salted lime slices by his hand. A clutch of banana plants grew tightly against the hangar wall, beads of moisture the size of BBs sliding down the leaves. The wind was hot, the canvas riffling above his head, the desert lidded from horizon to horizon with a layer of solid blue-black clouds that seemed to force the heat and humidity radiating from the desert floor back into the earth. The clouds crackled with electricity but offered no real promise of rain or even a moment of relief from the grit and alkali in the wind and the smell of salt and decomposition that whirled with the dust devils out of the streambeds. Jack decided there was nothing wrong with Mexico that a half-dozen hydrogen bombs and a lot of topsoil couldn’t cure.
Jack’s pilot and two hired killers, the cousins Eladio and Jaime, were waiting for him by the two-engine Beechcraft on the airstrip. The pilot was on retainer, at Jack’s beck and call on a twenty-four-hour basis. Eladio and Jaime were available for any activity that put money in their pockets, night or day; if there were any lines they would not cross, any deeds they would not perform, including a drive-by for La Familia Michoacana on a teenage birthday party in Juarez, Jack had not seen it. Their greatest problem, in his view, was the impaired thought processes that seemed to live behind the indolence in their faces. The inside of Jaime’s head could only be described as a tangled web of cruelty that was linked somehow to his stupidity and sullen nature. The more intelligent of the two, Eladio, thought that his transparent childlike deceit and attempts at manipulation were signs of sophistication. During a rare loss of restraint with the two cousins, Jack had asked Eladio if his mother had been impregnated by a bowling pin. Eladio had responded, “You are a man of knowledge, Senor Jack. But you must not misjudge simple men. We think and feel deeply about our mothers. They are the center of our lives.”
“Then why do you say chinga tu madre to each other at every opportunity?” Jack had said.
“I am not equipped to discuss abstractions with a man of your intelligence,” Eladio had said. “But my mother is eighty and still tells stories of her mother, who was a concubine of Pancho Villa and one of those who helped hide his severed head in the Van Horn Mountains. That is the level of respect we have for the women in our family.”
Jack had made a mental note about the level of stability in his employees.
At this particular moment, he was irritated with the weather, the clouds of black flies buzzing over a calf’s carcass in a nearby streambed, and the fact that the two cousins seemed incapable of doing anything right except killing people. The man who owned the airstrip and the hangar and the improvised cafe outside it had installed a jukebox just inside the hangar door, one loaded with gangsta-rap recordings that blasted through the speakers so loudly that the side of the tin hangar shook. Jack had told Eladio and Jaime to talk with the jukebox’s owner, but either the owner had ignored the warning or they had not bothered. So while he was trying to make notes in preparation for his conversation with the sheriff, his eardrums were being assailed by a level of electronic percussion that was like having a studded snow tire driven over his head.
Jack capped his pen, stuck it between the pages of his notebook, and went inside the hangar, where the owner was cleaning the concrete pad with a push broom. “Can I help you, senor?” he said.
Jack pointed to his ear, indicating he couldn’t hear.
“You got a problem with your ear?” the owner shouted.
Jack pulled the plug on the jukebox, cut the electric cord in two with his pocketknife, and set the plug on top of the casing. “No, I’m fine now. Thanks,” he said.
Then he sat down at his table under the canvas flap and drank a glass of seltzer and chewed on a lime slice, staring into space, each eye like a glass orb with a dead insect frozen inside it. He dialed his cell phone with his thumb and lifted the phone to his ear and waited, his body heat increasing inside his clothes, his pulse quickening. Why would his metabolism react to calling the sheriff? It could be anything, he told himself. Why dwell on it? Maybe it was because he had finally found a worthy opponent.
Or maybe it was something else.
What?
Don’t think about it, he told himself.
Why not? I’m supposed to be afraid of my own thoughts? he asked himself.
Maybe Holland is the father you never had. Maybe you want him to like you.
Like hell I do.
You could have taken him off the board a couple of times. Why didn’t you do it, Jackie Boy?
The situation was one-sided. There’s no honor in that. Don’t call me that name.
There was honor in the shooting of the nine Thai women?
I don’t want to talk about that. It’s over. I did my penance in the desert.
He thought he heard the hysterical laughter of a woman, someone who always hung just on the edge of his vision, ridiculing him, waiting for him to slip up, her smile as cruel as an open cut in living tissue.
When the female deputy answered, Jack said, “Put the sheriff on the line, woman.”
Whatever she said in response never registered. Instead, he heard the voice of the woman who lived in his dreams and his unconscious and his idle daytime moments and his futile attempts at joy. He heard her incessant, piercing laughter, louder and louder, and he knew that eventually, he would once again resort to the release that never failed him, an eruption of gunfire that reverberated through his hands and arms like a jackhammer and made his teeth rattle and cleansed his thoughts and deadened his ears to all sound, both outside and inside his head.
“What do you need, Mr. Collins?” the sheriff’s voice said.
“I know where the Asian woman is. I can take you there,” he replied.
“Where might that be?”
“Down in Mexico, way to heck and gone by car, not so far by air.”
“She’s with Sholokoff?”
“She and Temple Dowling and the ’breed known as Krill. How’s Noie doing?”
“I don’t know. I kicked him loose.”
“You did what?”
“Last time I saw him, he was walking toward the city-limits sign, whistling a song.”
“The feds aren’t going to be happy with you.”
“I’ll try to live with it. Where can we meet, Mr. Collins?”
“You ever lie?”
“No.”
“Not ever?”
“You heard me the first time,” Hackberry said.
“I’m trusting you. I don’t do that with most people.”
“Do whatever you want, sir. But don’t expect me to feel flattered.”
“I’ll give you some coordinates and see you no later than four hours from now. I suppose you’ll bring the female deputy with you?”
“Count on it. Why are you doing this, Mr. Collins?”
“Sholokoff shouldn’t have taken the Asian woman. She’s not a player.”
“There’s another reason.”
“Sholokoff tried to have me capped. I owe him one.”
“There’s another reason.”
“When you find out what it is, tell me so we’ll both know. Don’t bring anybody besides the female deputy and your pilot. A couple of my men will pick you up. If you violate any aspect of our arrangement, the deal is off and you won’t hear from me again. The Asian woman’s fate will be on your conscience.”
“If you try to harm me or my deputy, I’m going to cool you out on the spot. I’m like you, Jack-over-the-hill and out of place and time, with not a lot to lose.”
“Then keep your damn word, and we’ll get along just fine.”
Jack clicked off his cell phone. Unbelievably, the jukebox sprang to life and began blaring rap music out the door. He remembered that the cord he’d cut had both a female and a male plug and was detachable from the box. The owner of the hangar had probably replaced it and decided to prove he could be as assertive and unpleasant as an imperious gringo from Texas who thought he could come to Mexico and wipe his ass on the place.
Jack went to the plane and removed his guitar case and set it on top of the table. The wind was blowing harder, the heat and dust swirling under the canopy as Jack unfastened the top of the case and inserted plugs in his ears and removed his Thompson and snapped a thirty-round box magazine into the bottom of the receiver and went inside the hangar. The owner took one look at him and dropped his push broom and began running for the back door. Jack raised the Thompson’s barrel and squeezed the trigger, ripping apart the jukebox, scattering plastic shards and electronic components all over the concrete pad, stitching the tin wall with holes the size of nickels.
“Senor, what the fuck you doin’?” Eladio said behind him.
Jack still had the plugs stoppered in his ears and could not hear him. The only sound he heard was his mother’s laughter-maniacal, forever taunting, a paean of ridicule aimed at a driven man who would never escape the black box in which a little boy had been locked.
Krill did not know a great deal about the complexities of politics. A man owned land or he did not own land. Either he was allowed to keep the product of his labor or he was not allowed to keep it. The abstractions of ideology seemed the stuff that fools and radicals and drunkards argued about in late-hour bars because they had nothing else to occupy their time. Though Krill did not understand the abstruse terms of social science or economics, he understood jails. He had learned about them in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and he knew how you survived or didn’t survive inside them. Men in confinement all behaved and thought in a predictable fashion. And so did their warders.
Krill had a very strong suspicion that his captors did not understand how jails worked. The gringo Frank was a good example of what American convicts called a “fish.” He had not only baited a prisoner but had informed the prisoner of his ultimate fate, which in this case was death and burial in concrete, telling the prisoner in effect that he had nothing to lose. Frank had made another mistake. He had not bothered to note that when Krill was placed in the cell, he was wearing running shoes, not pull-on boots.
Krill had slept three hours on the floor, his head cushioned on a piece of burlap he had found in the corner. As the early glow of morning appeared through the window on the far side of the cellar, a man came down the stairs carrying two bowls filled with rice and beans. He was a strange-looking man, with dirty-blond hair and a duckbilled upper lip and eyes that were set too far apart and skin that had the grainy texture of pig hide. He took one bowl to the cell where Krill believed La Magdalena was being held, then squatted in front of Krill’s cell and pushed the second bowl through the gap between the concrete floor and the bottom of the door.
“I need something to eat with,” Krill said.
“This isn’t a hotel,” the man said.
“We cannot eat our food with our fingers.”
“Eat out of the bowl. Just tip it up and you can eat.”
“Hombre, we are not animals. You must give us utensils to eat.”
“I’ll see what I can find,” the man said.
“Bring me a spoon. I cannot eat rice with a fork. Bring us water, too.”
“Want anything else?”
“Yes, to use a real toilet, one that flushes with water. Using a chemical toilet is unsanitary and degrading.”
When the man had gone upstairs, Krill lowered his voice and said, “Magdalena, can you hear me?”
“Yes,” the woman said.
“Did they hurt you?”
“No.”
“Where is Dowling?”
“I think he’s dead.”
“Did they mutilate him?”
“Yes, very badly.”
“Listen to me. I must say this in a hurry. I have killed many men. I have also killed a Jesuit priest. I tortured and murdered a DEA informant. I need your absolution for these sins and others that are too many to name.”
“I don’t have that power. Only God does. If you’re sorry for what you did and you renounce your violent ways, your sins are forgiven. God doesn’t forgive incrementally or partially. He forgives absolutely, Antonio. That’s what ‘absolution’ means. God makes all things new.”
“You remembered my name.”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because everyone calls me Krill.”
“It’s a name you earned in war. You shouldn’t go by that name anymore.”
“Maybe I’ll stop using it later, Magdalena. But right now I got to get us out of here. We need a fork from the man who brought us our bowls.”
“Why?”
“There are only two ways we’re going to get out of here. I have to open the lock on my door or get a man in my cell. We need a fork.”
“I heard you ask for a spoon.”
“This man is stubborn and slow in the head. He will do the opposite of what he is asked.”
The upstairs door opened, and the man with the duckbilled mouth came down the stairs. There were two dull metallic objects in his right hand. “I got you what you wanted,” he said. “Put your bowls outside the door when you’re finished.”
Krill stuck his hand through the bars and curved his palm around the utensil the man gave him. A spoon, he thought bitterly.
“Disappointed? I was jailing when I was sixteen,” the man said. “Better eat up. You got a rough day ahead of you.”
The single-engine department plane dropped down over a ridge and followed a milky-brown river that had spread out onto the floodplain and was dotted with sandy islands that had willow trees on them. Above the plane, Hackberry could see the long blue-black layer of clouds that seemed to extend like curds of industrial smoke from the Big Bend all the way across northern Mexico. Down below, the willow trees stiffened in the wind, the surface of the river wrinkling in jagged V-shaped lines.
On the southern horizon, the cloud layer seemed to end and looked like strips of torn black cotton churning against a band of perfectly blue sky.
The wings of the plane yawed suddenly, the airframe shuddering. “We’re fine,” the pilot said above the engine noise. He was a crop duster named Toad Fowler who worked on and off for the sheriff’s department. “Those are just updrafts.”
Nonetheless, he kept tapping the glass on his instruments.
“What’s the problem?” Hackberry asked.
“The oil pressure is a little low,” the pilot said. “We’re okay. We’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“How low?” Hackberry said.
“It’s probably not a line, just a leaky gasket,” the pilot said. “I’ll check everything out after we get down. Hang on. We might bounce around a little bit.”
“You didn’t check everything out before we left?” Hackberry asked.
“It’s an old plane. What do you want? Shit happens,” the pilot said.
When the plane dipped down toward the river, Hackberry felt Pam place her hand on top of his shoulder, her breath coming hard against the back of his neck.
“We’re okay,” Hackberry said.
“How do you know?” she asked.
“Toad just told me.”
“Tell him I’m going to shoot him after we land.”
Down below, Hackberry could see great squares of both cultivated and pasture land and bare hills that looked molded out of white clay that had hardened and cracked. The pilot made a wide turn, the wings buffeting, and came in low over the river, the islands sweeping by, then Hackberry saw a feeder lot and hog farm whose holding pens were churned a chocolate color and buildings with tin roofs and houses constructed of cinder block and then a short pale green landing strip that had been recently mowed out of a field, a red wind sock straining against its tether at the far end. They landed hard, rainwater splashing under the tires. A flatbed truck with two men lounging near it was parked by the side of the strip.
“You ever see them before?” Pam said.
“No,” Hackberry replied. “You okay?”
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