She didn’t reply until Toad had cut the engine and gotten out of the plane and lit a cigarette by the wing. “I’m backing your play, Hack, but the idea of getting involved with Jack Collins makes my stomach churn,” she said.
“I wouldn’t blame you if you stayed with Toad. I can handle it by myself.”
“That’s not going to happen,” she said.
“I have to get Miss Anton back, Pam. If I don’t, I’ll never rest.”
“We’re making a deal with the devil, and you know it.”
“That’s the breaks.”
“You mean after this is over, you’re going to let that bastard slide?”
“Jack Collins isn’t planning to leave Mexico,” he said.
Her eyes went back and forth. “How do you know that?”
“Collins brought us here as his executioners,” he said.
“Or maybe he plans on being ours,” she said.
Hackberry and Pam pulled a duffel bag and a backpack off the plane and walked toward the flatbed truck. The Mexicans standing next to it introduced themselves as Eladio and Jaime. They were unshaved and wore slouch-brim straw hats and unpressed long-sleeve cotton shirts buttoned at the wrists. Their eyes wandered over Pam’s body without seeming to see her, the laziness in their expressions as much mask as indicator of their thoughts.
“Where’s Collins?” Hackberry said.
“He ain’t here,” Jaime said.
“That’s why I asked you where he is,” Hackberry said.
“We’ll take you where he’s at,” Jaime said. “You two can ride in front with Eladio. I’ll ride in back.”
“Where are we going?” Pam asked.
“You’ll know when we get there, chica,” Jaime said.
“Call me that again and see what happens,” she said.
“We are sorry. We do not mean to offend,” Eladio said. “Can we look in your canvas bag and your pack? It would be good if we can look at your cell phones, too.”
“Why would you want to do that?” Pam said.
“Among friends, there is no need of GPS locators,” Eladio said. “It is good to have things of that nature out of our discussions about the liberation of your friend. That is the only reason I raise this question.”
“Look all you want,” Hackberry said.
“Thank you,” Eladio said. “What fine guns you have in your bag. What is in this metal box?”
“Cookies and fruitcake,” Hackberry said.
“You carry such items with you when you go on a serious mission?” Eladio said.
“I have a sugar deficiency. I also thought you might like some. Take them if you like,” Hackberry said.
“That is very kind of you,” Eladio said. “I have children who will love these.”
“When do we see Preacher?” Hackberry asked.
“Very soon. He looks forward to seeing you with great anticipation,” Eladio said.
“You come all the way down here ‘cause of la china?” Jaime said.
“You could say that,” Hackberry replied.
“She must be some broad, hombre,” Jaime said. “It’s true what they say about Chinese women?”
“Do not speak further,” Eladio said, raising his finger to his cousin’s lips.
“It’s just a question. I do not need to be censored,” Jaime said. “These are gringos in our country. We do not suppress ourselves to please gringos in our own country.”
“It’s time for us to see Mr. Collins,” Hackberry said.
He and Pam rode in the cab while Eladio drove and Jaime sat on the flatbed. They proceeded in a southerly direction down dirt roads through irrigated farmland for almost an hour. The colors and configuration and flora in the land were like none that Hack could remember. Wild grapefruit and hibiscus and pink camellias and palm trees with long, slender trunks grew in the turn rows. The soil was loamy and tinted a reddish-brown, as though it had been mixed with rust, but the hills were white and bare and gray-backed, like sea creatures that had died and fossilized. The topography made Hack think of imaginative paintings of ancient Egypt that depicted an era when the earth was still recovering from the Flood and deserts bloomed and gatherers filled date baskets with their hands. Why would a man like Josef Sholokoff locate himself in such a place? To re-create the introduction of the serpent into Eden?
No, nothing so grandiose, Hackberry thought. For Sholokoff, Mexico was probably nothing more than a good tax dodge.
The truck rolled down a long embanked road made of crushed stone, the rocks ting ing steadily under the fenders, the wind stream warm and sultry, the sky lidded with clouds that emitted no sunlight. Ahead, at a crossroads, Hackberry could see a small, paintless wood-frame store with a single gas pump in front and a screened side porch. Behind the store, the terrain seemed to stretch away endlessly, glazed with salt, cracked and sunken in places, as though a lake had once covered the area but had drained through a hole in its center. Eladio parked the truck and cut the engine. “Senor Collins awaits you on the porch,” he said. “Do not take your guns inside. That would cause alarm for the owner of the store. Also, it is a very serious offense to bring guns into Mexico.”
“That’s like saying it’s a serious offense to bring insanity into a lunatic asylum,” Pam said.
“I am not educated and do not understand the comparisons you make, senorita,” Eladio said.
Hackberry looked through the back window of the cab. “Your cousin is eating the cookies you were going to give your children,” he said.
“Jaime, what are you doin’, man?” Eladio yelled out the window.
Jaime replaced the tin lid on the container and wiped the crumbs off his fingers. Pam and Hackberry got out of the cab and followed Eladio to the screen door on the store’s side porch. She glanced over her shoulder at Jaime, who had remained on the truck bed. “I don’t guess these guys are students of Homer,” she said.
“Shut up,” Hackberry said under his breath. He opened the screen door and stepped inside, removing his Stetson hat. Inside the gloom, against the back wall, he saw a man eating refried beans and strips of steak and sliced peppers from a tin plate with a fork. The man wore a blocked hat and a seersucker coat and a gray dress shirt with no buttons on the collar and trousers that were tucked into the tops of his boots. A guitar case was propped on its side against the wall behind him. For Hackberry, Jack Collins was like a figure out of a dream, not quite flesh and blood, vaporous in its dimensions, waiting like an incubus to attach itself to the fear in its victim, in the way a leech attaches itself to living tissue in order to survive.
“Have a good flight?” Collins said.
“Not really,” Hackberry said.
“Sit down. You, too, Deputy Tibbs.”
“I think I’ll stand. You don’t mind, do you?” Pam said.
“I owe you an apology,” Collins said, chewing while he spoke.
“For trying to kill me?” she said.
“If y’all had your way, you would have split me open and salted my innards and tacked me to a fence post. I figure what I did was just fair play.”
“We didn’t come here to talk past history, Mr. Collins. How far are we from our target?” Hackberry said.
Collins pushed two chairs out from the table with his boot. He was wearing a holstered thumb-buster revolver, the bluing rubbed bare around the cylinder, the cartridge loops stuffed with copperjacketed. 45 rounds. “Sit down. Have a Pepsi. The beans and meat aren’t bad. We go in at sunset. Once inside that compound, we don’t negotiate.”
“Listen to me, Collins. You don’t make the rules. I do,” Hackberry said. “We’re down here for one reason only, and that’s to save the life of an innocent woman. We don’t turn people into wallpaper. If you want to settle a personal score with Sholokoff, you find another time and place to do it.”
Collins motioned at the waiter, then looked up at Hackberry. “I bought a big bottle of Pepsi and had him put it in the icebox for y’all. Now sit down and take your nose out o
f the air. You, too, Deputy Tibbs.” He placed his fork on his plate and removed a folded piece of paper from inside his coat. “I’ve drawn a diagram of the compound and the entrances to it. Are y’all going to sit down or not?”
Pam Tibbs pulled back a chair and sat down, her eyes on his.
“You want to tell me something?” he asked.
“I’d like to park one in your brisket, you arrogant white trash,” she replied.
Collins looked across the table at Hackberry. “I’m not going to have this, Sheriff.”
“Show us the entrances to the compound,” Hackberry said.
“No, you need to correct the mouth on this woman.”
The waiter brought a tall plastic bottle of Pepsi and two glasses, then went away.
“We came a long way, Jack,” Hackberry said. “You’ve done a lot of harm to a lot of people, some of them friends of ours. Don’t expect too much of us.”
“You say I’ve done harm? Right now the Asian woman and the fellow named Krill are learning what harm is all about. Josef Sholokoff doesn’t know Noie is on the street. He thinks he’s still in your jail, and he’s mad as hell and sweating Ms. Ling and the half-breed because of it.”
“You’ve got someone inside?” Hackberry said.
“What do you think?” Collins asked. “They started in on Krill about four hours ago. If I know Josef, he’ll take a special interest in the woman. Why do you think he crucified Cody Daniels and set fire to his church with him hanging on the cross?”
“You tell me.”
“It wasn’t for money. It wasn’t for sheer meanness, either.”
Hackberry remained silent.
“Josef was born with the brain of a rodent and the face of a ferret, and he blames God for the pitiful little toothpick that he is,” Collins said. “For formally educated people, neither of y’all seems real bright, Mr. Holland. But I guess overestimating the intelligence of my fellow man has always been my greatest character defect.” He pushed the diagram toward Hackberry and resumed eating, his fork scraping in the grease at the bottom of the plate, his eyes as empty as glass.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
They had beaten Krill in his cell and hung him from a rafter in the center of the cellar, where the Asian woman could see him hanging, and then had beaten him again. When they dropped him to the floor, his wrists roped together behind him, he had begun to slip in and out of consciousness and into a place where his children were waiting for him. They were standing outside a traveling carnival, their cheeks smeared with Popsicle juice, the carved wooden horses of a merry-go-round spinning behind them, the music of the calliope rising into the evening sky.
Frank or the man standing next to Frank poured water from a canteen on Krill’s face. Josef Sholokoff was sitting on a chair two feet away, one knee folded over the other, smoking a perfumed cigarette that was gold-tipped and wrapped with lavender paper. “Noie Barnum remained for weeks in your custody, but you never made him draw the design of the drone? You’re a businessman who kidnaps and sells valuable people, but you never try to extract information from them? You think I’m a stupid man, Mr. Krill?”
“My name is Antonio.”
“You came to see the woman for religious reasons? You didn’t know she helped transport arms to your country? It’s just coincidence that we found you at her house while you were on a spiritual mission? You are a very entertaining man, I think.”
“My women have always told me that.”
“You worked for the Americans in your country?”
“Of course. Everyone does.”
“But you planned to help Al Qaeda?”
“An American helicopter killed my children. But I know now that I am responsible for their deaths, not others.”
“Oh, I see. Because you have discovered you are powerless against the killers of your children, you blame yourself and, in so doing, become a saint. So, in our way, we are helping you with your saintliness?”
“You taunt an uneducated man whose hands are bound after you have tortured him?” the Asian woman said from her cell. “You are a very small man, Mr. Sholokoff.”
“Frank, take care of that,” Sholokoff said.
“Sir?” Frank said.
“Ms. Ling. Take care of her.”
“The only way to shut her up is to pour concrete in her mouth,” Frank said.
“Then do it,” Sholokoff said.
“Sir, we need to finish with the greaser one way or another,” Frank said.
“All I get from you are admonitions but never results. In the last forty-eight hours, we have had in our possession a defense contractor, a notorious kidnapper and coyote, and an ex-CIA operative who flew with Air America. We get nothing out of any of them. Are you successful only with a worthless man like Cody Daniels? You certainly seemed to rise to the occasion when you turned him into a living passion play. I wonder about you, Frank.”
“That was your doing, sir,” Frank said. He was standing behind Sholokoff, wearing tight leather gloves like a race-car driver might wear, his flat stomach exposed by his scissored-off T-shirt.
Sholokoff turned in his chair. “You need to explain yourself, Frank.”
“We shouldn’t have been wasting our time on the minister. It wasn’t me that had the hard-on about him. That’s all I was saying.”
Sholokoff puffed on his cigarette, his eyes warm and shiny, exhaling the smoke from his nostrils. He put out the cigarette under his foot, then picked up the butt and handed it to one of his men to dispose of. “Frank, tell me this. Why is it that Sheriff Holland is not responding to our calls? Even after we sent part of Temple Dowling to his office. Why is a man like Holland, a personal friend of Ms. Ling, seemingly detached from her fate?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Frank said.
“Could it be that he no longer has Noie Barnum in his possession? Or that he’s closer to us now than he was this morning?”
“You mean he’s coming here?” Frank said.
“Put Antonio back in his cell. I have to use the bathroom,” Sholokoff said. “While I’m gone, I want you to devise something special for Ms. Ling. I also don’t want to have to correct you again. Do you understand me, Frank?”
“Loud and clear, Mr. S.,” Frank said.
“ Senor, you got a minute for me?” Krill said from the floor, staring through the legs of the men who surrounded him.
“You want me to be your friend now, Antonio? To take you out of all this unhappiness?” Sholokoff said.
“Yes, sir. I am very tired of it.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“I don’t want to be here when the next bad thing happens.”
“With Ms. Ling?”
“No, with you and your friends, senor.”
“I think you have become delusional, my Hispanic friend.”
“You didn’t see what Negrito just did. Negrito was living inside my skin, but he just left my body and went up on the ceiling. Now he’s standing right behind you. You are in deep shit, senor.”
“Who’s Negrito?” Sholokoff asked Frank.
“The guy who’s gonna fuck you with a garden rake,” Krill said. Then he began laughing on the floor, his long hair hanging in a sweaty web over his face.
Sholokoff seemed more bemused than offended and went upstairs to use the bathroom. Two men picked Krill up by his arms and carried him to his cell and threw him inside. “Hey, Frank,” one of them said. “There’re scratches around the keyhole.”
“What?” Frank said.
“His food bowl is here, but there’s no utensil. The guy must have been using a fork on the lock.”
“Somebody gave the greaser a fork?”
“Frank, I gave him a spoon,” said the man who had brought Krill his food.
“Then where is it?”
“I don’t know, man.”
“We should tell Mr. Sholokoff,” said the man who had discovered the scratches.
“Shut up. Both you guys shut up,” Frank said. H
e stepped inside the cell and kicked Krill in the base of the spine. “Where’s the spoon, greaseball?”
“That hurts, boss. It makes my mind go blank,” Krill said. “Somebody gave me a spoon? I must have lost it. I am very sorry.”
“Frank,” one of the other men whispered.
“What?”
“Mr. Sholokoff just flushed the toilet.”
Jack Collins had led the way in a Ford Explorer through a winding series of low-topped white hills on which no grass or trees or even scrub brush grew. The road through the hills was narrow and rock-strewn and dusty, the wind as hot as a blowtorch, smelling of creosote and alkali and dry stone under the layer of blue-black clouds that gave no rain.
He had seen white hills like these only one other time in his life, when he was marching with a column of marines in the same kind of dust and heat through terrain that was more like Central Africa than the Korean peninsula. The marines wore utilities that were stiff with salt, the armpits dark with sweat, the backs of their necks tanned and oily and glistening under the rims of their steel pots, their boots gray with dust. In the midst of it all, the ambulances and six-bys and tanks and towed field pieces kept grinding endlessly up the road, the dust from their wheels blowing back into the faces of the men. Ahead, Hackberry could see the white hills that made him think of giant wind-scrubbed, calcified slugs on which no vegetation grew and whose sides were sometimes pocked with caves in which the Japanese prior to World War II had installed railroad tracks and mobile howitzers.
That was the day Hackberry had an epiphany about death that had always remained with him and that he called upon whenever he was afraid. He had reached a point of exhaustion and dehydration that had taken him past the edges of endurance into personal surrender, a calm letting go of his fatigue and the blisters inside his boots and the sweat crawling down his sides and the fear that at any moment he would hear the popping of small-arms fire in the hills. When the column fell out, he looked at the red haze of dust floating across the sun and on the hills and on a long flat plateau dotted with freshly turned earth that resembled anthills, and he wondered why any of it should be of any concern to him or his comrades or even to the nations that warred over it. In a short span of time, nothing that happened here would be of any significance to anyone. Ultimately, every cloak rolled in blood would be used as fuel for flames, and the sun would continue to shine and the rain to fall upon both the just and the unjust, and this piece of worthless land would remain exactly what it was, a worthless piece of land of no importance to anyone except those who lost their lives because of it.
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