Rain Gods

by James Lee Burke

  “While I’m dealing with this guy, these two characters in a Trans Am are hassling Vikki. I don’t have trouble in my place, but suddenly, I got it all at one time, you follow me now? Drunks and hard cases don’t mess with my employees, Vikki in particular. Everybody knows that. ‘Orchestrated,’ that was the word I was looking for. It was like it was all orchestrated.”

  “You get a license number on any of these guys?” Hackberry said.

  “No.”

  Hackberry placed his business card on the glass counter. “Call us if you hear from Vikki or if you see any of these guys again,” he said.

  “What’s happened to Vikki? You ain’t told me squat,” Junior said.

  “We don’t know where she is. As far as we know, you’re the last person to have seen her,” Hackberry said.

  Junior Vogel let out his breath, the heel of his hand pressed to his head. “I looked out the window and the guy with the milk was ahead of her. The two creeps in the Trans Am got some gas and followed in the same direction. I watched it happen and didn’t do anything.”

  THE SKY WAS gray with dust as they drove back down the state highway toward town, Pam Tibbs behind the wheel.

  “I talked to my cousin Billy Bob Holland,” Hackberry said. “He’s a former Texas Ranger and practices law in western Montana. He’s known Pete Flores since he was a little boy. He says Pete was the best little boy he ever knew. He also says he was the smartest.”

  “These days it’s not hard for a good kid to get in trouble.”

  “Billy Bob says he’d bet his life this boy is innocent of any wrongdoing, at least of the kind we’re talking about.”

  “My father was in Vietnam. He was psychotic when he came home. He hanged himself in a jail cell.” Pam’s eyes were straight ahead, her hands in the ten-two position on the steering wheel, her expression as empty as a wood carving.

  “Pull on the shoulder,” Hackberry said.

  “What for?”

  “That road bull is waving at us,” he replied.

  The inmates were from a contract prison and wore orange jumpsuits. They were strung out in a long line on the swale, picking up litter and stuffing it into vinyl bags they tied and left on the shoulder. A green bus with steel mesh on the windows was parked up ahead. So was a flatbed diesel truck with a horse trailer anchored to the back bumper. One mounted gunbull was at the back and another at the head of the line working along the road. An unarmed man in a gray uniform with red piping on the collar and pockets stood on the swale, waiting for the cruiser. He wore yellow-tinted aviator shades and an elegant white straw cowboy hat. His uniform was flecked with chaff blowing off the hard pan. His neck and face were deeply lined, like the skin on a turtle. Neither Hackberry nor Pam Tibbs knew him.

  “What’s going on, Cap?” Hackberry said, getting out of the cruiser.

  “See that Hispanic boy over yonder with Gothic-letter tats all over him?” A polished brass tag on the captain’s pocket said RICKER.

  “Yes, sir?” Hack said.

  “He killed a bar owner with a knife ’cause the bar owner wouldn’t return the money this kid lost in the rubber machine. Guess what he just found back there in the rocks? I almost downloaded in my britches when he handed it to me.”

  “What’d he find?” Hackberry said.

  The captain removed a stainless-steel revolver from his pants pocket. “It’s an Airweight thirty-eight, a five-rounder. Two caps already popped. Don’t worry. The hammer is sitting on a spent casing.”

  Hackberry removed a ballpoint from his shirt pocket and put it through the trigger guard and removed the revolver from Ricker’s hand. Pam Tibbs got a Ziploc bag from the cruiser and placed the revolver inside it.

  “I shouldn’t have handled it?” Ricker said.

  “You did all the right things. I appreciate your waving us down,” Hackberry said.

  “That ain’t all of it. Better take a look over here,” Ricker said. He walked ahead and pointed at a grassy spot where, during the rainy season, water ran off the road into the swale. “I suspect somebody is a pint or two down right now.”

  Over a wide area, the grass was stippled with blood, and in places the blood had pooled and dried on top of the dirt. Pam Tibbs squatted down and looked at the grass and the broken blades and the depressions in it and the areas where the blood smears had taken on the characteristics of a body drag. She stood up and walked back toward the cruiser, in the direction of the truck stop and diner, and squatted down again. “I’d say there were two vehicles here, Sheriff,” she said. “My guess is the victim was shot about here, close to vehicle one, then was dragged, or dragged himself, on up to vehicle two. But why would the shooter throw away the weapon?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t his. Or rather, it wasn’t hers,” Hackberry said.

  “You want to print me and that Hispanic boy to exclude us when you dust the gun?” Ricker said.

  “Yep. And we need to wrap the crime scene. Some feds will probably be talking to you later.”

  “What the hell the feds want with me?”

  “You heard about all those Asian women who were murdered?”

  “That’s what this is about? I got enough grief, Sheriff.”

  “That makes two of us. Welcome to the New American Empire, Cap.”

  5

  AS HE LAY in a bed with a view of a chicken yard, a railed pen with six goats inside it, and a bladeless, rusted slip of a windmill strung with dead brush blown from a field of weeds, the man whose nickname was Preacher could not get the woman out of his mind, nor the scent of her fear and sweat and perfume while he wrestled with her on the ground, nor the expression on her face when she fired the .38 round through the top of his foot, exploding a jet of blood from the sole of his shoe. Her expression hadn’t been one of shock or pity, as Preacher would have expected; it had been one of triumph.

  No, that wasn’t it, either. What he had seen in her face was loathing and disgust. She had fried his eyes with wasp spray, taken his weapon, shot him at close quarters, crushed his cell phone with her tire, and left him to bleed out like a piece of roadkill. She had also taken the time to call him bubba and inform him he had gotten off easy. She had done all this to a man considered by some, in terms of potential, to be one notch below the scourge of God.

  The sheaf of bandages and tape on his calf smelled of medicinal salve and dried blood, but the pain pills he had eaten and the veterinarian’s injection had numbed the nerves down to the ankle. The plaster cast on his foot was another matter. It felt like wet cement on his skin, and the heat and sweat and friction it generated turned his wound into an aching misery. Twenty minutes ago, the electric power had failed and the fan on the table by his bed had died. Now he could feel the heat and humidity intensifying in the walls, the tin roof expanding, pinging like a banjo string.

  “Put some more ice on my foot,” he said to Jesus, the Hispanic man who owned the house.

  “It melted.”

  “Did you call the power company?”

  “We don’t got a phone, boss. When it gets hot like this, we got brownouts. After the day gets cooler, the electricity goes back on.”

  Preacher pressed the back of his head into the pillow and stared at the ceiling. The room was sweltering, and he could smell a growing stench from inside the hospital gown he had worn for two days. When he closed his eyes, he saw the girl’s face again, and it filled him with both desire and resentment for the sexual passion she excited in him. Hugo had brought him his .45 auto. It was a 1911 model—simple in design, always dependable, effective in ways most people couldn’t imagine. Preacher ran his hand along the bottom of his mattress and felt the hardness of the .45’s frame. He thought of the girl, her deep-set eyes and her chestnut hair that was curled at the tips, and the way her tongue and teeth looked when she opened her mouth. He held the last image in his mind for a long time. “Tell your wife to get a sponge and wash me,” he said.

  “I can bathe you.”

  “I look like a maricón to you?” Preacher said, grinning.

  “I’ll ask her, boss.”

  “Don’t ask. Tell her.
Hugo paid you enough money, didn’t he? For you and your family and the veterinarian who left me with all this pain? Y’all got paid plenty, didn’t you, Jesus? Or do you need more?”

  “It’s bastante.”

  “Hugo gave you bastante to take care of the gringo. ‘Bastante’ means ‘enough,’ doesn’t it? How should I take that? Enough to do what? Sell me out? Maybe tell your priest about me?” Preacher’s eyes became hazy and amused.

  Jesus’s hair was as black and shiny as paint, barbered like a matador’s, his skin pale, his hands small and his features frail, like those of a consumptive Spanish poet. He was not over thirty, but his daughter was at least ten and his overweight wife could have been his mother. Go figure, Preacher thought.

  THAT EVENING THE power was back on, but Preacher could not shake either his funk or his misgivings about his environment and his caretakers. “Your name is a form of irreverence,” he said to Jesus.

  “Is a what?”

  “Try to speak in complete sentences. Don’t leave the subject out of your sentences. ‘Is’ is a verb, not a noun. Your parents gave you the Lord’s name, but you take money to hide a gringo and break the laws of your country.”

  “I got to do what I got to do, boss.”

  “Take me outside. Don’t put me downwind of those goats, either.”

  Jesus set up the collapsible wheelchair by the bedside and worked Preacher into the seat, then wheeled him out the front door into the lee of the house, Preacher’s .45 resting on his lap. The view to the south was magnificent. The sky was lavender, the desert wastes bound not by earthy borders but by the arbitrary definitions of light and shadow. Few people would have found such a vista spiritually comforting, but Preacher did. The dry riverbeds were prehistoric, the flumes strewn with rocks the color of wizened apples and plums and apricots. Preacher saw wood that rain and wind and heat had carved and reshaped and hardened into bleached objects that could be mistaken for dinosaur bone. The desert was immutable, as encompassing as a deity, serene in its own magnitude, stretching into the past all the way back to Eden, a testimony to the predictability and design in all creation, a mistress beckoning to those who were unafraid to enter and conquer and use her.

  “You ever hear of Herbert Spencer?” Preacher said.

  “Who?” Jesus said.

  “That’s what I thought. Ever hear of Charles Darwin?”

  “Claro que sí.”

  “It was Herbert Spencer who understood how society worked, not Darwin. Darwin wasn’t a sociologist or philosopher. Can you relate to that?”

  “Whatever you say, boss.”

  “Why are you grinning?”

  “I thought you was making a joke.”

  “You think I need you to agree with me?”

  “No, boss.”

  “Because if you did, that would be an insult. But you’re not that kind of man, right?”

  Jesus lowered his head and folded his arms, his face drawn with fatigue and his inability to deal with Preacher’s convoluted rhetoric. A purple haze was settling on the mesas and vast wasteland that lay to the south, the dust rising off the hardpan, the creosote brush darkening inside the gloom. Not far away, Jesus saw a coyote digging hard into a gopher’s burrow, flinging the dirt backward with its nails, darting its muzzle into the hole.

  “You got any family, people who can help take care of you, boss?” Jesus said.

  It was a question he shouldn’t have asked. Preacher lifted his head the way a fish might when feeding on the surface of a lake. There was an unexpected and unreadable bead of light in his eyes, like a damp kitchen match flaring on the striker. “I look like a man with no family?”

  “I thought maybe there was somebody you wanted me to call.”

  “A man inseminates a woman. The woman squeezes the kid out of her womb. So now we’ve got a father and a mother and a child. That’s a family. You’re saying I’m different somehow?”

  “I didn’t mean nothing, boss.”

  “Go back inside.”

  “When it’s cool, the mosquitoes come out. They’ll pick you up and carry you off, boss.”

  Preacher’s expression seemed to go out of joint.

  “I got you, boss. When you’re ready to eat, my little girl made some soup and tortillas special for you,” Jesus said.

  Jesus went through the back door, not speaking until he was well inside the house. Preacher watched the coyote dip a gopher out of the hole and run heavily and stiff-necked across the hardpan, the gopher flopping from its jaws. Jesus’s wife came to the window and stared at Preacher’s silhouette, her fist pressed to her mouth. Her husband pulled her away and closed the curtain, even though the house was superheated by the propane cooking stove in the kitchen.

  In the morning a windburned man with an orange beard and blue tats on his upper arms delivered a compact car for Preacher’s use and then left with a companion in a second vehicle. Jesus’s little girl brought Preacher his lunch to him on a tray. She set it on his lap but did not go away.

  “My pants are on the chair. Take a half dollar out of the pocket,” he said.

  The girl took two quarters from his trousers and closed her palm on them. Her face was oval and brown, like that of her mother, her hair dark brown, a blue ribbon tied in it. “You ain’t got no family?” she asked.

  “You ask too many questions for a person your age. Somebody should give you a grammar book, too.”

  “I’m sorry you was shot.”

  Preacher’s eyes lifted from the girl’s face to the kitchen, where Jesus and his wife were washing dishes in a pan of greasy water, their backs to Preacher. “I was in a car accident. Nobody shot me,” he said.

  She touched the cast with the ends of her fingers. “We got ice now. I’ll put it on your foot,” she said.

  So Jesus had opened his mouth in front of his wife and daughter, Preacher thought. So the little girl could tell all her friends a gringo with two bullet holes in him was paying money to stay at their house.

  What to do? he asked himself, staring at the ceiling.

  Late that afternoon he had a feverish dream. He was firing a Thompson submachine gun, the stock and cylindrical magazine turned sideways so the recoil would jerk the barrel horizontally rather than upward, directing the angle of fire parallel to the ground rather than above the shapes he saw in the darkness.

  He awoke abruptly into the warm yellow glare of the room and wasn’t sure where he was. He could hear flies buzzing and a goat’s bell tinkling and smell the odor of water that had gone sour in a cattle pond. He picked up a damp cloth from a bowl on his nightstand and wiped his face with it. He sat on the side of the mattress, the blood draining down into his foot, waiting for the images in his dream to leave his mind.

  Through the kitchen doorway he could see Jesus and his wife and little girl eating at their kitchen table. They were eating tortillas they’d rolled pickled vegetables inside, their faces leaning over their bowls, crumbs falling from their mouths. They made him think of Indians from an earlier era eating inside a cave.

  Why’d Jesus have to blab in front of the kid? Preacher wondered. Maybe he plans to blab to a much wider audience anyway, maybe to the jefe and his khaki-clad half-breed dirtbags down at the jail.

  Preacher could feel the coldness of the .45’s frame protruding from under the mattress. His crutches were propped against a wood chair in the corner. Through the window he could see the tan compact Hugo had ordered delivered for his use.

  The veterinarian was coming back that evening. The veterinarian and Jesus and his wife and the little girl would all be in the house at one time.

  This crap was on Hugo Cistranos, not him, Preacher thought. Just like the gig behind the stucco church. It was Hugo who’d blown it. Preacher hadn’t invented how the world worked. The coyote’s ability to dig the gopher out of its burrow was hardwired into the coyote’s brain. A hundred-million-year-old floodplain disappearing into infinity contained only one form of meaningful artifact: the mineralized bones of all the mammals, reptiles, and birds that had done whatever was necessary in order to survive. If anyone doubted that,
he needed only to sink the steel bucket on a backhoe into one of those ancient riverbeds that looked like calcified putty in the sunset.

  Jesus brought Preacher his supper at dusk.

  “What time is the vet going to be here?” Preacher asked.

  “No is vet. Es médico, boss. He gonna be here soon.”