Rain Gods

by James Lee Burke

  “You’re saying you can’t control this guy? I’m supposed to give you twenty-five percent of two businesses so I can be safe from a guy you can’t control?”

  “You’re not giving me anything. You owe me over a hundred thou. I owe that to other people. If you don’t pay the vig, the vig falls on me. I don’t pay other people’s vig, Nick.”

  “Was your driver at my club last night?”

  “How would I know?”

  “A guy answering his description got thrown out. He was shooting off his mouth with my manager. He claimed he was going to be working there. You want the sit-down or not? You called this guy Collins a religious nut. If I get to him first, I’ll tell him that.”

  There was a long pause. “Maybe your wife gave you a blow job this morning and convinced you you’re not a pitiful putz. The truth is otherwise, Nick. You’re still a pitiful putz. But I’ll call Preacher. And I’ll also have those transfers of title rewritten. Forget twenty-five percent. The new partnership will be fifty-fifty. Give me some shit and it will go to sixty-forty. Guess who will get the forty.”

  Hugo hung up.

  “Got everything worked out?” the driver of the Chrysler said through the window.

  PETE AND VIKKI got exactly sixteen miles up a dark highway when the car Pete’s cousin had sold him on credit dropped the crankshaft on the asphalt, sparks grinding under the frame as the car slid sideways into soil that exploded around them like soft chalk.

  When Pete called, the cousin told him the car came with no guarantees and the cousin’s car lot did not have a complaint window for people with buyer’s remorse. He also indicated he and his wife were leaving with the kids early in the morning for a week of rest and relaxation in Orlando.

  Vikki and Pete removed two suitcases and Vikki’s guitar and a bag of groceries from the car and stood by the roadside, thumbs out. A tractor-trailer rimmed with lights roared past them, then a mobile home and a prison bus and a gas-guzzler packed with Mexican drunks, the top half of the car cut off with an acetylene torch. The next vehicle was an ambulance, followed by a sheriff’s cruiser, both of them with sirens on.

  Two minutes later, a second cruiser appeared far down the road, its flasher rippling, its siren off. It came steadily out of the south, a bank of low mountains behind it, the stars vaporous and hot against a blue-black sky. The cruiser seemed to slow, perhaps to forty or forty-five miles per hour, gliding past them, the driver holding a microphone to his mouth, his face turned fully on them.

  “He’s calling us in,” Pete said.

  “Maybe he’s sending a wrecker,” Vikki said.

  “No, he’s bad news.” Pete widened his eyes and wiped at his mouth. “I told you, he’s stopping.”

  The cruiser pulled to the right shoulder and remained stationary, its front wheels cut back toward the center stripe, the interior light on.

  “What’s he doing?” Vikki said.

  “He’s probably got a description of us on his clipboard. Yep, here he comes.”

  They stared numbly into the cruiser’s approaching headlights, their eyes watering, their hearts beating. The air seemed clotted with dust and bugs and gnats, the roadway still warm from the sunset, smelling of oil and rubber. Then, for no apparent reason, the cruiser made a U-turn and headed north again, its weight sinking on the back springs.

  “He’ll be back. We have to get off the highway,” Pete said.

  They crossed to the other side of the asphalt and began walking, glancing back over their shoulders, their abandoned car with all their household possessions dropping behind them into the darkness. A half hour later, a black man wearing strap overalls with no shirt stopped and said he was headed to his home, seventy miles southwest. “That’s pert’ exactly where we’re going,” Pete said.

  They paid a week’s advance rent, twenty dollars per day, at a motel on a stretch of side road that resembled a Hollywood re-creation of Highway 66 during the 1950s: a pink plaster-of-Paris archway over the road, painted with roses; a diner shaped like an Airstream trailer with a tin facsimile of a rocket on top; a circular building made to look like a bulging cheeseburger with service windows; a drive-in movie theater and a miniature golf course blown with trash and tumbleweed, the empty marquee patterned with birdshot; a red-green-and-purple neon war bonnet high up on the log facade of a beer joint and steak house; three Cadillac car bodies buried seemingly nose-first in the earth, their fins slicing the wind.

  “This is a pretty neat place, if you ask me,” Pete said, sitting on the side of the bed, looking through the side window at the landscape. He was barefoot and shirtless, and in the soft light of morning, the skin along his shoulder and one side of his back had the texture of lampshade material that has been wrinkled by intense heat.

  “Pete, what are we going to do? We don’t have a car, we’re almost broke, and cops are probably looking for us all over Texas,” Vikki said.

  “We’ve done all right so far, haven’t we?” Pete began talking about his friend Billy Bob Holland, a former Texas Ranger who had a law practice in western Montana. “Billy Bob will he’p us out. When I was little, my mother used to bring home men, usually late at night. Most of them were pretty worthless. This one guy was more worthless than all the rest put together and then some. One night he smacked both me and my mom around. When Billy Bob found out about it, he rode his horse into the beer joint and threw a rope on the guy and drug him out the front door into the parking lot. Then he kicked him into next week.”

  “Your lawyer friend can’t help a fugitive. All he can do is surrender you.”

  “Billy Bob wouldn’t do that.”

  “We have to get your disability check.”

  “That’s kind of a problem, isn’t it?” Pete stood up and propped one arm against the wall, gazing out the window, his upper torso shaped like a V. “That check should have come yesterday. It’s just sitting there in the box. The government always gets it there on the same date.”

  “I can ask Junior to get it and send it to us,” she said.

  “Junior doesn’t quite look upon me as a member of his fan club.”

  Vikki was sitting at the small desk by the television set. She stared emptily at the decrepit state of their room—the water-stained wallpaper, the air-conditioning unit that rattled in the window frame, the bedspread that she feared to touch, the shower stall blooming with mold. “There’s another way,” she said.

  “To turn ourselves in?”

  “We haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “I tried it already. That one won’t flush,” he said.

  “You tried to turn us in?”

  “I called a government eight hundred number. They switched me around to a bunch of different offices and finally to a guy with Immigration and Customs. He said his name was Clawson.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It didn’t go too well. He said he wanted to meet me, like somehow all this was between him and me and we were buds or something. He had a voice like a robot. You know what’s going on when people talk like robots? They don’t want you to know what they’re thinking.”

  “What’d you tell him, Pete?”

  “That I was by the church when the shooting started. I told him the guy who was paying me three hundred dollars to drive the truck was named Hugo. I told him I feel like a damn coward for running away while all those women were being killed. He said I needed to come in and make a statement and I’d be protected. Then he said, ‘Is Ms. Gaddis with you? We can he’p her, too.’

  “I said, ‘She’s not a part of this.’ He says, ‘We know about the characters at the truck stop, Pete. We think they either killed her or she put a hole in one of them. Maybe she’s dead and lying unburied someplace. You need to do the right thing, soldier.’”

  Pete sat back down on the bed and began drawing his shirt up one arm, the network of muscles in his back tightening like whipcord.

  “What’d you say?”

  “I told him to kiss my ass. When people try to make you feel guilty, it’s because they want to install dials on you. It also means they’re gonna sell you down the river the
first chance they get.”

  “Can the FBI trace a cell phone call?” she asked.

  “They can locate the tower it bounces off of. Why?”

  “I’m going to call Junior.”

  “I think that’s a bad idea. Junior makes a lot of noise, but Junior looks after Junior.”

  “You only get thirty percent disability. It’s hardly enough to pay the rent. What are we supposed to do? This all started in a bar where you were drinking with idiots who soak their brains in mescal. For three hundred dollars, you put our lives in the hands of people who are morally insane.”

  She saw the injury in his face. She turned away, her eyes closed, tears squeezing onto her eyelashes. Then, in her inability to control even the tear ducts in her face, she began hammering the tops of her thighs with her fists.

  THAT AFTERNOON, WHILE Pete slept, Vikki walked down the road and used the pay phone to call Junior collect at the diner. She told him about the disability check and about their financial desperation. She also told him that the man Junior had sold milk to had tried to kidnap and possibly kill her.

  “Maybe that’s more information than I need to know,” he said.

  “Are you serious? That guy was in your diner. A guy with an orange beard was there, too. I think he was part of it.”

  “The check’s at the mailbox in front of that shack y’all were living in?” Junior said.

  “You know where we were living. Stop pretending.”

  “The sheriff was here. So were some federal people. They thought maybe you were dead.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Did you shoot that guy who came here to buy milk?”

  “Are you going to help us or not?”

  “Isn’t this called aiding and abetting or something?”

  “You are really pissing me off, Junior.”

  “Give me your address.”

  She hesitated.

  “Think I’m gonna turn you in?” he said.

  She gave him the address of the motel, the name of the town, and the zip code. With each word she spoke, she felt like she was taking off a piece of armor.

  After she hung up, she went to the bar and asked the bartender for a glass of water. The combination steak house and beer joint was a spacious place, cool and dark, with big electric floor fans humming away, the heads of stuffed animals mounted on the debarked and polished log walls. “I put some ice and a lime slice in it,” the bartender said.

  “Thank you,” she replied.

  “You look kind of tuckered out. You visiting here’bouts?”

  She gulped from the iced drink and blew out her breath. “No, I’m a Hollywood actress on location. You need a waitress?”

  PAM TIBBS WALKED from the dispatcher’s cage into Hackberry’s office, tapping with one knuckle on the doorjamb as she entered.

  “What is it?” Hackberry said, looking up from some photos in a manila folder.

  “There’s a disturbance at Junior’s diner.”

  “Send Felix or R.C.”

  “The disturbance is with that ICE agent, Clawson.”

  Hackberry made a sucking sound with his teeth.

  “I’ll take it,” Pam said.

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Are those the photos of the Thai women?” she said. When he didn’t answer, she said, “Why are you looking at those, Hack? Say a prayer for those poor women and stop sticking pins in yourself.”

  “Some of them are wearing dark clothes. Some of them are wearing what were probably the best clothes they owned. They weren’t dressed for hot country. They thought they were going somewhere else. Nothing at that crime scene makes sense.”

  Pam Tibbs gazed at the street and at the shadows of clouds moving across the cinder-block and stucco buildings and broken sidewalks. She heard Hackberry getting up from his chair.

  “Is Clawson still at the diner?” he asked.

  “What do you think?” she replied.

  It took them only ten minutes to get to the diner, the flasher bar rippling, the siren off. Isaac Clawson’s motor pool vehicle was parked between the diner and the nightclub next door, both rear doors open. Junior was handcuffed in the backseat, wrists behind him, while Clawson stood outside the vehicle, talking into a cell phone.

  “Hack?” she said.

  “Would you give it a rest?”

  She pulled up behind Clawson’s vehicle and turned off the engine. But she didn’t open the door. “That guy called you a sonofabitch. He’ll never do that in my presence again,” she said.

  Hackberry put his hat back on and got out on the gravel and walked toward Isaac Clawson. To the south, he could see heat waves rippling off the hardpan, dust devils spinning in the wind, the distant ridge of mountains etched against an immaculate blue sky. He wore a long-sleeve cotton shirt snap-buttoned at the wrists, which was his custom at the office, regardless of the season, and he felt loops of moisture already forming under his armpits.

  “What’s the problem?” he said to the ICE agent.

  “There is no problem,” Clawson replied.

  “How about it, Junior?” Hackberry said.

  Junior wore white trousers and a white T-shirt and still had a kitchen apron on. The sideburns trimmed in a flare on his cheeks were sparkling with sweat. “He thinks I know where Vikki Gaddis is.”

  “Do you?” Hackberry asked.

  “I run a diner. I don’t monitor the lives of kids who cain’t stay out of trouble.”

  “Everybody tells me you had more than an employer’s interest in Vikki,” Clawson said. “She’s broke and on the run and has no family. I think you’re the first person she would come to for help. You want to see her dead? The best way to accomplish that is to keep stonewalling us.”

  “I don’t like your sexual suggestions. I’m a family man. You watch your mouth,” Junior said.

  “Could I speak to you a moment, Agent Clawson?” Hackberry said.

  “What you can do is butt out,” Clawson replied.

  “How about a little professional courtesy?” Pam Tibbs said.

  Clawson looked at her as though noticing her for the first time. “Excuse me?”

  “Our department is working in cooperation with yours, right?” she said.

  “And?” Clawson said.

  Pam looked away and hooked her thumbs in her gun belt, her mouth a tight seam, her eyes neutral. Hackberry walked into the shade, removing his hat, blotting his forehead on his sleeve. Clawson brushed at his nose, then followed. “All right, say it,” he said.

  “You taking Junior in?” Hackberry said.

  “I think he’s lying. What would you do?”

  “I’d give him the benefit of the doubt, at least for the time being.”

  “Benefit of the doubt? You found nine dead women and girls in your county, and you’re giving a man who may be an accomplice to fugitive flight the benefit of the doubt? It’s going to take me a minute or two to process that.”

  “Humiliating a man like Junior Vogel in front of his customers and employees is not going to get you what you want. Back off a little bit. I’ll come back and talk to him later. Or you can come back and we’ll talk to him together. He’s not a bad guy.”

  “You seem to have a long history in the art of compromise, Sheriff Holland. I accessed your file at the Department of Veterans Affairs.”

  “Really? Why would you do that, sir?”

  “You were a POW in North Korea. You gave information to the enemy. You were put in one of the progressive camps for POWs who cooperated with the enemy.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “It is? I had a different impression.”

  “I spent six weeks in a hole in the ground in wintertime under a sewer grate that was manufactured in Ohio. I knew its place of origin because I could see the lettering embossed on the iron surface. I could see the lettering because every evening a couple of guards urinated through the grate and washed the lettering clean of mud. I spent those weeks under the grate with only a steel pot to relieve myself in. I also saw my best friends machine-gunned to death and their bodies thrown into an open latrine. However, I don’t know if the material you f
ound at the VA contained those particular details. Did you come across that kind of detail in your research, sir?”

  Clawson looked at his watch. “I’ve had about all of this I can take,” he said. “It’s against my better judgment, but I’m going to kick your man loose. I’ll be back. You can count on it.”

  “Turn around, you pompous motherfucker,” Pam Tibbs said.

  “Say that again?” Clawson said.

  “You learn some manners or you’re going to wish you were cleaning chamber pots in Afghanistan,” Pam said.