Rain Gods

by James Lee Burke

  Whatever was bothering them, Hackberry did not appreciate being treated as a presumption or an authority figure with whom they had to reconcile their behavior. He set the groceries and the pizza boxes on the table. “What did I miss out on?”

  “Somebody was trying to take a shot at us,” Pete said.

  “Where?”

  “Up yonder from your north pasture. On the other side of a hill. There’s a church house by a stream.”

  “You said ‘trying.’ You saw the shooter?”

  “We saw the laser sight,” Pete said.

  “What were y’all doing at the church?”

  “Taking a walk,” Vikki said.

  “Y’all just strolled on up the road?”

  “That about says it,” Pete replied.

  “Even though I said stick close by the house?”

  “We were watching some people get baptized. We were sitting under a willow tree. Vikki saw the red dot on my face and on her hand, then I saw it on the ground,” Pete said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “How do you mistake something like that?” Pete said.

  “Why wouldn’t the shooter fire?”

  “Maybe he was afraid of hitting one of the black people,” Pete said.

  “The bunch we’re dealing with doesn’t have those kinds of reservations,” Hackberry said.

  “You think we made this up?” Vikki said. “You think we want to be here?”

  Hackberry went to the sink and washed his hands, lathering his skin well up on his arms, rinsing them a long time, drying the water with two squares of thick paper towel, his back turned to his guests so they could not see his expression. When he turned around again, his neutral demeanor was back in place. His gaze dropped to Pete’s pants legs. “You ran across the creek?” he said.

  “Yes, sir. Then on inside the church house. You could say we were bagging ass.”

  “You think it was Jack Collins?”

  “No,” Vikki said. “He’s done with us.”

  “How do you know what’s in the head of a lunatic?” Hackberry said.

  “Collins let us live, so now he feels he’s stronger than we are. He won’t test himself again,” she said. “He tried to give me money. I spit on his money and I spit on him. He’s not a lunatic. Everything he does is about pride. He won’t risk losing it again.”

  “So who was the guy with the laser sight?” Hackberry said.

  “It’s got to be Hugo Cistranos,” Pete said.

  “I think you’re right,” Hackberry said. He opened the top on one of the boxed pizzas. “You spat on Jack Collins?”

  “You think that’s funny?” she said.

  “No, I did the same. Maybe he’s getting used to it,” he said.

  “Where you going, Sheriff?” Pete said.

  “To make a phone call.” Hackberry walked through the hallway toward the small room in back that he used as a home office. He heard footsteps behind him.

  “I apologize for my rudeness,” Vikki said. “You’ve been very kind to us. My father was a police officer. I’m aware of the professional risk you’re taking on our behalf.”

  Better hang on to this one, Pete, Hackberry thought. He sat behind his desk and called Maydeen at the department and told her to put a cruiser on his house. Then he left messages at both of the phone numbers he had for Ethan Riser. Through the side window, he had a fine view of his south pasture. His quarter horses and the windmill and poplar trees were silhouetted against the purple coloring in the west like dimly backlit components in an ink wash. But the fading of the light, the gray aura that seemed to rise from the grass, gave him a sense of terminus that was like a knife blade in his chest. If the two young people had not been staying with him, he would have driven to town and visited his wife’s grave, regardless of the hour.

  In some ways, Vikki Gaddis and Pam Tibbs reminded him of Rie. Rie’s detractors had called her a Communist and jailed her and her friends and turned a blind eye to the acts of violence done to them inside and outside of jail, but never once did she allow herself to be afraid.

  Hackberry turned off his desk lamp and looked through the window into the darkness that seemed to be spreading across the land. Was it a suggestion of the Great Shade that we all feared? he wondered. Or a visual harbinger of what some called end-times, that morbid apocalyptical obsession of fanatics who seemed to delight in the possibility of the world’s destruction?

  But the greater question, the one that sank his heart, was whether or not he would ever see his wife again, on the other side, reaching through the light to take his hand and ease him across.

  The phone made his face jerk. It was Ethan Riser.

  “I’m returning your call. What’s up?” Riser said.

  “Hugo Cistranos may be in my neighborhood,” Hackberry said. “What kind of leash did you have on this guy?”

  “You’re asking me if he’s under surveillance?”

  “I know you have him tapped. Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. Somebody saw him?”

  “We may have a guy with a laser sight in the neighborhood, but I can’t confirm that. Have you gotten any more feedback on those license numbers that may belong to Jack Collins?”

  “I’m at my granddaughter’s wedding reception right now. I returned your call as a professional courtesy. Either tell me specifically what is on your mind or call me back during business hours on Monday.”

  “I need your assurances about Pete Flores.”

  “In regard to what?”

  “If I bring him in, you don’t stuff him into the wood chipper.”

  “We don’t stuff people in wood chippers.”

  “Sell that stuff to somebody else.” The line was silent. Hackberry felt a rush of blood in his head that made him dizzy. He swallowed until his mouth was dry again and waited for the tautness to go out of his throat before he spoke. “Flores didn’t see the mass killing. All he can do is put Cistranos at the scene. You already know Cistranos is dirty on the mass homicide. You must have wiretap evidence by this time. You must have information from CIs. Maybe you’ve already flipped Arthur Rooney. I think the only reason you haven’t picked up Cistranos is he’s bait. You don’t need the kid, do you?”

  “If you’re in contact with Pete Flores, you tell him he’d better get his ass into an FBI office.”

  “That kid got fried in a tank because he believed in his country. You think he belongs in a federal prison or a place like Huntsville?”

  “I’d like to say it’s been good talking to you. But instead, I think I’ll just say goodbye.”

  “Don’t blow me off, Agent Riser. You guys are determined to hang Josef Sholokoff from a meat hook, and you don’t care how you get him there.”

  But Hackberry was already talking to a dead connection.

  EARLY SUNDAY MORNING, the sun was barely above the hills when Pam Tibbs turned the cruiser, with Hackberry in the passenger seat, in to Ouzel Flagler’s place. They rumbled across the cattle guard, the cloud of dust from the cruiser drifting back amid the junked farm tractors and construction machinery and rusted-out tankers and tangles of fence wire strewn over the property. The Sunday-morning quiet was starkly palpable, almost unnatural, in its contrast to the visual reminders of Ouzel’s customers’ Saturday-night fun at the blind-pig bar he operated: beer cans and red plastic cups and fast-food containers scattered across a half acre, a discarded condom flattened into a tire track, ashtrays and at least one dirty plastic diaper dumped on the ground.

  “We’re not any too soon,” Hackberry said, peering through the windshield.

  Ouzel and his wife and two grandchildren were exiting the side door of their house. All of them were dressed for church, Ouzel in brown shoes and a blue tie dotted with dozens of tiny white stars and a dark polyester suit that shone as brightly as grease.

  “You want to take him in?” Pam asked.

  But Hackberry’s attention was fixed on the abandoned machinery.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “I think I underestimated Ouzel’s potential,” he replied. “Cut off his vehicle. Keep his wife away from a phone while I talk to him.”


  “You look like somebody put thumbtacks in your breakfast cereal.”

  “This place is really an eyesore, isn’t it? Why in the hell do we allow something like this to exist?”

  She looked at him curiously. When they got out of the cruiser, she picked up her baton from between the seats and slipped it through the ring on her belt. Hackberry stepped in front of Ouzel, raising his hand. “Hold up, partner, you’ll have to be late for the sermon this morning,” he said.

  “What’s wrong?” Ouzel said.

  “Ask your family to go back inside. My deputy will stay with them.”

  “We get too loud here last night?”

  “Deputy Tibbs, leave me your baton,” Hackberry said.

  She looked at him strangely again, then slipped the baton from its ring and handed it to him, her eyes lingering warily on his.

  “I don’t know what’s going on here,” Ouzel said.

  Pam placed her hands on the two small children’s shoulders and began walking them toward the side door. But the wife—a broad-faced, hulking peasant of a woman who was known for her bad disposition and her clean brown beautiful hair—did not move and stared straight into Hackberry’s face, her dark eyes like lumps of coal that were no long capable of giving off heat. “These are our grandkids,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “We take them to church because their mother won’t,” she said. “They’re good kids. They don’t need this.”

  “Mrs. Flagler, you and your husband are not victims,” Hackberry said. “If you cared about those children, you wouldn’t be involved with criminals who transport heroin and crystal meth through your property. Now go back in your house and don’t come out until you’re told to.”

  “You heard him, ma’am,” Pam said. Before she entered the Flagler house, she looked back over her shoulder at Hackberry, this time with genuine concern.

  Ouzel’s Lexus was parked incongruously under a cottonwood tree, its tinted windows and waxed surfaces darkly splendid in the shade.

  “You aren’t afraid birds will corrode your paint?” Hackberry said.

  “I parked it there a few minutes ago so it’d be cool when we got in,” Ouzel said.

  “There’s a man in the neighborhood with a laser-sighted rifle. I think you brought him here,” Hackberry said.

  “I don’t know anything about that. No, sir, I don’t know anything about rifles. Never did. Never had much interest.” Ouzel’s gaze swept the great panorama of plains and mountains to the south, as though he were simply passing the time of day in idle conversation with a friend.

  Hackberry placed the flat of his hand on the hood of the Lexus. Then he picked a leaf off a ventilator slit and let it blow away in the wind. “What’d it cost you, sixty grand, something like that?”

  “It wasn’t that much. I got a deal.” Ouzel looked back at his house from the shadows the tree made. When he rotated his neck, the bulbous purple swellings in his throat raking against the stiffness of his collar, his small eyes sunk into black dots, Hackberry thought he could detect an odor that was reminiscent of a violated grave or the stench given off by an incinerator in which dead animals were burned. He wondered if he was starting to step across an invisible line.

  “Why you staring at me like that?” Ouzel said.

  “We let you skate on the sale of illegal booze because it was easier to keep an eye on you than it was to monitor a half-dozen vendors we couldn’t keep track of. But that was a big mistake on our part. You got mixed up with the dope traffickers across the river, and they’ve been using the back of your property as a corridor ever since. How much of your construction equipment is operational?”

  “None of it. It’s junk. I sell parts off it.”

  “When is the last time you saw Hugo Cistranos, Ouzel?”

  “I cain’t say that name rings bells.”

  Hackberry laid Pam Tibbs’s metal baton on the hood of the car. It rolled off, bouncing on the bumper before it struck the dirt with a pinging sound. He picked it up and reset it on the hood, then grabbed it when it rolled again, resetting it until it balanced, the tiny scratches showing like cats’ whiskers in the paint. He watched the baton contemplatively and moved it once more, pushing it audibly across the hood’s surface. “A couple of young people were almost killed yesterday. You sicced the shooter on them. Now you’re on your way to your church with your grandchildren. You’re a special kind of fellow, Ouzel.” Hackberry spun the baton on the car hood the way one might spin a bottle. “What do you think we ought to do about that?”

  Ouzel’s eyes flicked back and forth from the baton to Hackberry’s face. “About what?” he said.

  “I’m going to bring a forensic team out here. They’re going to examine every grader and dozer and front-end loader on the place. They’ll take soil samples from the blades and buckets and treads and see if they match the soil behind the church at Chapala Crossing. If your equipment was used in a mass burial, the DNA from the dead will still be on the metal. That will make you an accessory to a mass murder. If you don’t ride the needle, you’ll go down for the rest of your life. I’m talking about Huntsville, Ouzel. Do you understand what kind of place Huntsville is?”

  “I didn’t know anything about those Asian women till I saw it on TV.”

  “Who used your equipment?”

  “I don’t control what happens here. Sometimes I see lights in the dark at the south end of my property. Maybe somebody put one of the dozers on a flatbed and took it away. I kept the blinds shut. In the morning it was back. Other people have keys to everything I own here.”

  “Which people?”

  “They’re in Mexico. Maybe a couple come from Arizona. They don’t tell me anything. After the dozer was back, some guys came to see me.” Ouzel touched his wrist and the back of his left hand, a sorrowful light swimming into his eyes. “They—”

  “They what?”

  “Walked me out to my shed and put my hand in my own vise.”

  “Was Hugo Cistranos one of them?”

  “I don’t know his last name. But the first name was Hugo.”

  “Who did you call about my young friends?”

  “All I got is a phone number. I don’t have the name that goes with the number. When something happens, when I see something that’s important, I’m supposed to call that number. Sometimes Hugo answers. Sometimes a woman. Sometimes other guys.”

  “Give me the number.”

  Ouzel took a ballpoint pen from his pocket and a piece of paper from his wallet, his hands shaking. He started to write on top of his car hood but instead propped one foot on the bumper and smoothed the paper on his leg and wrote out the number there so he would not risk damaging the finish on his car.

  “When did you last call this number?”

  “Friday.”

  “When you saw Vikki Gaddis and Pete Flores?”

  “I was at my brother’s filling station. They were riding in Danny Boy Lorca’s truck. They came in for gas.” Ouzel’s eyes wandered to the baton. “Can you take that off my car?”

  “Do you have any idea at all of the suffering you’re party to?”

  “I never made anybody suffer. I just tried to support my family. You think I want these animals running my life? I’m sorry for those women who died. But tell me this: They didn’t know what happens when you become a prostitute and have yourself smuggled into somebody else’s country? How about what they did to my hand? How about the trouble I’m in? I just wanted to take my grandkids to church this morning.”

  Hackberry had to wait a long time before he replied. “Is there anything else you want to tell me, Ouzel?”

  “I get immunity of some kind, right?”

  “I’m not sure you’ve really given me anything. Your memory comes and goes, and a lot of what you say is incomprehensible. I also think for every true statement you make, you surround it with five lies.”

  “How about this? The one they call Preacher. You know that name?”

  “What about him?”

  “He was here.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday. He was looking for the guy named Hugo. I gave him that phone num
ber just like I did you. It belongs to a resort or something. In the background I’ve heard people talking about shooting cougars and African animals, the kind that got those twisted horns on their heads. I gave it to Preacher, and he looked at it and said, ‘So that’s where the little fellow is.’ If you’re gonna bust me, don’t cuff me in front of the kids. I’ll get in the cruiser on my own.”