Rain Gods

by James Lee Burke

  The marines packed snow on the barrels of their .30-caliber machine guns, running the snow up and down the superheated steel with their mittens. When the barrels burned out, they sometimes had to unscrew and change them with their bare hands, leaving their flesh on the metal.

  The ditch was littered with shell casings, the BAR man hunting in the snow for his last magazine, the breech of every M-1 around Hack locking open, the empty clip ejecting with a clanging sound. When the marines were out of ammunition, Hackberry remembered the great silence that followed and the hissing of shrapnel from airbursts in the snow and then the bugles blowing again.

  Now, as he gazed through the windshield of the cruiser, he was back in the ditch, and the year was 1950, and for a second he thought he heard a series of dull reports like strings of Chinese firecrackers popping. But when he rolled down the window, the only sound he heard was wind. “Stop the car,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “There’s something wrong with that scene. The old man said the Mexicans working here were illegals. But the vehicles are new and expensive. Undocumented workers don’t set up a permanent camp where they work, either.”

  “You think Collins is actually there?”

  “He shows up where you least expect him. He doesn’t feel guilty. He thinks it’s the rest of us who have the problem, not him.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Call the locals for backup, then call Ethan Riser.”

  “I say leave the feds out of it. They’ve been a cluster-fuck from the jump. Where you going?”

  “Just make the calls, Pam,” he said.

  He walked twenty yards farther up the dirt track. The wind was blowing harder and should have felt colder, but his skin was dead to the touch, his eyes tearing slightly, his palms so stiff and dry that he felt they would crack if he folded them. He could see a haze of white smoke hanging on the ground near the tents. A redheaded turkey vulture flew by immediately over Hackberry’s head, gliding so fast on extended wings that its shadow broke apart on a pile of boulders and was gone before Hackberry could blink.

  An omen in a valley that could have been a place of bones, the kind of charnel house one associated with dead civilizations? Or was it all just the kind of burned-out useless terrain that no one cared about, one that was disposable in the clash of cultures or imperial societies?

  He could feel a pressure band tightening on the side of his head, a cold vapor wrapping around his heart. At what point in a man’s life did he no longer have to deal with feelings as base as fear? Didn’t acceptance of the grave and the possibility of either oblivion or stepping out among the stars without a map relieve one of the ancestral dread that fouled the blood and reduced men to children who called out their mother’s name in their last moments? Why did age purchase no peace?

  But he no longer had either the time or luxury of musing upon abstractions. Where were the men who lived in the tents? Who was cooking food inside a fire ring no different from those our ancestors cooked on in this same valley over eleven thousand years ago?

  The cave located up the mountainside from the camp looked like a black mouth, no, one that was engorged, strung with flumes of green and orange and gray mine tailings or rock that had simply cracked and fallen away from constant exposure to heat and subfreezing temperatures.

  It was the kind of place where something had gone terribly wrong long ago, the kind of place that held on to its dead and the spiritual vestiges of the worst people who had lived inside it.

  Hackberry wondered what his grandfather, Old Hack, would have to say about a place like this. As though Old Hack had decided to speak to him inside the wind, he could almost hear the sonorous voice and the cynical humor for which his grandfather was infamous: “I suspect it has its moments, Satchel Ass, but truth be known, it’s the kind of shithole a moral imbecile like John Wesley Hardin would have found an absolute delight.”

  Hackberry smiled to himself and hooked his coat behind the butt of his holstered revolver. He walked back toward the cruiser, where Pam Tibbs was still sitting behind the steering wheel, finishing her call to Ethan Riser.

  But something in the door mirror had caught her attention. She put down the phone and turned around in the seat and looked back toward the twin bluffs, then got out of the cruiser with the binoculars and focused them on a vehicle that had come to a stop by the twin bluffs. “Better take a look,” she said.

  “At what?”

  “It’s a Grand Cherokee,” she said. “It’s flying an American flag on a staff attached to the back bumper.”

  “Nick Dolan?”

  “I can’t tell. It looks like he’s lost.”

  “Forget him.”

  “Flores and Gaddis are probably with him.”

  “We’re going in, babe. Under a black flag. You got me?”

  “No, I didn’t hear that.”

  “Yes, you did. Collins has killed scores of people in his life. What’s in the pump?”

  “All double-aught bucks,” Pam said.

  “Load your pockets with them, too.”

  PREACHER WAS EATING his second brownie when the first cramp hit him. The sensation, or his perception of its significance, was not instantaneous. At first he felt only a slight spasm, not unlike an irritant unexpectedly striking the stomach lining. Then the pain sharpened and spread down toward the colon, like a sliver of jagged tin seeking release. He clenched his buttocks together, still unsure what was happening, faintly embarrassed in front of the woman, trying to hide the discomfort distorting his face.

  The next spasm made his jaw drop and the blood drain from his head. He leaned forward, trying to catch his breath, sweat breaking on his upper lip. His stomach was churning, the interior of the tent going out of focus. He swallowed drily and tried to see the woman clearly.

  “Are you sick?” she said.

  “You ask if I’m sick? I’m poisoned. What’s in this?”

  “What I said. Chocolate and flour and—”

  A bilious metallic taste surged into his mouth. The constriction in his bowels was spreading upward, into his lower chest, like chains wrapping around his ribs and sternum, squeezing the air out of his lungs. “Don’t lie,” he said.

  “I ate the brownies, too. There’s nothing wrong with them.”

  He coughed violently, as though he had eaten a piece of angle iron. “There must be peanut butter in them.”

  “You have a problem with peanut butter?”

  “You bitch.” He pulled open the tent flap to let in the cold air. “You treacherous bitch.”

  “Look at you. A grown man cursing others because he has a stomachache. A man who kills women and young girls calls other people names because a brownie has upset him. Your mother would be ashamed of you. Where did you grow up? In a barnyard?”

  Preacher got to his feet and held on to the tent pole with one hand until the earth stopped shifting under his feet. “What right do you have to talk of my mother?”

  “What right, he asks? I’m the mother you took from her husband and her children. The mother you took to be your concubine, that’s who I am, you miserable gangster.”

  He stumbled out into the wind and cold air, his hair soggy with sweat under his hat, his skin burning as though it had been dipped in acid, one hand clenched on his stomach. He headed for his tent, where the Thompson lay on top of his writing table, the drum fat with cartridges, a second cartridge-packed drum resting beside it. That was when he saw a sheriff’s cruiser coming up the dirt track and, in the far distance, a second vehicle that seemed part of an optical illusion brought on by the anaphylactic reaction wrecking his nervous system. The second vehicle was a maroon SUV with an American flag whipping from a staff attached to the back bumper. Who were these people? What gave them the right to come on his land? His anger only exacerbated the fire in his entrails and constricted his lungs as though his chest had been touched by the tendrils of a jellyfish.

  “Angel! Molo!” he called hoarsely.

  “żQué pasa, Seńor Collins?”

  “ĄMaten los!” he said.
/>   “żQuién?”

  “Todos que estan en los dos vehiculos.”

  The two Mexican killers were standing outside their tent. They turned and saw the approaching cruiser. “żNosotros los matamos todos? Hombre, esta es una pila de mierda,” Angel said. “Chingado, son of a beech, you sure you ain’t a marijuanista, Seńor Collins? Oops, siento mucho, solamente estoy bromeando.”

  But Preacher was not interested in what the Mexicans had to say. He was already inside his tent, gathering up the Thompson, stuffing the extra ammunition pan under his arm, convinced that the voice he had sought in the wind and in the fire and even in an earthquake would speak to him now, with the Jewish woman, inside the cave.

  “A GUY JUST came out of a tent,” Pam said, leaning forward on the steering wheel, taking her foot off the gas. “Dammit, I can’t see him now. The trash pile is in the way. Wait a second. Two other guys are talking to him.”

  The visual angle from the passenger seat was bad. Hackberry handed her the binoculars. She fitted them to her eyes and adjusted the focus, breathing audibly, her chest rising and falling irregularly. “They look Hispanic,” she said. “Maybe they’re construction workers, Hack.”

  “Where’s the other guy?”

  “I don’t know. He’s gone. He must have gone back in one of the tents. We need to dial it down.”

  “No, it’s Collins.”

  She removed the binoculars from her eyes and looked hard and long at him. “You thought you heard a bugle. I think you’re seeing and hearing things that aren’t there. We can’t be wrong on this.”

  He dropped open the glove box and removed a Beretta nine-millimeter. He pulled back the slide and chambered a round and set the butterfly safety. “I’m not wrong. Pull to the back of the trash pile. We get out simultaneously on each side of the vehicle and stay spread apart. If you see Collins, you kill him.”

  “Listen to me, Hack—”

  “No, Collins doesn’t get a chance to use his Thompson. You’ve never seen anyone shot with a weapon that has that kind of firepower. We kill him on sight and worry about legalities later.”

  “I can’t accept an order like that.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “I know you, Hack. I know the thoughts you have before you think them. You want me to protect myself at all costs, but you’ve got your own agenda with this guy.”

  “We left Dr. Freud back there on the road,” he said. He stepped out on the hardpan just as the sun broke over the hill, splintering like gold needles, the bottom of the hill still deep in shadow.

  He and Pam Tibbs walked toward the pile of house debris, dividing around it, their eyes fixed on the four tents, their eyes watering in the wind and the smoke blowing from a fire that smelled of burning food or garbage.

  But because of the angle, they had lost sight of the two Hispanic men, who had gone back in their tent or were behind the vehicles. As Hackberry walked deeper into the shadows, the sunlight that had fractured on the ridgeline disappeared, and he could see the tents and the pickup truck and the SUV and the mountainside in detail, and he realized the mistake he had made: You never allow your enemy to become what is known as a barricaded suspect. Even more important, you never allow your enemy to become a barricaded suspect with a hostage.

  Pam Tibbs was to his left, the stock of her cut-down pump Remington twelve-gauge snugged against her shoulder, her eyes sweeping from right to left, left to right, never blinking, her face dilated as though she were staring into an ice storm. He heard her footsteps pause and knew she had just seen Collins at the same moment he had, pushing a woman ahead of him up a footpath that led to the opening in the mountainside.

  Collins had knotted his left fist in the fabric of the woman’s dress and was holding the Thompson by the pistol grip with his right hand, the barrel at a downward angle. He looked back once at Pam and Hackberry, his face white and small and tight under his hat, then he shoved the woman ahead of him into the cave and disappeared behind her.

  “He’s got the high ground. We’ve got to get one of the vehicles between us and him,” Hackberry said.

  The tent that the two Hispanic men had been using was the largest of the four. The SUV was parked not far from the tent flap; the pickup truck was parked between two other tents. The only sounds were the ruffling of the wind on the polyethylene surfaces of the tents and a rock toppling from the ridgeline and the engine of the maroon SUV coming up the dirt track from the bluffs.

  Hackberry turned around and raised one fist in the air, hoping that Pete Flores would recognize the universal military signal to stop. But either Flores did not see him, or the driver, who was undoubtedly Nick Dolan, chose to keep coming.

  Hackberry shifted his direction, crossing behind Pam Tibbs, his .45 revolver on full cock, the Beretta stuffed through the back of his gun belt. “I’m going to clear the first tent. Cover me,” he said.

  He opened his Queen pocketknife with his teeth and walked quickly to the back of the tent, taking long strides, watching the other tents and the two parked vehicles, both of which had tinted windows. The blade of his knife could shave hair off his arm. He sliced the cords that were tied to the tent’s support poles and steel ground pins and watched the shape go out of the tent as it collapsed in a pile.

  Nothing moved under its folds. He crossed behind Pam Tibbs, lifting his eyes to the cave entrance on the mountainside. The pile of building debris was behind them now, the bulldozed stucco powdering, the broken asbestos feathering in the wind. If Collins opened up on them, the only cover available would be the pickup truck or the SUV, and he could not be sure either of them was unoccupied.

  He felt naked in the way a person feels naked in a dream, in a public place, before a large audience. But the sense of nakedness in his and Pam’s circumstances went beyond that. It was the kind of sensation a forward artillery observer experiences when the first round he has called in for effect strikes home and his position is exposed. It was the kind of nakedness a navy corpsman feels when he runs through automatic-weapons fire to reach a wounded marine. The sensation was akin to having one’s skin pulled off in strips with a pair of pliers.

  Then he realized that regardless of the criminal background of his antagonists, at least one of them had made the mistake of all amateurs: His vanity or his libido or whatever megalomaniacal passion defined him was more important to him than the utilitarian simplicity of a stone killer and survivor like Jack Collins.

  One man was wearing lizard-skin cowboy boots, chrome-plated on the heels and toes. They flashed with a dull silvery light beneath the running board on the far side of the pickup truck.

  “Three o’clock, Pam!” Hackberry said.

  At the same moment the man behind the truck fired an Uzi or a MAC-10 across the hood, then moved back quickly behind the cab. But his one-handed aim was sloppy, and the bullets hit the trash pile and stitched the water drum and cut a line across the hardpan, flicking dirt into the air and ricocheting off rocks and whining into the distance with the diminished sound of a broken bedspring.

  Hackberry aimed his .45 with both hands and fired through the tinted window on the driver’s side, cascading glass onto the seats and blowing out the opposite window. He fired two more rounds, one through the window on the extended cab, one through the back door, leaving a clean-edged, polished indentation and hole the size of a quarter. But the three rounds he had let off did no good. The man with the automatic weapon moved behind the back of the cab and sprayed the whole area blindly, probably as masking fire for either the other Hispanic man, who was nowhere in sight, or Jack Collins up in the cave.

  The shooting stopped. Hackberry had pulled back to the edge of the trash pile, and Pam was somewhere off to his left, in the shadows or behind the concrete foundation of the destroyed house. In all probability, the shooter was changing magazines. Hackberry got down on his hands and knees, then on his stomach. He heard a metallic click, like a latching steel mechanism being inserted into a socket. He extended his .45, gripping it with both hands, his elbows propped in the dirt, the pain along hi
s spine flaring into his ribs.

  Hackberry saw the chrome-sheathed lizard-skin boots of the shooter move from behind the back tire. He sighted down the long barrel of his .45 at the place where the blue-jean cuff of the shooter’s right pants leg met the top of his foot. He pulled the trigger.

  The shooter screamed when the 230-grain round tore through his boot. He fell to the ground and yelled out again, holding his destroyed foot and ankle, blood welling through his fingers, his other hand still gripping his weapon.

  Pam Tibbs ran toward the truck, her pump shotgun held in front of her, the safety off, lifting the barrel, stepping sideways in an arc around the hood of the truck, almost like an erratic dancer, coming into position so that she stood in full view of the shooter. All the time she was yelling, as though to a man with neither sight nor hearing, “Give it up! Give it up! Give it up! Do it now! Do it now! Throw it away! Hands straight out on the ground! You must do it now! No, you do not do that! Both hands in the dirt! Did you hear me?”