Billy Bob and Hackberry Holland Ebook Boxed Set

by James Lee Burke

  “You’d remember.”

  They put headstalls on both colts and tethered one to the hitching post in front of the barn and walked the palomino named Love That Santa Fe around the side into the shade.

  “Santa Fe doesn’t like people messing with his back feet, so he tends to spook,” Hackberry said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Hold the lead.”

  “Yes, sir, got it.”

  “You say you’ve done this before?”

  “Sure.”

  “When you hold the lead and the farrier is working in back, don’t stand catty-corner to him. If the horse spooks, he’ll pull away from you and fall backward on the farrier.”

  “I can see that might be a problem.”

  “Thank you.” Hackberry bent over and cradled the hind left foot of the horse against his thighs and began trimming the edges of the hoof, the half-moon strips of horn dropping into the dust. He felt Santa Fe surge and try to straighten his leg and pull against the lead. “Hold him,” Hackberry said.

  “I’m not exactly playing with myself up here,” Pete said.

  Hackberry smoothed the edges and bottom of the hoof with his rasp, still fighting the resistance of a three-year-old horse weighing eleven hundred pounds. “Dammit, boy, hold him,” he said.

  “I’d sure like to get a job in your department. I bet it’s fun,” Pete said.

  Hackberry dropped Santa Fe’s foot to the ground and straightened up, closing his eyes, waiting for the pain in his lower back to go to the place that pain eventually went to.

  “You got sciatica?”

  “Get the chairs back out of the tack room, will you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hackberry pressed his hands against the barn wall and stretched one leg at a time behind him, like a man trying to push down a building. He heard Pete unfold the chairs and set them on the ground. Hackberry sat down and removed his hat and wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist. It was comfortable in the shade, the heat of the day trapped inside the sunshine, the wind puffing the mulberry tree in the backyard.

  “Who was the shooter at the church?” Hackberry said.

  “The one actually did it?”

  “Who was he?”

  “This guy Preacher, I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “I didn’t see it. I got out of the truck to take a leak and took off when the shooting started.”

  “Who had the Thompson?”

  “The guy named Hugo. It was in a canvas bag with the ammo pan. He said it belonged to the most dangerous man in Texas.”

  “Did you ever see Preacher?”

  “No, sir, I never saw him. The only guy I saw up close was Hugo. It was in the dash light of the truck. There were other guys out there in the dark, but I don’t know who they were. One guy had a beard, I think. I just saw him in the headlights for a second. Maybe the beard was red or orange.”

  “Was his name Liam or Eriksson?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Who hired you for the job?”

  “An ole boy I was drinking with. But he didn’t show up at the convoy.”

  “Convoy?”

  “There was one truck and an SUV and a couple of cars.”

  “Where were you drinking when you met the guy who hired you?”

  “At Ouzel’s place. Or at least I think I was.”

  “What was this ole boy’s name?”

  “I don’t know. I was drunk.”

  “So as far as you know, the shooter could have been Hugo, not Preacher?”

  “It could have been anybody. I told you, sir, I took off.”

  “Did you see the women?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Pete was sitting in one of the two folding chairs he had set up, his eyes averted, his shoulders rounded like the top of a question mark. He folded his arms across his chest and lowered his chin.

  “Did you talk to the women?”

  “A girl fell down getting into the truck, and I he’ped her up.”

  Hackberry could hear the wind gusting through the grass and the screens on the far side of the barn. “By that time you knew you weren’t bringing in wets?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who did you think these women were?”

  “I didn’t want to know.”

  “Housemaids?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Fieldworkers?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did you think they were going to start up a laundry?”

  “I figured they were prostitutes. And I figured if they weren’t prostitutes already, somebody was fixing to turn them into prostitutes.” Pete’s eyes were shiny when he glanced sideways at Hackberry.

  “You think I’m being too hard on you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “That’s good, because the feds are going to be a lot harder.”

  “I don’t care. I got to live with what I did. Fuck them.”

  “They’re just doing their job, Pete. But that doesn’t mean we won’t do ours.”

  “I cain’t translate that.”

  “What that means is I don’t think your legal value is worth horse piss on a hot rock.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “I suspect both of us will find out directly.”

  Pete stared in confusion at the sky and at the wind in the trees and at the shimmer of sunlight on the water brimming over the edge of the horse tank. “I wish I’d ate an AK round in Baghdad.”

  HACKBERRY HAD TOLD Pete and Vikki to stay close to the house, then had gone to town in his truck to buy groceries. Pete and Vikki sat on the gallery in the late-Saturday-afternoon haze and drank limeade from a pitcher that was beaded with moisture from the icebox. In the west, great orange and mauve-tinted clouds rose out of the hills, as though a brush fire were racing up the arroyos on their opposite slopes. Vikki tuned her sunburst Gibson and formed an E chord and ticked the plectrum across the strings, the notes rolling out of the sound hole.

  Pete wore his straw hat, even though they were sitting in shade. “You know those big herds the drovers used to move from Mexico up the Chisholm and the Goodnight-Loving? Some of them came right through here. Lot of those cows went plumb to Montana.”

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

  “Montana.”

  “Maybe Montana is not all you think it is.”

  “I suspect it’s that and more. People say British Columbia is even better. They say Lake Louise is green like the Caribbean and has a big white glacier at the head of it and yellow poppies all around the banks. Can you imagine having a ranch in a place like that?”

  “You’re the dreamer, Pete.”

  “A song-catcher is calling me a dreamer?”

  “I said ‘the’ dreamer. Of the two of us, it’s you who has the real vision.”

  “You sing spirituals in beer joints.”

  “They’re not really beer joints. So there’s nothing special about what I’ve done. You’re the poet. You have faith in things there’s no reason to believe in.”

  “Want to take a walk?”

  “Sheriff Holland wants us to stay close by.”

  “It’s Saturday evening, and we’re sitting on the front porch like old people,” he said. “What’s the harm?”

  She put away her Gibson, snapped the latches on the case, and set the case inside the door. In the south pasture, the quarter horses had moved into the shadows created by the poplar trees. The sky was golden, the tannic smell of dead leaves on the wind. Up on a hillside, Vikki thought she saw a reflection, an ephemeral glitter, like sunlight striking on a piece of foil that had gotten caught in the branch of a cedar tree. Then it was gone. “I’ll leave a note,” she said.

  They walked up the road into shade that was lengthening from a hill, the breeze at their backs, the two foxtrotters walking along the railed fence with them. They rounded a curve and saw a deer trail that switch-backed up a hillside. Vikki shaded her eyes with one hand and stared
at the place where the trail disappeared into an arroyo strewn with rocks that looked like yellow chert. She stared at the hillside until her eyes watered.

  “What are you looking at?” Pete asked.

  “I thought I saw a reflection behind that boulder up there.”

  “What kind of reflection?”

  “Like sunlight hitting glass.”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “I don’t, either. At least not now,” she said.

  “In Afghanistan, I’d pray for wind.”

  “Why?”

  “If there were a lot of trees and the wind started to blow and one thing in the trees didn’t move with the wind, that’s where the next RPG was coming from.”

  “Pete?”

  The change in her voice made him turn his head and forget about the reflection on the hillside or his story about Afghanistan.

  “I’m afraid,” she said.

  “You’ve never been afraid of anything. You’re braver than I am.”

  “I think you’re right about Montana or British Columbia. I think we’re about to turn over our lives to people we don’t know and shouldn’t trust.”

  “Sheriff Holland seems to be on the square.”

  “He’s a county sheriff in a place nobody cares about. He’s an elderly man whose back is coming off his bones.”

  “Don’t let him hear you say that.”

  “It’s the goodness in you that hurts you most, Pete.”

  “Nothing hurts me when you’re around.”

  He put his arm over her shoulders, and the two of them walked past the last fence on Hackberry Holland’s property and followed a trail between two hills that led to a creek and the back lot of an African-American church where the congregation had assembled in the shade of three giant cottonwoods. The creek was of a sandy-red color and had been dammed up with bricks and chunks of concrete, forming a pool that swelled out into the roots of the trees.

  The men were dressed in worn suits and white shirts and ties that didn’t match the color of their coats, the women in either white dresses or dark colors that absorbed heat as quickly as wool might.

  “Will you look at that,” Vikki said.

  “You didn’t get dunked when you were baptized?”

  “There’re no white people there at all. I think we’re intruding.”

  “They’re not paying us any mind. It’s worse if we walk away and make noise. There’s a willow tree yonder. Let’s sit under it a minute or two.”

  The minister escorted a huge woman into the pool, the immersion gown she wore ballooning up like white gauze around her knees. The minister cupped one hand behind her neck and lowered her backward into the pool. Her breasts were as taut and dark and heavy as watermelons under her gown. The surface of the pool closed over her hair and eyes and nose and mouth, and she grasped the minister’s arm with a rigidity that indicated the level of her fear. On the bank, the leaves of the cottonwoods seemed to flicker in the wind with a green-gold kinetic light.

  The minister raised his eyes to his congregants. “Jesus told the apostles to go not unto the Gentiles. He sent them first unto the oppressed and the forlorn. And that’s how our shackles have been broken, my brothers and sisters. I now baptize Sister Dorothea in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And we welcome our white brethren who are watching us now from the other side of our little Jordan.”

  Vikki and Pete were sitting in the shade on a pad of grass under the willow tree. Pete plucked a long, thin blade of grass and put it in his mouth. “So much for anonymity,” he said.

  She brushed at a fly on the side of his face, then looked in a peculiar way at the back of her hand. “What’s that?” she said.

  “What’s what?” Pete said. His arms were locked around his knees, his attention fixed on the baptism.

  “There was a red dot on my hand.”

  “Just then?”

  “Yes, it moved across my hand. I saw it when I touched your face.”

  He got to his feet and pulled her erect, looking up through the leaves at the side of the hill. He pushed her behind him, deeper into the shade, under the cover of the tree.

  “Give me your hand,” he said.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for an insect bite.”

  “I wasn’t bitten by an insect.”

  He looked out again from under the tree’s canopy at the hillside, his eyes sweeping over the scattered rocks, the piñon and juniper spiked into soil that was little more than gravel, the shadows inside an arroyo and the scrub brush that grew along its rim, the shale that had avalanched down from a collapsed fire road. Then he saw a glassy reflection at the top of a ridge and, for under a second, an electric red pinpoint racing past his feet.

  “It’s a laser sight,” he said, stepping backward. “Get behind the tree trunk. They don’t have the angle yet.”

  “Who? What angle?”

  “That bastard Hugo or whoever works for him. That’s what Collins said, right? Hugo wanted to do both of us? They cain’t get a clear shot yet.”

  “There’s a sniper up there?”

  “Somebody with a laser sight, that’s for sure.”

  She took a deep breath and blew it out. She opened her cell phone and stared at it. Her blue-green eyes were bright in the shade, locked on his. “No bars,” she said.

  “We don’t have a lot of time. A nine-one-one call wouldn’t he’p us.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  The fact that her question indicated options seemed testimony to the quality he admired most in her, namely her refusal to let others control her life, regardless of the risk she had to incur. He wanted to hold her against his chest. “Wait them out,” he said.

  “What if they work their way down the hill?”

  His head was hammering. If he yelled out to the congregants, they would scatter and run, and the rifleman on the hill would have no reason not to fire round after round through the branches of the willow.

  “Pete, I’d rather die than live like this.”

  “Live like how?”

  “Hiding, being afraid all the time. Nothing is worth that.”

  “Sometimes you have to live to fight another day.”

  “But we don’t fight another day. We hide. We’re hiding now.”

  “You told Jack Collins to go to hell. You spit on him.”

  “I told him to rape me if he wanted. I told him I wouldn’t resist.”

  Pete rubbed his palm across his mouth. His hand was dry and callused and made a grating sound on his skin. “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “Because I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  “I think I’m going to kill that fellow if I catch up with him. You don’t think I’ll do it, but there’s a part of me you don’t know about.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “You stay here. Don’t move for any reason. I need your word on that.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m gonna take it to them.”

  “That’s insane.”

  “It’s the last thing that guy up there expects.”

  “No, you’re not going out there by yourself.”

  “Let go of me, Vikki.”

  “We do it together, Pete.”

  He tried to pry her hands from his arm. “I can make that boulder over yonder, then head up the arroyo.”

  “I’ll follow you if you do.”

  There was nothing for it. “We cross the creek and get into the cottonwoods. Then we go through the back door of the church and out the front.”

  “What about the black people?” she said.

  “We’re out of choices,” he replied.

  THE TWO MEN had followed the couple down below by first climbing the hill and then walking the ridgeline, peeking over the summit when necessary, threading their way through rocks and twisted juniper trunks that had been bleached gray by the sun. One of the men carried a bolt-action rifle on a leather sling. A large
telescopic sight was mounted above the chamber, the front lens capped with a dustcover. Both men were breathing hard and sweating heavily and trying to avoid looking directly into the western sun.

  They couldn’t believe their bad luck when they crawled up to the edge of the summit and saw the couple walking under a willow tree.

  “We stumbled into a colored baptism,” the man with the rifle said.

  “Keep the larger picture in mind, T-Bone. Let the coloreds take care of themselves,” the other man said.

  T-Bone peered through his telescopic sight and saw a flash of skin through the branches. He activated his laser and moved it across the leaves until it lit upon the side of someone’s face. Then the wind gusted and the target disappeared. He paused and tried again, but all he could see was the pale green uniformity of the tree’s canopy. “I’d scrub this one, Hugo,” he said.

  “You’re not me,” Hugo said. His browned skin was powdered with dust so that the whites of his eyes looked stark and theatrical in his face. He folded a handkerchief in a square and positioned it on a rock so he could kneel without causing himself more discomfort than necessary. He drummed his fingers on a piece of slag and took the measure of the man he was with, his impatience and irritability barely restrained. “Keep your head down, T-Bone.”

  “That’s what we’ve been doing. My back feels like the spring on a jack-in-the-box.”

  “Don’t silhouette on a hill, and don’t let the sunlight reflect on your face. It’s like looking up at an airplane. You might as well be a signal mirror. Another basic infantry lesson—you shouldn’t have all that civilian jewelry on you.”

  “Thanks for passing that on, Hugo. But I say we wait till dark and start over at the house.”

  Hugo didn’t reply. He was wondering if they could work their way down the arroyo for at least two clear shots, then get back over the ridge and down to their vehicle before the black people realized what had happened in their midst.

  “Did you hear what I said?” T-Bone asked.

  “Yes, I did. We take them now.”

  “I just don’t get what’s going on. Why’d Preacher and Bobby Lee turn on us? Why didn’t they pop the kid and his girl when they had the chance?”

  “Because Preacher is a maniac, and Bobby Lee is a treacherous little shit.”

  “So we’re doing this for Arthur Rooney?”