“You bet, Hugo. We’re glad you did that, too,” Bobby Lee replied.
The plateau was limestone, topped with a soft carpet of soil and grass that was surprisingly green. The wind was cool, flecked with rain, and smelled of damp leaves and perhaps the beginning of a new season. Twenty yards away, Preacher Collins was talking in Spanish to two Mexican killers who had a great gift for listening while he spoke, absorbing every word, never challenging or advising, their taciturnity an affirmation of his will.
Their pickup truck was parked next to Preacher’s Honda, the compact’s back window pocked with a hole that looked like a crystalline eye. The Jewish woman sat in the backseat, her expression less one of anger than of thought, her purse and a box of brownies next to her. What did Preacher intend to do with her? Not harm her, certainly. And if Preacher wasn’t going to harm her, maybe he would not harm Hugo, at least not in her presence, Hugo told himself.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Bobby Lee said. “Puts me in mind of the Shenandoah Valley, without the greenery and all.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Hugo said. He lowered his voice. “Bobby Lee, I’m a soldier just like you. I take orders I don’t like sometimes. We’ve been on a lot of gigs together. You hearing me on this, son?”
Bobby Lee squeezed Hugo’s shoulder reassuringly. “Look yonder. See the deer running inside the wind. They’re playing. They know fall is in the air. You can smell it. It’s like wet leaves. I love it when it’s like this.”
As Hugo looked into Bobby Lee’s face, he knew for the first time in his life the distinction between those who had a firm grasp on the day and the expectation of the morrow and those who did not.
Preacher finished his conversation with the Mexicans and walked toward the cliff. “Let me have Hugo’s cell phone,” he said to Bobby Lee.
Preacher wore a suit coat and a rumpled fedora and slacks that had no crease, one cuff tucked inside a boot. The wind was blowing his coat as he dialed a number on the cell phone. “When Arthur Rooney answers, you say, ‘I did what you told me to, Artie. Everything went fine.’ Then you hand the phone back to me.”
Hugo said, “Jack, Artie is going to be confused. Why would I say ‘Everything went fine’? I was just bringing the money up. Artie could say anything, because he wouldn’t know what I meant. And give you the wrong impression. See?”
Preacher took a tin of Altoids from his pocket and snicked open the lid and put one on his tongue. He gave one to Bobby Lee and offered one to Hugo, but Hugo shook his head.
“See those trees down yonder with the flowers inside their branches?” Preacher said. “Some people call them rain trees. Others say they’re mimosas. But a lot of people call them Judas trees. Know why?”
“Jack, I’m not up on that crap, you know that.” And for just a moment the confidence and sense of familiarity in his own voice almost convinced Hugo that things were as they used to be, that he and Jack Collins were still business partners, even brothers in arms.
“The story is that Judas was in despair after he betrayed Jesus. Before he hanged himself, he went out on a cliff in the desert and flung his thirty pieces of silver into the darkness. Every place those coins landed, a tree grew. On each tree were these red flowers. Those flowers represent the blood of Jesus. That’s the story of how the Judas tree came to be. You cold? You want a coat?”
“Talk to him, Bobby Lee.”
“It’s out of my hands, Hugo.”
Jack winked at Hugo, then pushed the send button with his thumb and placed the phone in Hugo’s palm.
Hugo shrugged, his expression neutral, as though he were placating an unreasonable friend. The five rings that he hoped would deliver him to voice mail were the longest rings he had ever heard. When he thought he was home free, Artie Rooney picked up.
“That you, Hugo?” Artie said.
“Yeah, I—”
“Where are you? I heard that crazy sonofabitch kidnapped Nick Dolan’s old lady.”
“I did what you said. Everything is fine.”
Preacher pulled the cell phone from Hugo’s hand and pressed it against his ear.
“I hope he went out shivering like a dog passing broken glass,” Rooney said. “Tell me Mrs. Dolan was with him. Make my day perfect. Don’t hold back on me, Hugo. I want every detail. You parked one in her mouth, right? I’m getting hard thinking about it.”
Preacher folded the cell phone in his palm and dropped it in the pocket of his trousers. He stared out at the dust and mist blowing across the canyon, his expression contemplative, his mouth like a surgical wound. He stuck his little finger in one ear and removed something from his ear canal. Then he smiled at Hugo.
“Everything okay?” Hugo said.
“Right as rain,” Preacher said.
“Because words can get mixed up over the phone, or people can misunderstand each other.”
“No problem, Hugo. Take a walk with me.”
“Walk where?”
“A man should always have choices. Ever read Ernest Hemingway? He said death is only bad when it’s prolonged and humiliating. When I brood on things like this, I take a walk.”
“I don’t get what you’re saying. Where we going?”
“That’s the point. It’s for you to choose. Pancho Villa always gave his prisoners a choice. They could stand against a wall with a blindfold over their eyes or take off running. If it was me, I don’t think I’d run. I’d say screw that. I’d eat a round from one of those Mausers. Winchesters and Mausers were the standard issue for Villa’s troops. Did you know that?”
“Jack, let’s talk a minute. I don’t know what Artie said, but he gets excited sometimes. I mean, you’d think that two hundred grand I brought you was drained out of his veins. He’s always yelling about what you did to his hand, like he didn’t bring it on himself, which everybody knows he did. Come on, Jack, slow down here. It’s a matter of keeping things in perspective, like the lady in your car there, I know you want to care for her and everybody knows you’ve always been a gentleman that way and you got a code most people in the life don’t have, wait, we don’t need to keep walking anywhere, let’s just stay right here a second, I mean right here where we’re talking, I’m not real big on heights, I never have been, I’m not afraid, I just want to be reasonable and make sure you understand I always thought you and Bobby Lee here were stand-up, and look, man, you got your two hundred large and I’m never gonna breathe a word about this stuff, you got my word, you want me to blow the country, you want my condo in Galveston, you name it, hey, Jack, come on, whoa, I’m telling you the truth, I get vertigo, my heart won’t take it.”
“Don’t fault yourself for this, Hugo. You’ve made a choice. Bobby Lee and I respect that,” Preacher said. “Keep looking at me. That’s right, you’re a stand-up guy. See, it’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Hugo Cistranos stepped backward onto a shelf of air, his eyes closed and his fingers extended in front of him, like a blind man feeling in the dark. Then he plummeted three hundred feet, straight down, through the top of a cottonwood into the streambed filled with rocks that were the color of dirty snow.
27
HACKBERRY DID NOT get back home until almost ten that night. When he tried to sleep, the insides of his eyelids were dry and abrasive, as though there were sand in them or his corneas had been burned by the flash of an arc welder. Each time he thought he was successfully slipping off to sleep, he would feel himself jerked awake by the images of the dead men in the game farm’s lounge or, less dramatically, by the banality of an evil man who, when dying, had grieved over the wasted pot roast that had come from the exotic animal he had paid five thousand dollars to kill.
The tape Pam Tibbs had retrieved from the security camera had proved of little help. It had shown the arrival of a Honda and a Ford pickup truck. It had shown the back of a man wearing a fedora and a suit coat and slacks that flattened against his body in the wind. It had shown two tall unshaved men in colorful western shirts and bleached tight-fi
tting jeans that accentuated their genitalia. One of the tall men carried an elongated object wrapped loosely in a raincoat. The tape also showed a man in a dented and sweat-ringed top hat, his face shadowed, his striped overalls starched and pressed.
But it did not show the license tag on the pickup truck, and it showed only one letter and one number on the Honda: an S and the numeral 2. The value of the tape was minimal, other than the fact that the S and 2 confirmed that the vehicle Pete Flores had attacked with rocks was being driven by Jack Collins and perhaps was even registered to him, although under an alias.
Maybe the grouping of the letters and the numbers on the plate would narrow down the list provided earlier by the Texas DMV. In the morning Hackberry would call Austin again and start over. In the meantime, he had to sleep. He had learned long ago as a navy corpsman that Morpheus did not bestow his gifts easily or cheaply. The sleep that most people yearned for rarely came this side of the grave, except perhaps to the very innocent or to those willing to mortgage tomorrow for tonight. Tying off a vein, watching the blood rise inside a hypodermic needle, staining a mint-bruised mug of crushed ice with four fingers of Black Jack Daniel’s were all guaranteed to work. But the cost meant taking up residence in a country no reasonable person ever wanted to enter.
Throughout the night, he could hear the wind stressing the storm shutters against their hooks and swelling under his house. He saw flashes of lightning in the clouds, the windmill in his south pasture shivering in momentary relief against the darkness, his horses running in the grass, clattering against the railed fence. He heard thunder ripping across the sky like a tin roof being slowly torn asunder by the hands of God. He sat on the side of his bed in his skivvies, his heavy blue-black white-handled revolver clenched in his hand.
He thought of Pam Tibbs and the way she had always covered his back and incessantly brought him food. He thought of the way her rump filled out her jeans and the bold way she carried herself and her mercurial moods that vacillated from a martial flash in the eyes to an invasive warmth that made him step back from her and put his hands in his back pockets.
Why think about her now, at this moment, as he sat on the side of his bed with the coldness of a pistol on his naked thigh, like an old fool who still thought he could be the giver of death rather than its recipient?
Because he was alone and his sons were far away, and because every unused second that clicked on the clock was an act of theft to which he was making himself party.
He went into the office at seven on Monday morning, hung his dove-colored hat on a wood peg on the wall, and pulled from his desk drawer the DMV fax that contained the 173 possible registrants of the Honda driven by Preacher Jack Collins. He flattened the pages on his ink blotter, placed a ruler under the name of the first registrant, and began working his way down the list. He had gotten through six names when the phone rang. The caller was not one he cared to hear from.
“Ethan Riser,” Hackberry said, trying to hide the resignation in his voice.
“I heard you had a bad day up at the game farm,” Riser said.
“Not as bad as the guys Jack Collins eased into the next world.”
“A couple of my colleagues say it was a real mess. They appreciated your help.”
“That’s funny, I don’t remember their saying that.”
“So you know about Nick Dolan’s wife?”
“No, not the particulars. Just what I got from this guy T-Bone Simmons.” Hackberry leaned forward on his desk, his back stiffening. “What about her?”
“She was carjacked or kidnapped, I guess it depends on how you want to put it. Her vehicle was found on a side road off I-10, just east of Segovia.”
“When did you know about this?”
“The day it happened, Saturday afternoon. Mr. Dolan is a little distraught. I thought maybe he’d called you by now.”
“Tell me this again. You knew Mrs. Dolan was abducted Saturday afternoon, but I have to hear about it from a dying criminal a day later? And you thought I had probably gotten word from the husband of the victim?”
“Or from my colleagues,” Riser said wearily. “Look, Sheriff, this is not the reason I called. We have information that indicates you may be giving sanctuary to Vikki Gaddis and Pete Flores.”
“I don’t know where you got that from, but I don’t really care. You know why the right-wing nutcases around here don’t trust the government?”
“No, I don’t.”
“That’s the point, sir. You don’t know. That’s the entire point.”
Hackberry hung up. Thirty seconds later, the phone rang again. He glanced at the caller ID, picked up the receiver, and without speaking, hung up a second time, his eyes returning to the list of names on the DMV fax.
Pam Tibbs came into his office and looked over his shoulder. “It sounded like you were talking to Ethan Riser,” she said.
“There’s no such thing as a conversation with Riser. The two voices you hear are Riser talking and his voice echoing.”
“Get enough sleep last night?”
He raised his head. She was silhouetted against the light from the window, the tips of her hair lit by the early sun. Behind her, he could see the silver flagpole and the flag popping hard in the breeze. “I didn’t eat breakfast. Let’s go down to the café.”
“I have a pile of stuff in my intake basket,” she said.
“No, you don’t,” he said, lifting his hat off the wood peg.
At the café, he ordered a steak, three scrambled eggs, grits, hash browns and gravy, fried tomatoes, toast and marmalade and orange juice and coffee.
“Think you can make it to lunch?” she said. Her fingers were knitted on top of the table. Her nails were clean and unpainted and closely clipped. There was a shine in her hair just like the light in polished mahogany. Behind her, tumbleweeds were bouncing through the streets, the tin roof on an old mechanic’s shed rattling, forked lightning striking the hills in the south. “You trying to make me uncomfortable?” she said.
“Why do you say that?”
“Looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
Her eyes went away from him and came back. “You think I’m your daughter?”
“No.”
“Well—”
“Well, what?” he said.
“God!” she replied.
A calendar hung on a post not far from their booth. No one had folded back a page on it since June. The days in June had been marked off with a black felt-tip pen, up to the twenty-first. He wondered what event in June had been so important that someone had in effect indicated all the previous days were to be gotten past and rid of. Then he wondered why the events after June 21 were so lacking in significance that no one had even bothered to turn the calendar page to the following month.
“Know why people in jail use the term ‘stacking time’?” he said.
“It makes a collection of dimwits sound clever?”
“No, it makes them sound normal. The goal for most people is to get time out of the way. I learned that in No Name Valley, under the sewer grate. I counted the threads in my sweater so I wouldn’t have to think about the time being stolen from my life.”
She turned a University of Houston class ring on her finger. The waitress brought coffee and went away. Pam watched a church bus pass on the street, its headlights on in the mixture of blowing dust and rain. “You’re the most unusual man I’ve ever known, but not for the reasons you might think,” she said.
He tried to smile but was disturbed by the tenor in her voice.
“You’re blessed with an innate goodness the Communists couldn’t take away from you. But I think in your mind, Jack Collins has become the prison guard who tormented you in North Korea. Collins wants to make you over in his image. If you let him do that, he wins, and so does that prison guard in the POW camp.”
“You’re wrong. Collins is a defective amoeba. He’s not worth thinking about.”
“Lie to God, lie to your f
riends, but don’t lie to yourself.”
“If you’re going to talk church-basement psychology to me, would you lower your voice?”
“There’s no one sitting around us.”
He looked sideways and didn’t reply.
“Don’t blow me off, Hack.” She pushed her right hand across the table and bumped the tips of her stiffened fingers hard against his.
“Do you think I’d do that? Do you think any intelligent man would ever treat a woman like you with disrespect?”
She bit a hangnail on her thumb and looked at him in a peculiar fashion.
IN FRONT OF the office, Hackberry took one glance at the sky and unhooked the chain on the flagpole and lowered the flag in advance of the impending storm. He folded the flag in a tuck and placed it in his desk drawer. Then he went back to work on the list of registrants given to him by the DMV. He went through the entire list twice, his eyes starting to swim. What was the point? If the FBI couldn’t locate Collins, how could he? Did Collins actually possess magic? Was he a griffin loosed from the pit, a reminder of the bad seed that obviously existed in the gene pool? It was always easier to think of evil as the work of individuals rather than the successful and well-planned efforts of societies and organizations operating with a mandate. Men like Collins were not created simply by their environments. Auschwitz and the Nanking massacre hadn’t happened in a vacuum.
Billy Bob and Hackberry Holland Ebook Boxed Set Page 76