T-Bone, the driver of the pickup, could not speak. His eyes bulged from his head, and saliva ran from both sides of his mouth.
“Blink your eyes if you got the message, moron,” the man from the SUV said.
T-Bone lowered his eyelids and opened them again. The driver of the SUV slid the revolver from T-Bone’s mouth and lowered the hammer with his thumb and wiped the saliva off the steel onto T-Bone’s shirt. Then, for no apparent reason other than unbridled rage, he hit him in the face with it.
T-Bone pressed the flat of his hand to the cut below his eye. “Hugo sent me. The broad is at the Fiesta motel,” he said. “We couldn’t find the Fiesta ’cause we were looking for the Siesta. We had the wrong name of the motel, Bobby Lee.”
“You follow me to the next corner and turn right. Keep your shit-machine running for three blocks, then we’ll be in the country. Don’t let this go south on you.” Bobby Lee Motree’s eyes met Pete’s. “It’s called a Venus flytrap. Rapists use it. It means you’re screwed. But ‘screwed’ and ‘bullet in the head’ aren’t necessarily the same thing. You roger that, boy? You’ve caused me a mess of trouble. You can’t guess how much trouble, which means your name is on the top of the shit list right now. Start your engine, T-Bone.”
T-Bone turned the ignition. The engine coughed and blew a noxious cloud of black smoke from the exhaust pipe. Something tinkled against metal, and antifreeze streamed into the gravel as the engine caught, then steam and a scorched smell like a hose or rubber belt cooking on a hot surface rose from the hood. Pete sat silent and stiff against the seat, pushing himself deeper into it so he could get a thumb under the safety strap and try to work it off his chest. His Swiss Army knife was on the floor, the red handle half under the driver’s foot. A car went by, then a truck, the illumination of their headlights falling outside the pool of shadow under the chinaberry tree.
“My piece is under the seat,” T-Bone said.
“Go ahead.”
“I need to talk to Hugo.”
“Hugo doesn’t have conversations with dead people. That’s what you’re gonna be unless you do what I say.”
T-Bone bent over, his gaze straight ahead, and lifted a .25 auto from under the seat. He kept it in his left hand and laid it across his lap so it was pointed at Pete’s rib cage. A thin whistling sound like a teakettle’s was building inside the hood. “I didn’t mean to get in your space, Bobby Lee. I was doing what Hugo told me.”
“Say another word, and I’m going to seriously hurt you.”
Pete remained silent as T-Bone followed Bobby Lee’s SUV out of town and up a dirt road bordered by pastureland where black Angus were clumped up in an arroyo and under a solitary tree by a windmill. Pete’s left hand drifted down to the latch on the safety belt. He worked his fingers over the square outline of the metal, pushing the plastic release button with his thumb, trying to free himself by creating enough slack in the belt to go deeper into the latch rather than pull against it.
“You’re wasting your time. It has to be popped loose with a screwdriver from the inside,” T-Bone said. “By the way, I ain’t no rapist.”
“Were you at the church?” Pete asked.
“No, but you were. Way I see it, you got no kick coming. So don’t beg. I’ve heard it before. Same words from the same people. It ain’t their fault. The world’s been picking on them. They’ll do anything to make it right.”
“My girlfriend is innocent. She wasn’t part of anything that happened at that church.”
“A child is created from its parents’ fornication. Ain’t none of us innocent.”
“What were you told to do to us?”
“None of your business.”
“You’re not on the same page as the guy in the SUV, though, are you?”
“That’s something you ain’t got to worry about.”
“That’s right. I don’t. But you do,” Pete said.
Pete saw T-Bone wet his bottom lip. A drop of blood from the cut under his eye slipped down his cheek, as though a red line were being drawn there with an invisible pencil. “Say that over.”
“Why would Hugo send you after us and not tell Bobby Lee? Bobby Lee is working on his own, isn’t he? How’s the guy named Preacher fit into all this?”
T-Bone glanced sideways, the shine of fear in his eyes. “How much you know about Preacher?”
“If Bobby Lee is working with him, where’s that leave you?”
T-Bone sucked in his cheeks as though they were full of moisture. But Pete guessed that in reality, his mouth was as dry as cotton. The dust from the SUV was corkscrewing in the pickup’s headlights. “You’re a smart one, all right. But for a guy who’s so dadburned smart, it must be strange to find yourself in your current situation. Another thing I cain’t figure out: I talked with your girlfriend at the steak house. How’d a guy who looks like a fried chitling end up with a hot piece of ass like that?”
Up ahead, the brake lights on the SUV lit up as brightly as embers inside the dust. To the south, the ridges and mesas that flanged the Rio Grande were purple and gray and blue and cold-looking against the night sky.
Bobby Lee got out of his vehicle and walked back to the truck, his nine-millimeter dangling from his right hand. “Cut your lights and turn off your engine,” he said.
“What are we doing?”
“There’s no ‘we.’” Bobby Lee’s cell phone hung from a cord looped over his neck.
“I thought we were working together. Call Hugo. Call Artie. Straighten this out.”
Bobby Lee screwed the muzzle of a nine-millimeter against T-Bone’s temple. The hammer was already cocked, the butterfly safety off.
“You use your nine on your—”
“That’s right, I do,” Bobby Lee said. “A fourteen-rounder, manufactured before the bunny huggers got them banned. Hand me your piece, butt-first.”
T-Bone lifted his hand to eye level, his fingers clamped across the frame of his .25. Bobby Lee took it from him and dropped it in his pocket. “Who’s down here with you?”
“A couple of new people. Maybe Hugo’s around. I don’t know. Maybe—”
“Maybe what?”
“There’s a lot of interest in Preacher.”
Bobby Lee removed the nine-millimeter’s muzzle from T-Bone’s temple, leaving a red circle that seemed to glow against the bone. “Get out.”
T-Bone stepped carefully from the door. “I was supposed to grab the girl and call Hugo and not do anything to her. I didn’t pull it off, so I saw the kid carrying his groceries on the road, and I took a chance.”
Bobby Lee was silent, busy with thoughts inside of which people lived or died or were left somewhere in between; his thoughts shaped and reshaped themselves, sorting out different scenarios that, in seconds, could result in a situation no human being wanted to experience.
“If you see Preacher—” T-Bone said.
“I’ll see him.”
“I just carry out orders.”
“Do I need to jot that down so I got the wording right?”
“I ain’t worth it, Bobby Lee.”
“Worth what?”
“Whatever.”
“Tell me what ‘whatever’ is.”
“Why you doing this to me?”
“Because you piss me off.”
“What’d I do?”
“You remind me of a zero. No, a zero is a thing, a circle with air inside it. You make me think of something that’s less than a zero.”
T-Bone’s gaze wandered out into the pasture. More Angus were moving into the arroyo. There were trees along the arroyo, and the shadows of the cattle seemed to dissolve into the trees’ shadows and enlarge and darken them at the same time. “It’s fixing to rain again. They always clump up before it rains.”
Bobby Lee was breathing through his nose, his eyes unfocused, strained, as though someone were shining a light into them.
T-Bone closed his eyes, and his voice made a clicking sound, but no words came from his throat. Then
he hawked loudly and spat a bloody clot on the ground. “I got ulcers.”
Bobby Lee didn’t speak.
“Don’t shoot me in the face,” T-Bone said.
“Turn around.”
“Bobby Lee.”
“If you look back, if you call Hugo, if you contact anybody about this, I’m gonna do to you what you did to that Mexican you tied up in that house in Zaragoza. Your truck stays here. Don’t ever come in this county again.”
“How do I know you’re not—”
“If you’re still sucking air after about forty yards, you’ll know.”
Bobby Lee rested his forearm on the truck window and watched T-Bone walk away. He slowly turned his gaze on Pete. “What are you looking at?”
“Not a whole lot.”
“You think this is funny? You think you’re cute?”
“What I think is you’re standing up to your bottom lip in your own shit.”
“I’m the best friend you got, boy.”
“Then you’re right. I’m in real trouble. Tell you what. Pop me out of this safety belt, and I’ll accept your surrender.”
Bobby Lee walked around to the other side of the vehicle and opened the door. He pulled a switchblade from his jeans and flicked it open. He sliced the safety strap in half, the nine-millimeter in his right hand, then stepped back. “Get on your face.”
Pete stepped out on the ground, got to his knees, and lay on his chest, the smell of the grass and the earth warm in his face. He twisted his head around.
“Eyes front,” Bobby Lee said, pressing his foot between Pete’s shoulder blades. “Put your hands behind you.”
“Where’s Vikki?”
Bobby Lee didn’t reply. He stooped over and hooked a handcuff on each of Pete’s wrists, squeezing the teeth of the ratchets as deep as he could into the locking mechanism. “Get up.”
“At the A.A. meeting, you said you were in Iraq.”
“What about it?”
“You don’t have to do this stuff.”
“Here’s a news flash for you. Every flag is the same color. The color is black. No quarter, no mercy, it’s ‘burn, motherfucker, burn.’ Tell me I’m full of shit.”
“You were kicked out of the army, weren’t you?”
“Close your mouth, boy.”
“That guy, T-Bone, you saw yourself in him. That’s why you wanted to tear him apart.”
“Maybe I can work you in as a substitute.”
Bobby Lee opened the back door of the SUV and shoved Pete inside. He slammed the door and lifted the cell phone from the cord that hung around his neck, punching the speed dial with his thumb. “I got the package,” he said.
22
VIKKI DRIED HERSELF and wrapped the towel around her body and began brushing her teeth. The mirror was heavily fogged, the heat and moisture from her shower escaping through the partially opened door into the bedroom. She thought she heard a movement, perhaps a door closing, a half-spoken sentence trailing into nothingness. She squeezed the handle on the faucet, shutting off the water, her toothbrush stationary in her mouth. She set the toothbrush in a water glass. “Pete?” she said.
There was no response. She tucked the towel more securely around her. “Is that you?” she said.
She heard electronic laughter through the wall and realized the people in the next room, a Hispanic couple with two teenage children, had once again turned up the volume on their television to full jet-engine mode.
She opened the door wide and tied a hand towel around her head as she walked into the bedroom. She had left only one light burning, a lamp by the table in the far corner. It created more shadows than it did illumination and softened the neediness of the room—the bedspread that she avoided touching, the sun-faded curtains, the brown water spots on the ceiling, the molding that had cracked away from the window jambs.
She felt his presence before she actually saw him, in the same way one encounters a faceless presence in a dream, a protean figure without origins, from an unknown place, who can walk through walls and locked doors, and in this instance place himself in the cloth-covered chair by the closet, on the far side of the bed, the only telephone in the room two feet from his hand.
He had made himself comfortable, one leg crossed on his knee, his pin-striped suit in need of pressing, his white shirt starched, his shoes buffed, his knit necktie not quite knotted, his shave done without a mirror. Like the dream figure, he was a study in contradiction, his shabby elegance not quite real, his rectangularity that of a grandiose poseur sitting in a soup kitchen.
He kept his eyes on hers and did not lower them to her body, but she could see the flicker of hunger around his mouth, the hollows in his cheeks, his suppressed need to lick his tongue across his bottom lip.
“You,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I hoped I would never see you again.”
“Worse men than I are looking for you, missy.”
“Don’t you talk down to me.”
“You don’t wonder how I got in?”
“I don’t care how you got in. You’re here. Now you need to leave.”
“But that’s not likely, is it?”
“By your foot.”
“What?”
“What’s that by your foot?”
He looked down at the carpet. “This?”
“Yes.”
“A twenty-two derringer. But it’s not for you. If I were a different sort of fellow, it might be. But it’s not.” He cupped his hand to lift his leg gingerly off his knee and set it down. “You did me up proper on the highway.”
“I stopped to help you because I thought you had a flat. You repaid the kindness by trying to abduct me.”
“I don’t ‘abduct’ people, miss. Or Ms.”
“Excuse me. You kill them.”
“I have. When they came after me. When they tried to kill me first. When they were part of a higher plan that I didn’t have control over. Sit down. Do you want your bathrobe?”
“I don’t have one.”
“Sit down anyway.”
She felt as if a hot coal had been placed on her scalp. Moisture was leaking out of the towel she had wrapped on her head. Her face stung, and her eyes burned. She could feel drops of sweat networking down her thighs like lines of ants. His eyes dropped to her loins, then he looked away quickly and pretended to be distracted by the noise the air conditioner made. She sat down at the small table against the wall, her knees close together, her arms folded across her chest. “Where’s Pete?” she asked.
“He was rescued by a friend of mine.”
“Rescued?” She paused and said the word a second time. “Rescued?” She could taste the acidity in her saliva when she spoke.
“Do you want me to leave without resolving our problem? Do you want to leave Pete’s situation undecided? He’s out there somewhere on a dark road in the hands of a man who believes he’s a descendant of Robert E. Lee.”
“Who are you a descendant of? Who the fuck are you?”
The fingers of Preacher’s right hand twitched slightly. “People don’t speak to me that way.”
“You think a mass killer deserves respect?”
“You don’t know me. Maybe I have qualities you’re not aware of.”
“Did you ever fight for your country?”
“You might say in my own way I have. But I don’t make claims for myself.”
“Pete was burned in his tank. But the real damage to him happened when he came back home and met you and the other criminals you work with.”
“Your friend is a fool or he wouldn’t be in this trouble. I don’t appreciate the coarseness of your remarks to me.”
Again she could feel a pool of heat building inside her head, as though the sun were burning through her skull, cooking her blood, pushing her out on the edges of a place she had never been. Her towel was starting to slip loose, and she gathered it more tightly around her, pressing its dampness against her skin with her arms.
�
�I’d like for you to go away with me. I’d like to make up for any harm I did to you. Don’t speak, just listen,” he said. “I have money. I’m fairly well educated for a man without much formal schooling. I have manners, and I know how to care for a fine woman. I have a rented house on a mountaintop outside Guadalajara. You could have anything you want there. There would be no demands on you, sexual or otherwise.”
She thought she heard a train in the distance, the massive weight and power of the locomotive grinding dully on the track, the vibrations spreading through the hardpan like the steady tremors given off by an abscessed wisdom tooth.
“Give Pete back to me. Don’t hurt him,” she said.
“What will you give me in turn?”
“Take my life.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“I put two bullets in you.”
“You don’t know me very well.”
“You know why you’re here. Go ahead and do it. I won’t resist you. Just leave Pete alone.” Her eyes seemed to go in and out of focus, the room shimmering, a dark liquid swelling up from her stomach into her throat.
“You offend me.”
“Your thoughts are an offense, and you don’t hide them well.”
“What thoughts? What are you talking about?” The skin under his left eye wrinkled, like putty drying up.
“The thoughts you don’t want to admit are yours. The secret desires you mask with your cruelty. You make me think of diseased tissue with insects crawling on it. Your glands are filled with rut, but you pretend to be a gentleman wishing to care for and protect a woman. It’s embarrassing to look at the starvation in your face.”
“Starvation? For a woman who insults me? Who thinks she can tongue-lash me after I saved her from a man like Hugo Cistranos? That’s right, Hugo plans to kill you and your boyfriend. You want me to hit the speed dial on my cell phone? I can introduce your friend to an experience neither of you can imagine.”
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