“I need to get dressed. I don’t want you to watch me.”
“Dressed to go where?”
“Out. Away from you.”
“You think you’re controlling the events that are about to happen around you? Are you that naive?”
“My clothes are in the dresser. I’m going to take them into the bathroom and dress. Don’t come in there. Don’t look at me while I’m removing my clothes from the drawer, either. After I’m dressed, I’ll be going somewhere. I’m not sure where. But it won’t be with you. Maybe I’ll end here, in this room, in this dirty room, in this godforsaken place on the edge of hell. But you won’t be a part of it, you piece of shit.”
His facial expression seemed divided in half, as though his motor controls were shutting down and the muscles on one side of his face were collapsing. His right hand trembled. “You have no right to say these things.”
“Kill me or get out. I can’t stand being around you.”
He stooped over and picked up the blue-black white-handled derringer from the carpet. He was breathing raggedly through his nose, his eyes small and hot under his brow. He approached her slowly, his white shirt catching the pink glow of the neon outside the window, giving his face a rosy hue it didn’t possess on its own. He stood in front of her, his stomach flat behind his shirt and his tightly notched belt, an odor of dried perspiration wafting from his suit. “Say that last part again.”
“I hate being in the presence of a man like you. You’re what every woman dreads. Your physical touch causes nausea.”
He lifted the barrel of the derringer to her mouth. Through the wall, she could hear the electronic laughter from the neighbor’s television set. She could hear the locomotive pulling a mile-long string of gondolas and boxcars between the hills, the reverberations shaking the foundation of the motel. She could hear Preacher’s dry exhalations just above her forehead. He put his left hand under her chin and lifted her line of vision to his. When she tried to turn away, he pinched her jaws and jerked her head straight. “Look into my eyes.”
“No.”
“You’re afraid?”
“No. Yes.”
“Of what?”
“Of what I’ll see there. You’re evil. I think you carry the abyss inside you.”
“That’s a lie.”
“In your sleep, you hear a howling wind, don’t you? It’s like the sound the wind makes at night on the ocean. Except the wind is inside you. I read a poem once by William Blake. It was about the worm that flies at night in the howling storm. I think he was writing about you.”
He released her, almost flinging her face from his hand. “I couldn’t care less about your literary experience. It’s you who’s the agent of the devil. It’s inherent in your gender. From Eden to the present.”
Her head was lowered, her arms still folded across her bosom, her back starting to tremble. He reached in his pocket with his left hand. She felt something touch her cheek. “Take it,” he said.
She showed no response other than to wrap herself more tightly in her own skin, and curl her shoulders and spine into a tighter ball, and keep her eyes fixed on the tops of her folded arms.
He pushed an object that was both sharp and yielding against her cheek, jabbing the jawbone, trying to force her head up. “I said take it.”
“No.”
“There’s six hundred dollars in the clip. Cross into Chihuahua. But don’t stop till you get to Durango. Hugo Cistranos’s people are everywhere. South of Durango, you’ll be safe.” He held the money clip with two fingers in front of her. “Go ahead. No strings.”
She spat on the money clip and on the bills and on his fingers. Then she began to weep. In the silence that followed, the pink glow of his shirt and the odor of his perspiration and the proximity of his loins to her face seemed to crush the air out of her lungs, as though the only reality in the world were the figure of Preacher Jack Collins hovering inches from her skin. She had never realized that silence could be so loud. She believed its intensity was like the creaking sounds a drowning person hears as he sinks to the bottom of a deep lake.
He traced the double muzzles of the derringer across her temple and hairline and along her cheek. She closed her eyes, and for a moment she thought she heard the electronic laughter from the television set subsumed by a train engine blowing through a tunnel, its whistle screaming off the walls, a lighted dining car filled with revelers disappearing into the darkness.
When she opened her eyes, she saw a cell phone in his hand, saw his thumb touch a single button, saw the phone go out of her line of vision toward his ear. “Cut him loose,” he said.
Then the room was quiet again, and she felt the hot wind of the desert puffing through the door and saw an eighteen-wheeler driving by on the state highway, its trailer outlined with strings of festive lights, the stars winking above the hills.
EVEN BEFORE THE sun had broken the edge of the horizon, Hackberry Holland knew the temperature would reach a hundred degrees by noon. The influence of the rainstorm and the promise it had offered had proved illusory. The heat had lain in abeyance through the night, collecting in stone and warm concrete and sandy river bottoms that boiled with grasshoppers; at dawn it had come alive again, rising with the sun inside a warm blanket of humidity that shimmered on the fields and hills and made the eyes water when you stared too long at the horizon.
At seven-thirty A.M. Hackberry raised the flag on the pole in front of his office, then went inside and tried again to reach Ethan Riser. He did not know what had happened to Pete Flores since Pete had called from a phone booth and told Hackberry he remembered one letter and two numbers from Jack Collins’s car tag, or at least the tag of the tan Honda that Flores had showered rocks on. Hackberry had given the Texas DMV the single letter and two digits and asked that they run every combination possible through the computer until they found a match with a Honda. He had also called Riser and told him of the call from Flores.
The DMV had come back with 173 possibles. Riser not only did not get back to him; he had stopped returning Hackberry’s calls altogether. Which raised another question: Was Riser like too many of his colleagues, cooperative and helpful as long as the locals were useful, then down the road and gone after he got what he needed?
Or maybe Riser had been told by his superiors to stay away from Hackberry and worry less about local problems and concentrate on putting Josef Sholokoff out of business.
On occasion, federal agencies practiced a form of triage that went beyond the pragmatic into a marginal area that was one step short of ruthless. Psychopaths were sprung from custody without their victims or the prosecution’s witnesses being notified. People who had trusted the system with their lives discovered they had been used and discarded as casually as someone flicking away a cigarette butt. Most of these people usually had the power and social importance of fish chum.
By ten A.M. Hackberry had left two messages with Riser. He opened his desk drawer and removed a thick brown envelope that contained the eight-by-ten crime-scene photos taken behind the church at Chapala Crossing. Besides their morbid subject matter, the photos contained a second kind of peculiarity: None of the uniformed deputies, the paramedics, the federal personnel, or the forensic team from Austin wore any expression. In photo after photo, their faces were empty of emotion, their mouths down-hooked at the corners, as though they were playing roles in a film that was not supposed to make use of sound or any display of feeling. The only photography he could compare it with was the black-and-white news footage taken during the mass burials at the death camps liberated by American forces in early 1945.
He returned the photos to the drawer.
What had happened to Pete Flores and Vikki Gaddis? What was the next move Preacher Jack Collins would make? What kind of cage could contain the evil that had perpetrated the slaughter at Chapala Crossing?
AT TWO-THIRTY THAT afternoon Danny Boy Lorca was driving his converted army-surplus flatbed truck up the two-lane from the Mexican b
order, the wind as hot as a blowtorch through the window, the unmuffled roar of the engine shaking the cab, his fuel gauge ticking on empty. He saw the hitchhikers in the distance, standing on the roadside between two low hills whose sides had been scorched by a wildfire. There was no other traffic on the road. The outlines of the two hitchhikers were warping in the heat, the glaze on the road like a pool of tar. As he drew closer, he realized one of the hitchhikers was a woman. A guitar case rested by her foot. Her denim shirt was pasted to her skin with perspiration. The man next to her wore a coned-up straw hat and a shirt he had sawed off at the armpits. The top of one arm was wrinkled with scar tissue that looked like the material in an overheated lampshade.
Danny Boy pulled to the side of the road, glancing warily in the rearview mirror. “Y’all came back,” he said through the passenger window.
“Will you give us a ride?” the woman asked.
Danny Boy never answered questions whose answer seemed obvious, in the same way he did not say hello or goodbye to people when their actions or presence were obvious.
Pete Flores swung a duffel bag onto the truck bed and placed Vikki’s guitar case between it and the cab. He opened the passenger door, blowing on his hand after he did, waiting for Vikki to get inside. “Wow,” he said, looking at his hand. “How long has your truck been in the sun?”
“It’s a hunnerd and seven,” Danny Boy said.
“Thank you for stopping,” Vikki said.
Pete climbed inside and shut the door. He started to offer his hand, but Danny Boy was concentrating on the wide-angle mirror.
“You know the cops are looking for you? Federal agents and state people and Sheriff Holland, too. A federal agent got killed.”
“I reckon they found us,” Pete said.
Danny Boy pulled back onto the road, his shirt open on his leathery chest, his neck beaded with dirt rings. “Maybe this ain’t the best place for y’all.”
“We don’t have any other place to go,” Pete said.
“If it was me, I’d get on a freight and go to Canada and follow the harvest, maybe. A cook on them crews can make good money. I’d find a place that ain’t been ruined and settle down.”
Pete stuck his arm out the window, turning his palm into the airflow so it would vane up his arm and inside his shirt. “We’re working on it,” he said.
“Them people you got mixed up with? They’re out there.”
“Which people? Out where?” Vikki asked.
“They’re out there at night. They come up the arroyos. They ain’t wets, either. They go past my place. I see them in the field.”
“Those are harmless farmworkers,” Pete said.
“No, they ain’t. See the sky. We had one night of hard rain, the way it used to be. But we didn’t get no more. Them rain gods were giving us a chance. But they ain’t coming back while all these drug dealers and killers are here. There’s a hole in the earth, and down inside it is the place where all the corn came from. That’s where all power comes from. Don’t nobody know where the hole is anymore.”
Vikki looked sideways at Pete.
“Tell her,” Danny Boy said.
“Tell her what?”
“That I ain’t drunk.”
“She knows that. Danny Boy is okay, Vikki.” Pete gazed out the window, the wind climbing up his bare arm, puffing inside his shirt. “That’s Ouzel Flagler’s place. I wish I hadn’t been there when some bad hombres came in.”
“That’s where you met them guys?”
“Probably. I’m not sure. I was in a blackout most of the day. I know I bought mescal from Ouzel that day. Ouzel’s mescal always leaves its mark, like an earth grader has rolled over your head.”
Ouzel Flagler’s brick bungalow, cracked down the middle, with a plank bar built on one side of the house, was veiled briefly by a cloud of dust blowing off the hardpan, balls of tumbleweed skipping across its roof. Under a white sun, amid the tangled wire and all the rusted construction equipment Ouzel had hauled onto his property, a cluster of rheumy-eyed longhorns was standing by a recessed pool of rainwater, the sides of the depression strung with green feces.
“Don’t look at it,” Vikki said.
“At what?”
“That place. It’s not part of your life anymore.”
“What I did that night is on me, not on Ouzel.”
“Will you stop talking about it, Pete? Will you just stop talking about it?”
“I got to get gas up yonder,” Danny Boy said.
“No, not here,” Vikki said.
Danny Boy looked at her, his eyes sleepy, the muscles in his face flaccid. “The needle is below the E. It’s three miles to the next station.”
“Why didn’t you tell us you were out of gas when we got in?” she said.
Danny Boy shifted down and angled the truck off the road into the filling station, steering with his hands in the ten-two position, bent slightly forward like a student driver beginning his first solo, his face impassive. “You can walk across the highway and maybe catch a ride while I’m inside,” he said. “I got to use the restroom. I forgot to tell you about that when you got in, even though it’s my truck. If you don’t have a ride by the time I leave, I’ll pick y’all up again.”
“We’ll wait in the truck. I’m sorry,” Vikki said.
Danny Boy went inside the station and paid for ten dollars’ gas in advance.
“Why were you getting on his case?” Pete said.
“Ouzel Flagler’s brother owns this station.”
“Who cares?”
“Pete, you never learn. You just never learn.”
“Learn what? About Ouzel? He has Buerger’s disease. He’s a sad person. He sells a little mescal. What’s the big deal? You stood up to that killer. I’m really proud of you. We don’t have to be afraid anymore.”
“Please shut up. For God’s sake, for once just shut up.” She blotted the humidity out of her eyes with a Kleenex and stared at the highway winding into the sun’s white brilliance. The terrain, untouched by shade or shadows, glaring and coarse and rock-strewn, made her think of a dry seabed and huge anthills or a planet that had already gone dead.
Danny Boy pulled the gas spigot out of the tank and clanked it back into place on the pump, then used the outside washroom and climbed back into the cab, his face still wet from a rinse in the lavatory. “On a day like this, ain’t nothing like cold water,” he said.
None of them took note of the man on the other side of the black glare on the filling station window. He had just come out of the back of the store and was drinking a soda, upending it, his neck swollen by a chain of tumors. His head seemed recessed into his shoulders, reminiscent of a perched carrion bird’s. He finished his soda, dropped the can into the wastebasket, and seemed to think for a long time. Then he picked up the telephone.
23
PETE AND VIKKI had climbed down from Danny Boy Lorca’s truck cab, retrieved a duffel bag and guitar case from the truck bed, and entered the building dehydrated, sunburned, and windblown with road grit. Their clothes stiff with salt, they sat down in front of Hackberry’s desk as though his air-conditioned office were the end of a long journey out of the Sahara. They told him of their encounter with Preacher Jack Collins and Bobby Lee and the man named T-Bone and the fact that Collins had let them go.
“We got on the bus early this morning, but it broke down after twenty miles. So we hitchhiked,” Pete said.
“Collins just cut you loose? He didn’t harm you in any way?” Hackberry let his gaze linger on Vikki Gaddis.
“It happened just like we told you,” Vikki said.
“Where do you think Collins went?” Hackberry asked.
“Collins is y’all’s business now. Tell us what you want us to do,” Pete said.
“I haven’t quite thought it through,” Hackberry said.
“Repeat that, please?” Vikki said.
“I’ve got two empty cells. Go up the iron stairs in back and check them out.”
&nbs
p; “You’re offering us jail cells?” she said.
“The doors would stay unlocked. You can come and go as you like.”
“I don’t believe this,” she said.
“You can use the restroom and the shower down here,” Hackberry said.
“Pete, would you say something?” Vikki said.
“Maybe it’s not a bad idea,” he replied.
Pam Tibbs came into the office and leaned against the doorjamb. “I’ll go with you, honey.”
“With luck, we can probably find an iron staircase by ourselves,” Vikki said. “Excuse me, I forgot to call you ‘honey.’”
“Suit yourself, ma’am,” Pam said. She waited until they were out of earshot before she spoke again. “How do you read all that stuff about Collins and Bobby Lee Motree and this character T-Bone?”
“Who knows? Collins probably has psychotic episodes.”
“Vikki Gaddis has a mouth on her, doesn’t she?”
“They’re just kids,” Hackberry said.
“That doesn’t mean you should put your ass in a sling for them.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Maydeen Stoltz walked into the room. “Ethan Riser is on the phone. Want me to take a message?”
“Where’s he calling from?” Hackberry asked.
“He didn’t say.”
“Ask him if he’s in town.”
“Like that? ‘Are you in town?’”
“Yeah, tell him I want to ask him to dinner. Would you please do it, Maydeen?”
She went back into the dispatcher’s office, then returned. “He’s in San Antonio.”
“Put him through.”
“I’m going to get a job on a spaceship,” she said.
A moment later, the light on Hackberry’s desk phone went on, and he picked up the receiver. “Hey, Ethan. How are you?”
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