“Don’t fret yourself about it.”
“Those bikers Preacher hosed down?”
“What about them?”
“They worked for Josef Sholokoff?”
“Could be, but they’re not our concern,” Hugo said, cupping his hand on T-Bone’s shoulder. T-Bone had sweated through his clothes, and his shirt felt as soggy as a wet washcloth. Hugo wiped his palm on his trousers. He looked down at the top of the willow tree and at the sandy-red stream and at the black minister and his congregants, who seemed distracted by something the white couple were doing.
“Get ready,” Hugo said.
“For what?”
“Our friends are about to make their move. Put a little more of your heart in it. That boy down there made a fool out of you, didn’t he?”
“I never said that. I said Bobby Lee double-crossed us. I never said anybody made a fool out of me. People don’t make a fool out of me.”
“Sorry, I just misspoke.”
“I don’t like this. This whole gig is wrong.”
“We take them now. Concentrate on your shot. The priority is the boy. Take the girl if you can. Do it, T-Bone. This is one thing you’re really good at. I’m proud of you.”
T-Bone wrapped the rifle sling around his left forearm and clicked off the safety. He moved into a more comfortable position, his left elbow anchored in a sandy spot free of sharp rocks, the steel toes of his hobnailed work shoes dug into the hillside, his scrotum tingling against the ground.
“There they go. Take the shot,” Hugo said.
“The minister is walking a little girl into the creek.”
“Take the shot.”
“Flores and the girl are holding hands. I cain’t see for a clear shot.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The minister and a little girl are right behind them.”
“Take the shot.”
“Stop yelling.”
“You want me to do it? Take the shot.”
“There’s colored people everywhere. You whack them and it’s a hate crime.”
“They can afford to lose a few. Take the shot.”
“I’m trying.”
“Give me the rifle.”
“I’ll do it. Let them get clear.” T-Bone raised the barrel slightly, leading his target, his unshaved jaw pressed into the stock, his left eye squinted shut. “Ah, beautiful. Yes, yes, yes. So long, alligator boy.”
But he didn’t pull the trigger.
“What happened?” Hugo said.
T-Bone pulled back from the crest, his face glistening and empty, like that of a starving man who had just been denied access to the table. “They went up the steps into the back of the church. I lost them in the gloom. I didn’t have anything but a slop shot.”
Hugo hit the flat of his fist on the ground, his teeth gritted.
“It’s not my fault,” T-Bone said.
“Whose is it?”
T-Bone worked the bolt on his rifle and opened the breech, ejecting the unfired round. It was a soft-nosed .30-06, its brass case a dull gold in the twilight. He fitted it back into the magazine with his thumb and eased the bolt back into place and locked it down so the chamber was empty. He rolled on his back and squinted up at Hugo, his eyelashes damp with perspiration. “You bother me.”
“I bother you?”
“Yeah.”
“You care to tell me why?”
“’Cause I never saw you scared before. Has ole Jack Collins got you in his sights? ’Cause if you ask me, somebody has got you plumb scared to death.”
25
WHEN HACKBERRY GOT back home from the grocery store in town, the sun had melted into a brassy pool somewhere behind the hills far to the west of his property. The blades on his windmill were unchained and ginning rapidly in the evening breeze, and inside the shadows on his south pasture, he could see well water gushing from a pipe into the horse tank. Once again he thought he smelled an odor of chrysanthemums or leakage from a gas well on the wind, or perhaps it was lichen or toadstools, the kind that grew carpetlike inside perennial shade, often on graves.
For many years Saturday nights had not boded well for him. After sunset he became acutely aware of his wife’s absence, the lack of sound and light she had always created in the kitchen while she prepared a meal they would eat on the backyard picnic table. Their pleasures had always been simple ones: time with their children; the movies they saw every Saturday night in town, no matter what was playing, at a theater where Lash La Rue had once performed onstage with his coach whip; attending Mass at a rural church where the homily was always in Spanish; weeding their flower beds together and, in the spring, planting vegetables from seed packets, staking the empty packets, crisp and stiff, at the end of each seeded row.
When he thought too long on any of these things, he was filled with such an unrelieved sense of loss that he would call out in the silence, sharply and without shame, lest he commit an act that was more than foolish. Or he would telephone his son the boat skipper in Key West or the other twin, the oncologist, in Phoenix, and pretend he was checking up on them. Did they need help buying a new home? What about starting up a college fund for the grandchildren? Were the kingfish running? Would the grandkids like to go look for the Lost Dutchman’s mine in the Superstitions?
They were good sons and invited him to their homes and visited him whenever they could, but Saturday night alone was still Saturday night alone, and the silence in the house could be louder than echoes in a tomb.
Hackberry hefted the grocery sacks and two boxed hot pizzas from his truck and carried them through the back door of the house into the kitchen.
Pete Flores and Vikki Gaddis were waiting for him at the breakfast table, both of them obviously tense, their mouths and cheeks soft, as though they were rehearsing unspoken words on their tongues. In fact, inside the ambience of scrubbed Formica and plastic-topped and porcelain perfection that was Hackberry’s kitchen, they had the manner of people who had wandered in off the highway and had to explain their presence. If they had been smokers, an ashtray full of cigarette butts would have been smoldering close by; their hands would have been busy lighting fresh cigarettes, snapping lighters shut; they would have blown streams of smoke out the sides of their mouths and feigned indifference to the trouble they had gotten themselves into. Instead, their forearms were pressed flat on the yellow table, and there was a glitter in their eyes that made him think of children who were about to be ordered by a cruel parent to cut their own switch.
Whatever was bothering them, Hackberry did not appreciate being treated as a presumption or an authority figure with whom they had to reconcile their behavior. He set the groceries and the pizza boxes on the table. “What did I miss out on?”
“Somebody was trying to take a shot at us,” Pete said.
“Where?”
“Up yonder from your north pasture. On the other side of a hill. There’s a church house by a stream.”
“You said ‘trying.’ You saw the shooter?”
“We saw the laser sight,” Pete said.
“What were y’all doing at the church?”
“Taking a walk,” Vikki said.
“Y’all just strolled on up the road?”
“That about says it,” Pete replied.
“Even though I said stick close by the house?”
“We were watching some people get baptized. We were sitting under a willow tree. Vikki saw the red dot on my face and on her hand, then I saw it on the ground,” Pete said.
“You’re sure?”
“How do you mistake something like that?” Pete said.
“Why wouldn’t the shooter fire?”
“Maybe he was afraid of hitting one of the black people,” Pete said.
“The bunch we’re dealing with doesn’t have those kinds of reservations,” Hackberry said.
“You think we made this up?” Vikki said. “You think we want to be here?”
Hackberry went to the sink and w
ashed his hands, lathering his skin well up on his arms, rinsing them a long time, drying the water with two squares of thick paper towel, his back turned to his guests so they could not see his expression. When he turned around again, his neutral demeanor was back in place. His gaze dropped to Pete’s pants legs. “You ran across the creek?” he said.
“Yes, sir. Then on inside the church house. You could say we were bagging ass.”
“You think it was Jack Collins?”
“No,” Vikki said. “He’s done with us.”
“How do you know what’s in the head of a lunatic?” Hackberry said.
“Collins let us live, so now he feels he’s stronger than we are. He won’t test himself again,” she said. “He tried to give me money. I spit on his money and I spit on him. He’s not a lunatic. Everything he does is about pride. He won’t risk losing it again.”
“So who was the guy with the laser sight?” Hackberry said.
“It’s got to be Hugo Cistranos,” Pete said.
“I think you’re right,” Hackberry said. He opened the top on one of the boxed pizzas. “You spat on Jack Collins?”
“You think that’s funny?” she said.
“No, I did the same. Maybe he’s getting used to it,” he said.
“Where you going, Sheriff?” Pete said.
“To make a phone call.” Hackberry walked through the hallway toward the small room in back that he used as a home office. He heard footsteps behind him.
“I apologize for my rudeness,” Vikki said. “You’ve been very kind to us. My father was a police officer. I’m aware of the professional risk you’re taking on our behalf.”
Better hang on to this one, Pete, Hackberry thought. He sat behind his desk and called Maydeen at the department and told her to put a cruiser on his house. Then he left messages at both of the phone numbers he had for Ethan Riser. Through the side window, he had a fine view of his south pasture. His quarter horses and the windmill and poplar trees were silhouetted against the purple coloring in the west like dimly backlit components in an ink wash. But the fading of the light, the gray aura that seemed to rise from the grass, gave him a sense of terminus that was like a knife blade in his chest. If the two young people had not been staying with him, he would have driven to town and visited his wife’s grave, regardless of the hour.
In some ways, Vikki Gaddis and Pam Tibbs reminded him of Rie. Rie’s detractors had called her a Communist and jailed her and her friends and turned a blind eye to the acts of violence done to them inside and outside of jail, but never once did she allow herself to be afraid.
Hackberry turned off his desk lamp and looked through the window into the darkness that seemed to be spreading across the land. Was it a suggestion of the Great Shade that we all feared? he wondered. Or a visual harbinger of what some called end-times, that morbid apocalyptical obsession of fanatics who seemed to delight in the possibility of the world’s destruction?
But the greater question, the one that sank his heart, was whether or not he would ever see his wife again, on the other side, reaching through the light to take his hand and ease him across.
The phone made his face jerk. It was Ethan Riser.
“I’m returning your call. What’s up?” Riser said.
“Hugo Cistranos may be in my neighborhood,” Hackberry said. “What kind of leash did you have on this guy?”
“You’re asking me if he’s under surveillance?”
“I know you have him tapped. Where is he?”
“I don’t know. Somebody saw him?”
“We may have a guy with a laser sight in the neighborhood, but I can’t confirm that. Have you gotten any more feedback on those license numbers that may belong to Jack Collins?”
“I’m at my granddaughter’s wedding reception right now. I returned your call as a professional courtesy. Either tell me specifically what is on your mind or call me back during business hours on Monday.”
“I need your assurances about Pete Flores.”
“In regard to what?”
“If I bring him in, you don’t stuff him into the wood chipper.”
“We don’t stuff people in wood chippers.”
“Sell that stuff to somebody else.” The line was silent. Hackberry felt a rush of blood in his head that made him dizzy. He swallowed until his mouth was dry again and waited for the tautness to go out of his throat before he spoke. “Flores didn’t see the mass killing. All he can do is put Cistranos at the scene. You already know Cistranos is dirty on the mass homicide. You must have wiretap evidence by this time. You must have information from CIs. Maybe you’ve already flipped Arthur Rooney. I think the only reason you haven’t picked up Cistranos is he’s bait. You don’t need the kid, do you?”
“If you’re in contact with Pete Flores, you tell him he’d better get his ass into an FBI office.”
“That kid got fried in a tank because he believed in his country. You think he belongs in a federal prison or a place like Huntsville?”
“I’d like to say it’s been good talking to you. But instead, I think I’ll just say goodbye.”
“Don’t blow me off, Agent Riser. You guys are determined to hang Josef Sholokoff from a meat hook, and you don’t care how you get him there.”
But Hackberry was already talking to a dead connection.
EARLY SUNDAY MORNING, the sun was barely above the hills when Pam Tibbs turned the cruiser, with Hackberry in the passenger seat, in to Ouzel Flagler’s place. They rumbled across the cattle guard, the cloud of dust from the cruiser drifting back amid the junked farm tractors and construction machinery and rusted-out tankers and tangles of fence wire strewn over the property. The Sunday-morning quiet was starkly palpable, almost unnatural, in its contrast to the visual reminders of Ouzel’s customers’ Saturday-night fun at the blind-pig bar he operated: beer cans and red plastic cups and fast-food containers scattered across a half acre, a discarded condom flattened into a tire track, ashtrays and at least one dirty plastic diaper dumped on the ground.
“We’re not any too soon,” Hackberry said, peering through the windshield.
Ouzel and his wife and two grandchildren were exiting the side door of their house. All of them were dressed for church, Ouzel in brown shoes and a blue tie dotted with dozens of tiny white stars and a dark polyester suit that shone as brightly as grease.
“You want to take him in?” Pam asked.
But Hackberry’s attention was fixed on the abandoned machinery.
“Did you hear me?”
“I think I underestimated Ouzel’s potential,” he replied. “Cut off his vehicle. Keep his wife away from a phone while I talk to him.”
“You look like somebody put thumbtacks in your breakfast cereal.”
“This place is really an eyesore, isn’t it? Why in the hell do we allow something like this to exist?”
She looked at him curiously. When they got out of the cruiser, she picked up her baton from between the seats and slipped it through the ring on her belt. Hackberry stepped in front of Ouzel, raising his hand. “Hold up, partner, you’ll have to be late for the sermon this morning,” he said.
“What’s wrong?” Ouzel said.
“Ask your family to go back inside. My deputy will stay with them.”
“We get too loud here last night?”
“Deputy Tibbs, leave me your baton,” Hackberry said.
She looked at him strangely again, then slipped the baton from its ring and handed it to him, her eyes lingering warily on his.
“I don’t know what’s going on here,” Ouzel said.
Pam placed her hands on the two small children’s shoulders and began walking them toward the side door. But the wife—a broad-faced, hulking peasant of a woman who was known for her bad disposition and her clean brown beautiful hair—did not move and stared straight into Hackberry’s face, her dark eyes like lumps of coal that were no long capable of giving off heat. “These are our grandkids,” she said.
“Yes?”
<
br /> “We take them to church because their mother won’t,” she said. “They’re good kids. They don’t need this.”
“Mrs. Flagler, you and your husband are not victims,” Hackberry said. “If you cared about those children, you wouldn’t be involved with criminals who transport heroin and crystal meth through your property. Now go back in your house and don’t come out until you’re told to.”
“You heard him, ma’am,” Pam said. Before she entered the Flagler house, she looked back over her shoulder at Hackberry, this time with genuine concern.
Ouzel’s Lexus was parked incongruously under a cottonwood tree, its tinted windows and waxed surfaces darkly splendid in the shade.
“You aren’t afraid birds will corrode your paint?” Hackberry said.
“I parked it there a few minutes ago so it’d be cool when we got in,” Ouzel said.
“There’s a man in the neighborhood with a laser-sighted rifle. I think you brought him here,” Hackberry said.
“I don’t know anything about that. No, sir, I don’t know anything about rifles. Never did. Never had much interest.” Ouzel’s gaze swept the great panorama of plains and mountains to the south, as though he were simply passing the time of day in idle conversation with a friend.
Hackberry placed the flat of his hand on the hood of the Lexus. Then he picked a leaf off a ventilator slit and let it blow away in the wind. “What’d it cost you, sixty grand, something like that?”
“It wasn’t that much. I got a deal.” Ouzel looked back at his house from the shadows the tree made. When he rotated his neck, the bulbous purple swellings in his throat raking against the stiffness of his collar, his small eyes sunk into black dots, Hackberry thought he could detect an odor that was reminiscent of a violated grave or the stench given off by an incinerator in which dead animals were burned. He wondered if he was starting to step across an invisible line.
“Why you staring at me like that?” Ouzel said.
“We let you skate on the sale of illegal booze because it was easier to keep an eye on you than it was to monitor a half-dozen vendors we couldn’t keep track of. But that was a big mistake on our part. You got mixed up with the dope traffickers across the river, and they’ve been using the back of your property as a corridor ever since. How much of your construction equipment is operational?”
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