“My wife is waiting dinner on me.”
“That’s funny, since you’re notorious for always closing the joint yourself and counting every penny in the till.”
“There a second meaning in that?”
Hugo drank from his carbonated water and chewed a cherry on the back of his teeth, his expression thoughtful. “No, there’s no second meaning there, Nicholas.” His tongue was bright red. He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and looked at the smear of color on it. “I hired some extra personnel that I need your advice about. A kid that’s proving to be a pain in the ass.” He leaned forward and squeezed Nick’s shoulder, his face suffused with warmth and intimacy. “I think it’s gonna rain. You’ll like the fresh smell in the air. It’ll get all that nicotine out of your clothes.”
Outside, the air was as Hugo had described it, scented with the possibility of a thunderstorm and the smell of watermelons in a field on the far side of live oaks at the back of Nick’s property. Nick walked in front of Hugo into a space between a Buick and Hugo’s big black SUV. Hugo propped one arm on the fender of his vehicle, blocking Nick’s view of the club. He wore a sport shirt and pleated white slacks and shined Italian shoes. In the electric glow from the overhead lamps, his propped forearm was taut and pale and wrapped with green veins.
“Artie Rooney is light nine chippies,” Hugo said.
“I don’t know anything about this,” Nick said.
Hugo scratched the back of his neck. His hair was ash-blond, streaked with red, like iodine, gelled and combed straight back so that his high forehead had a polished look resembling the prow of a ship. “‘Wipe the slate clean.’ What do those words mean to you, Nicholas?”
“It’s Nick.”
“This question still stands, Nick.”
“They mean ‘forget it.’ The words mean ‘pull the plug.’ They don’t mean go apeshit.”
“Let me see if I got your vision of things straight. We kidnap Rooney’s Thai whores, put at least one of his coyotes in a hole, then turn a bunch of hysterical slopes loose on a dirt road so I can either ride the needle or spend the next forty years in a federal facility?”
“What’s that you said about a coyote?”
Nick felt something blink in his mind, a dysfunctional shutter snapping open and closing, a malfunction in his brain or in his subconscious, an impaired mechanism that for a lifetime had not stopped him from speaking or given him the right words to say until it was too late, leaving him vulnerable and alone and at the mercy of his adversaries. Why had he asked a question? Why had he just exposed himself to more knowledge of what Hugo had done on a dark road to a truckload of helpless Asian women, maybe girls as well? Nick felt as though his ectoplasm were draining through the soles of his shoes.
“I’m at a loss on this, Hugo. I got no idea what we’re talking about here,” he said, his eyes sliding off Hugo’s face, his words like wet ash in his throat.
Hugo looked away and pulled on an earlobe. His mouth was compressed, his mirth leaking from his nose like air escaping a rubber seal. “You’re all the same,” he said.
“Who’s the ‘you’?”
“Monkey see no evil. You hire others to do it for you. You owe me ninety large, Nicholas, ten grand for each unit I had to take off Artie’s hands and dispose of. You also owe me seven grand for transportation costs. You owe me another five large for employee expenses. The vig is a point and a half a week.”
“Vig? What vig? Are you out of your mind?”
“Then there’s this other issue, a kid I hired out of a wino bar.”
“What kid?”
“Pete Rumdum. What difference does it make? He got off the leash.”
“No, I’m not part of this. Let me by.”
“It gets a little more complicated. I’ve been to the rathole he lives in. A girl was there. She saw me. So now she’s a factor. Do I have your attention?”
Nick was stepping backward, shaking his head, trying to remove himself from the closed space that seemed to be crushing the light out of his eyes. “I’m going home. I’ve known Artie Rooney for years. I can work this out. He’s a businessman.”
Hugo took out his pocket comb and ran it through his hair with one hand. “Artie Rooney offered me his old Caddy to put you on a crash diet. Enforced total abstinence. Fifteen to twenty pounds a day weight loss guaranteed. Inside your own box, get it? Know why he doesn’t like you, Nicholas? Because he’s a real mick and not a fraud who changes his name from Dolinski to Dolan. I’ll drop by tomorrow to get my cash. I want it in fifties, no consecutive numbers on the bills.”
The words were going too fast. “Why’d you turn Artie Rooney down on the hit?” Nick said, because he had to say something.
“I already got a Caddy.”
Two minutes later, when Nick walked back into his nightclub, the pounding music of the four-piece band was not nearly as loud as the thundering of Nick’s heart and the rasping of his lungs as he tried to suck oxygen past the cigarette he held in his mouth.
“Nick, your face is white. You get some bad news?” the bartender said.
“Everything is great,” Nick replied.
When he sat on the bar stool, his head reeling, his duck feet were so swollen with hypertension that he thought his shoes would burst their laces.
BEFORE HE FINALLY went to bed, Hackberry Holland had gone into the shower stall as his only salutary refuge from his experience behind the church, washing his hair, scrubbing his skin until it was red, holding his face in the hot water as long as he could stand it. But the odor of disinterred bodies had followed him into his sleep, trailing with him through the next day into the following twilight, into the onset of darkness, the hills flickering with electricity, the horn of an eighteen-wheeler blowing far down the highway like a bugle from a forgotten war.
Federal agents had done most of the work at the murder scene, setting up a field mortuary and flood lamps and satellite communications that probably involved Mexican authorities as well as their own departmental supervisors in D.C. They were polite to him, respectful in their perfunctory fashion, but it was obvious they thought of him as a curiosity if not simply a bystander or witness. At dawn, when all the exhumed bodies had been bagged and removed and the agents were wrapping up the site, a man in a suit, with white hair and threadlike blue and red capillaries in his cheeks, approached Hackberry and shook hands in farewell, his smile forced, as though he was preparing to ask a question that was not intended to offend.
“I understand you were an attorney for the ACLU,” he said.
“At one time, many years ago.”
“Quite a change in career choices.”
“Not really.”
“I didn’t tell you something. One of our agents found some bones that have been in the ground a long time.”
“Maybe they’re Indian,” Hack said.
“They’re not that old.”
“Maybe the shooter has used this site before. The dozer was brought in on a truck. It went out the same way. Maybe this is a very organized guy.”
But the FBI agent in charge of the exhumation, whose name was Ethan Riser, was not listening. “Why did you stay out here digging up all these bodies by yourself? Why didn’t you call in sooner?” he said.
“I was a POW during the Korean War. I was at Pak’s Palace, plus a couple of other places.”
The agent nodded, then said, “Forgive me if I don’t make the connection.”
“There were miles of refugees on the roadways, almost all of them headed south. The columns were infiltrated by North Korean soldiers in civilian clothes. Sometimes our F-80s were ordered to kill everybody on the road. We had to dig their graves. I don’t think that story ever got reported.”
“You’re saying you don’t trust us?” the agent said, still smiling.
“No, sir, I wouldn’t dream of saying that.”
The agent stared at the long roll of the countryside, the mesquite leaves lifting like green lace in the breeze. “It must be l
ike living on moonscape out here,” he said.
Hackberry did not reply and walked back to his truck, pain from an old back injury spreading into the lower regions of his spine.
IN THE LATE 1960s, he had tried to help a Hispanic friend from the service who had been beaten into a pile of bloody rags on a United Farm Workers picket line and charged with assaulting a law officer. At the time Hackberry was four fingers into a bottle of Jack Daniel’s by midafternoon every day of the week. He was also a candidate for Congress and deep in the throes of political ambition and his own cynicism, both of which poorly masked the guilt and depression and self-loathing he had brought back with him from a POW camp located in a place the North Koreans called No Name Valley.
At the jail where his friend would eventually be murdered, Hackberry met Rie Velásquez, who was also a United Farm Workers organizer, and he was never the same again. He had thought he could walk away from his friend’s death and from his meeting with the girl named Rie. But he was wrong on both counts. His first encounter with her was immediately antagonistic, and not because of her ideals or her in-your-face attitude. It was her lack of fear that bothered him, and her indifference to the opinions of others, even to her own fate. Worse, she conveyed the impression that she was willing to accept him if he didn’t ask her to take him or his politics seriously.
She was intelligent and university-educated and stunning in appearance. He manufactured every reason possible to see her, dropping by her union headquarters, offering her a ride, all the while trying to marginalize her radicalism and dismiss and hold at bay her leftist frame of reference, as though accepting any part of it would be like pulling a thread on a sweater, in this instance unraveling his own belief system. But he never confronted the issue at hand, namely that the working poor she represented had a legitimate cause and that they were being terrorized by both growers and police officers because they wanted to form a union.
Hackberry Holland’s political conversion did not take place at a union meeting or at Mass inside a sympathetic Catholic church, or involve seeing a blinding light on the road to Damascus. An irritable lawman accomplished the radicalization of Hackberry Holland by swinging a blackjack across his head and then trying to kick him to death. When Hackberry awoke on the concrete floor of a county lockup, his head inches from a perforated drain cover streaked with urine, he no longer doubted the efficacy of revolutionaries standing at the jailhouse door to sign up new members for their cause.
Rie had died of uterine cancer ten years ago, and their twin sons had left Texas, one for a position as an oncologist at the Mayo in Phoenix, the other as a boat skipper in the Florida Keys. Hackberry sold the ranch on the Guadalupe River where they had raised the children, and moved down by the border. If he’d been asked why he had given up the green place he loved for an existence in a dust-blown wasteland and a low-paying electoral office in a county seat whose streets and sidewalks and buildings were spiderwebbed with heat cracks, Hackberry would have had no explanation, or at least not one he would discuss with others.
The truth was, he could not rise in the morning from his bed surrounded by the things she had touched, the wind blowing the curtains, pressurizing the emptiness of the house, stressing the joists and studs and crossbeams and plaster walls against one another, filling the house with a level of silence that was like someone clapping cupped palms violently on his eardrums. He could not wake to these things and Rie’s absence and the absence of his children, whom he still saw in his mind’s eye as little boys, without concluding that a terrible theft had been perpetrated upon him and that it had left a lesion in his heart that would never heal.
A Baptist preacher had asked Hackberry if he was angry at God for his loss.
“God didn’t invent death,” Hackberry answered.
“Then who did?”
“Cancer is a disease produced by the Industrial Age.”
“I think you’re an angry man, Hack. I think you need to let go of it. I think you need to celebrate your wife’s life and not mourn over what you cain’t change.”
I think you ought to keep your own counsel, Hackberry thought. But he did not say the words aloud.
Now, in the blue glow of early dawn and the fading of the stars in the sky, he tried to eat breakfast on his gallery and not think about the dreams he’d had just before waking. No, “dreams” wasn’t the right word. Dreams had sequence and movement and voices inside them. All Hackberry could remember before opening his eyes into the starkness of his bedroom was the severity of the wounds in the bodies of the nine women and girls he had found buried by a bulldozer behind the church. How many people were aware of what a .45-caliber round could do to human tissue and bone? How many had ever seen what a .45 machine-gun burst could do to a person’s face or brain cavity or breasts or rib cage?
There was a breeze out of the south, and even though his St. Augustine grass was dry and stiff, it had a pale greenish aura in the early dawn, and the flowers in his gardens were varied and bright with dew. He didn’t want to think about the victims buried behind the church. No, that wasn’t correct, either. He didn’t want to think about the terror and the helplessness they had experienced before they were lined up and murdered. He didn’t want to brood on these things because he had experienced them himself when he had been forced to stand with his fellow POWs on a snowy stretch of ground in zero-degree weather and wait for a Chinese prison guard to fire his burp gun point-blank into their chests and faces. But because of the mercurial nature of their executioner’s bloodlust, Hackberry was spared and made to watch while others died, and sometimes he wished he had been left among the dead rather than the quick.
He believed that looking into the eyes of one’s executioner in the last seconds of one’s life was perhaps the worst fate that could befall a human being. That parting glimpse into the face of evil destroyed not only hope but any degree of faith in our fellow man that we might possess. He did not want to contend with those good souls who chose to believe we all descend from the same nuclear family, our poor, naked, bumbling ancestors back in Eden who, through pride or curiosity, transgressed by eating forbidden fruit. But he had long ago concluded that certain kinds of experiences at the hands of our fellow man were proof enough that we did not all descend from the same tree.
Or at least these were the thoughts that Hackberry’s sleep often presented to him at first light, as foolish as they might seem.
He drank the coffee from his cup, covered his plate with a sheet of waxed paper, and set it inside his icebox. As he backed out of the driveway in his pickup truck and headed down the two-lane county road, he did not hear the telephone ringing inside his house.
He drove into town, parked behind the combination jail and office that served as his departmental headquarters, and entered the back door. His chief deputy, Pam Tibbs, was already at her desk, wearing jeans and cowboy boots and a short-sleeve khaki shirt and a gun belt, her face without expression. Her hair was thick and mahogany in color, curly at the tips, with a bit of gray that she didn’t dye. Her most enigmatic quality lay in her eyes. They could brighten suddenly with goodwill or warmth or intense thought, but no one could be quite sure which. She had been a patrolwoman in Abilene and Galveston and had joined the department four years ago in order to be near her mother, who had been in a local hospice. Pam had a night-school degree from the University of Houston, but she spoke little of her background or her private life and gave others the sense they should not intrude upon it. Hackberry’s recent promotion of her to chief deputy had not necessarily been welcomed by all of her colleagues.
“Good morning,” Hackberry said.
Pam held her eyes on his without replying.
“Something wrong?” he said.
“An Immigration and Customs Enforcement guy by the name of Clawson just left. His business card is on your desk.”
“What does he want?”
“Probably your ass.”
“Pardon?”
“He wants to know why y
ou didn’t call in for help when you found the bodies,” she replied.
“He asked you that?”
“He seems to think I’m the departmental snitch.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“To take a walk.”
Hackberry started toward his office. Through the window he could see the flag straightening on the metal pole in the yard, the sun behind clouds that offered no rain, dust gusting down a broken street lined by stucco and stone buildings that had been constructed no later than the 1920s.
“I heard him talking on his cell outside,” Pam said at his back.
When he turned around, her eyes were fixed on his, one tooth biting down on the corner of her lip.
“Will you just say it, please?”
“The guy’s a prick,” she replied.
“I don’t know who’s worse, you or Maydeen. Will y’all stop using that kind of language while you’re on the job?”
“I heard him talking outside on his cell. I think they know the identity of the witness who called in the shots fired. They think you know his identity, too. They think you’re protecting him.”
“Why would I protect a nine-one-one caller?”
“You have a cousin name of William Robert Holland?”
“What about him?”
“I heard Clawson use the name, that’s all. I got the impression Holland might be your relative, that maybe he knows the nine-one-one caller. I was hearing only half of the conversation.”
“Don’t go anywhere,” Hackberry said. He went into his office and found the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent’s business card centered squarely in the middle of his desk blotter. A cell phone number was written across the top; the area code was 713, Houston. He punched in the number on his desk phone.
“Clawson,” a man’s voice said.
“This is Sheriff Holland. I’m sorry I missed you this morning. What can I help you with?”
“I tried your home, but your message machine wasn’t on.”
“It doesn’t always work. What is it you want to know?”