“A significant lapse of time occurred between your discovery of the bodies out by the church and your call to your dispatcher. Can you clear me up on that?”
“I’m not quite sure what the question is.”
“You wanted to dig them up by yourself?”
“We’re short on manpower.”
“Are you related to a former Texas Ranger by the name of—”
“Billy Bob Holland, yeah, I am. He’s an attorney. So am I, although I don’t practice anymore.”
“That’s interesting. We need to have a chat, Sheriff Holland. I don’t like getting to a crime scene hours after local law enforcement has tracked it up from one end to the other.”
“Why is ICE involved in a homicide investigation?” Hackberry asked. He could hear the chain rattling on the flagpole, a trash can clattering drily on a curbstone. “Do you have the identity of the nine-one-one caller?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss that right now.”
“Excuse me, sir, but I have the impression that you consider a conversation a monologue in which other people answer your questions. Don’t come bird-dogging my deputies again.”
“What did you say?”
Hackberry replaced the receiver in the phone cradle. He walked back into the outer office. Pam Tibbs looked up from her paperwork, a slice of sunlight cutting her face. Her eyes were a deep brown, bright, fixed on his, waiting.
“You drive,” he said.
THE AIR WAS muggy and warm when she parked the cruiser in the abandoned Pure filling station across from the stucco shell of the old church. Hackberry got out on the passenger side and looked at the phone booth on the perimeter of the concrete. The clear plastic panels were sprayed and scratched with graffiti, the phone box itself unbolted and removed. The sun had gone behind a cloud, and the hills had turned as dark as a bruise.
“The feds took the box?” Pam said.
“They’ll dust it and all the coins inside and keep us out of the loop at the same time.”
“Who owns the land behind the church?”
“A consortium in Delaware. They bought it from the roach paste people after the Superfund cleaned it up. I don’t think they’re players, though.”
“Where’d the killers get the dozer to bury the bodies? They had to have some familiarity with the area. There were no prints on the shell casings?”
“Nope.”
“Why would anyone kill all these women? What kind of bastard would do this?”
“Somebody who looks like your postman.”
The sun came out of the clouds and flooded the landscape with a jittering light. Her brow was moist with perspiration, her skin browned and grainy. There were thin white lines at the corners of her eyes. For some reason, at that moment, she looked older than her years. “I don’t buy that stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“That mass killers live in our midst without ever being noticed, that they’re just normal-looking people who have a screw torqued too tight in the back of their heads. I think they have neon warning signs hung all over them. People choose not to see what’s at the end of their noses.”
Hackberry watched the side of her face. There was no expression on it. But in moments like these, when Pam Tibbs’s speech would rise slightly in intensity, a heated strand of wire threaded through her words, he would remain silent, his eyes deferential. “Ready?” he said.
“Yes, sir,” she said.
They fitted on polyethylene gloves and began walking down opposite sides of the road, searching through the grass and scattered gravel and empty snuff containers and desiccated paper litter and broken glass and discarded rubbers and beer cans and whiskey and wine bottles. A quarter mile from the phone booth, they traded sides of the road and retraced their steps back to the booth, then continued on for two hundred yards in the opposite direction. Pam Tibbs descended into a grassy depression and picked up a clear flat-sided bottle that had no label. She hooked one finger through the bottle’s lip and shook it gently. “The worm is still inside,” she said.
“Have you seen that shape of bottle before?” he asked.
“Out at Ouzel Flagler’s place. Ouzel always tries to keep it simple. No tax stamps or labels to create undue paperwork,” she replied. She dropped the bottle in a large Ziploc bag.
OUZEL FLAGLER RAN an unlicensed bar in a plank shed next to the 1920s brick bungalow he and his wife lived in. The bungalow had settled on one side and cracked through the center, which caused the big windows on either side of the porch to stare out at the road like a cross-eyed man. Behind the house was a wide arroyo, outcroppings of yellow rock jutting from the eroded slopes. The arroyo bled into a flat plain that shimmered with heat, backdropped in the distance by purple mountains. Ouzel’s acreage was dotted with junked construction equipment and old trucks that he hauled from other places and neither sold nor maintained. Why he collected acres of junk rusting into the creosote brush was anybody’s guess.
His longhorns were rheumy-eyed and spavined, their ribs as pronounced as wagon spokes, their nostrils and ears and anuses auraed with gnats. Deer and coyotes got tangled in the collapsed and broken fence wire that surrounded his cedar posts. His mescal probably came from Mexico, right up the arroyo behind his house, but no one was sure, and no one cared. Ouzel’s mescal was cheap and could knock the shoes off a horse, and no one, at least in the last few years, had died from it.
The crystal meth transported through his property was another matter. People who were sympathetic with Ouzel believed he had made a deal with the devil when he’d gotten into the sale of illegal mescal; they believed his new business partners were stone killers and that they had drawn Ouzel deep into the belly of the beast. But it was Ouzel’s burden to carry and certainly not theirs.
He peered out of the screen door on the shed. He was wearing an incongruous white dress shirt with puffed sleeves and patriotic tie and pressed slacks. But Ouzel’s affectations were poor compensation for his pot stomach and narrow shoulders and the purple chains of vascular knots from Buerger’s disease in his neck and upper chest that gave him the appearance of a carrion bird humped grotesquely on a perch.
The dust drifted off the sheriff’s cruiser and crusted on the screen. Ouzel stepped outside, forcing a smile on his face, hoping to talk in the sunlight and wind, not inside, where he had not yet cleaned up last night’s bottles.
“Need your help, Ouzel,” Hackberry said.
“Yes, sir, anything I can do,” Ouzel replied, looking innocuously at the mescal bottle the sheriff held up inside a Ziploc bag.
“I can probably lift some prints off this and run them through AFIS and end up with diddly-squat for my trouble. Or you can just tell me if a guy named Pete bought some mescal from you. Or I can lift the prints and find out that both your and Pete’s prints are on the bottle, which means I’ll have to come back here and talk with you about the implications of lying to an officer of the law in a homicide investigation.”
“Y’all want a soda or something?” Ouzel asked.
“The worm in that bottle is still moist, so I doubt it was in the ditch more than a couple of days. Both of us know this bottle came from your bar. Help me on this, Ouzel. What we’re talking about here is a lot more weight than you’re ready to deal with.”
“Those Oriental women at Chapala Crossing? That’s why you come out here?”
“Some of them were girls. They were machine-gunned, then buried by a bulldozer. At least one of them may have still been alive.”
Ouzel’s stare broke. “They were alive?”
“What happened to your hand?” Hackberry said.
“This?” Ouzel said. He touched the tape and gauze wound around his wrist and fingers. “Kid at the market slammed the car door on it.”
“What’s his name?” Pam said.
“Ma’am?”
“My nephew works at the IGA. You’re saying maybe my nephew crushed your fingers and didn’t tell anybody about it?”
“It was in Alpine.”
A heavy woman in a sundress that barely covered her huge dugs came out the back door, looked at the cruiser, and went back inside.
“Have the feds been here?” Hackberry said.
“No, sir, no feds.”
“But somebody else was here, weren’t they?” Hackberry said.
“No, sir, just neighborly people dropping by, that sort of thing. Nobody is bothering me.”
“Those men will kill both you and your wife. If you’ve met them, you know what I say is true.”
Ouzel gazed at his property and at all the paint-blistered road graders and dozers and front-end loaders and farm tractors and chemical tankers leaking fluid into his land. “It’s a mess out here, ain’t it?” he said.
“Who’s Pete?” Hackberry asked.
“I sold a pint of mescal to a kid name of Pete Flores. He’s part Mexican, I think. He said he was in Iraq. He come in one day with no shirt on. My wife went and got him a shirt of mine.”
“You have a dress code?” Pam said.
“You meet up with him, take a look at his back. Get you a barf bag when you do it, too.”
“Where’s he live?” Hackberry asked.
“Don’t know and don’t care.”
“Tell me who hurt your hand.”
“It’s going to be a hot, windy one, Sheriff, with little likelihood of rain. Wish it wasn’t that way, but some things here’bouts don’t ever change.”
“You’d better hope we don’t have to come back out here,” Pam said.
Hackberry and Pam got back in the cruiser. Ouzel started to walk away, then heard Hackberry roll down the window on the passenger side of the cruiser. “Is any of the equipment on your property operational?” Hackberry asked.
“No, sir.”
“Can you tell me why you keep all this junk here?”
Ouzel scratched his cheek. “With some places, I guess anything is an improvement.”
3
VIKKI GADDIS CALLED the diner at the truck stop on her cell and told her boss she couldn’t work that night and in fact was quitting, and could she please get her wages, maybe in cash, because she would be en route to El Paso, which was a lie, when the banks opened in the morning.
The owner, Junior Vogel, lifted the receiver from his ear and held the sound piece so it caught the full volume of noise from the counter and tables and jukebox and cooks dinging the bell at the serving window as they clattered plateloads of food onto the Formica surface for the waitresses to pick up. “You’ll make at least fifty bucks in tips. Cut me some slack here, Vikki.”
“I’m packing. I’ll be in at eleven. Junior?”
“What?”
“Cash, okay? It’s important.”
“You’re letting me down, kid.” He hung up, not angrily, but he hung up just the same, knowing that for the next three hours, she would worry about the manner in which she was paid or worry that he would be gone when she got there.
Now it was 10:51 as she drove down the two-lane state highway toward the truck stop, the wind rushing at her through the glassless windows, the road grit stinging her face as the car body shook on its frame. The floor of the car was almost ankle-deep in trash—Styrofoam food containers, paper cups, oily rags, a can of wasp spray, a caulking gun, old newspaper black with footprints. Six weeks ago one of Pete’s army friends, a peyote-soaked Indian from the Pima rez in Arizona, had given him the car for forty dollars, a six-pack of Diet Coke, and a pocketknife. The car tags were valid, the battery good, the engine hitting on at least six of the eight cylinders.
Pete had said he would trade up and buy a good used car for Vikki as soon as he got a job roughnecking on a platform out in the Gulf of Mexico. Except he’d had two other offshore jobs, and in both instances the company oversight personnel decided that a man whose back looked like red alligator hide and who screamed in his sleep probably wasn’t cut out for communal living.
She had turned from the county road onto the state highway five miles back. Then a solitary vehicle had either followed her onto the state highway or come out of nowhere and remained behind her for at least the last six or seven minutes. She was driving only forty-five miles an hour because of the airflow through the windows, and the vehicle tracking behind her should have passed by this time. She accelerated up to fifty-five, then sixty, the low, humped hills dotted with dark brush speeding by. The pair of headlights, one slightly higher than the other, grew small and smaller in the rearview mirror, then disappeared into a glow behind the silhouette of a hill.
She could smell the nocturnal odor of the desert, like the smell of damp flowers crushed inside the pages of an old book. She could see the slick surface of a dried-out riverbed, the mud shining under the moon, the green plant life along the banks bending in the breeze. She had spent the first thirteen years of her life in the red-butte country of southwestern Kansas, but she loved Texas and its music and its people, whether others denigrated it or not, and she loved Pete, whether others looked upon him as a sad and doomed product of war or not, and finally, she loved the life she believed they could have together if only her love could prove greater than all the forces that seemed determined to destroy it.
When she had thoughts such as these, she wondered if she wasn’t grandiose and vain and driven by pride and ego. She wondered if the black wind scented by the desert and speckled with road grit wasn’t a warning about the nature of self-deception. Wasn’t the greatest vanity perhaps the belief that one’s love could change the fate of another, particularly the fate of an innocent and kind Texas boy who had made himself party to a mass murder?
The images those last words conjured up in her mind made her want to weep.
A brilliant glare appeared in the rearview mirror. A vehicle with its high beams on was coming hard up the state two-lane now, swinging wide on a curve across the yellow stripe. The reflected glare was like a white flame in her eyes. A Trans Am passed her, blowing road heat and exhaust and dust through her windows. The Trans Am’s windows were up, but for just an instant she saw the humped shapes of two men in the front seat, the driver wearing a top hat. Neither of them seemed to look at her. In fact, the man in the passenger seat seemed to keep his face deliberately averted. In the distance she could see the truck stop strung with lights, the run-down nightclub next door, a couple of eighteen-wheelers parked by the diesel pumps, their cabs lit. She realized she had stopped breathing when the Trans Am accelerated toward her back bumper. She let out her breath, her heart shrinking back into a cold place at the bottom of her chest.
Then the car with the uneven headlights was behind her again. But this time she was not going to be frightened. She took her foot off the accelerator and watched the speedometer needle drag down to fifty-five, fifty, then forty-five, thirty-eight. The car behind her pulled out to pass, its engine laboring. When it went by her, she saw a solitary man behind the wheel. His windows were half open, which meant his air conditioner was off and he was saving every teaspoon of gasoline possible, just as she was.
Pete had gotten a ride to Marathon, where he hoped to talk a distant cousin into selling him a used car off his car lot on credit. If the cousin refused, Vikki was to meet Pete in Marathon regardless, and they would lose themselves in a city, maybe Houston or Dallas. Or maybe head for Colorado or Montana. Everything they owned was in the trunk or on the backseat of the car, tape-wrapped or held together with twine. On top of all the boxes in the backseat was her J-200 sunburst Gibson.
The cell phone chimed on the seat. She opened it and placed the receiver against her ear. “Where are you?” she said.
“At the lot. We got us a Toyota with a hundred grand on it. The tires are good, and it doesn’t have any oil smoke coming out of it. You got your paycheck?”
“I’m almost at the diner.” She paused. Up ahead, the Trans Am was pulling in to the nightclub. A square of light from the truck stop slid off the face and shoulder of the man in the passenger seat. “Did any of those guys at the church have an orange or red beard?”
r /> “No,” Pete said. “Wait a minute. I’m not sure. One guy in the dark had a beard. Why?”
“Some guys just pulled in to the beer joint. The driver is wearing a hat like the Mad Hatter’s.” Her tires began crunching across the gravel in the parking lot. “They’re staring at me. Think, Pete. Did you see a guy with an orange beard?”
“Get away from them.”
“I have to get paid. We don’t have any money,” she said, her irritability and frustration rising.
“Screw the money. Junior can mail it to us. We’ll make out.”
“On what?” she said. When there was no answer, she glanced at the cell phone’s screen. She had lost service.
Just ahead of her, the man driving the car with lopsided headlights parked by the entrance to the diner and went inside. He was thin and of medium height and wore an old suit coat, even though it was summer.
She parked next to his car, a beat-up Nissan, and turned off the engine. The men in the Trans Am had gotten out and were stretching and yawning in front of the nightclub. It had been a dance hall in the 1940s, and colored lights from inside shone through a window cut in the shape of a champagne glass over the entranceway. A tattered canvas canopy extended out from the door over a series of limestone slabs, on either side of which were two huge ceramic pots planted with Spanish daggers. A lone palm tree, as dark and motionless as a cutout, was silhouetted against a pink and green neon cowgirl holding a guitar, one booted foot raised. In the distance, behind the club, was a geological fault where the land seemed to collapse and dissolve into darkness, flat and enormous and breathtaking, as if an inland sea had evaporated overnight and left its depths as beveled and smooth as damp clay.
If Pete had not taken a job from men no one in his right mind would trust. If Pete had only had faith in what the two of them could do together if they tried.
The man with the orange beard wore a denim shirt scissored off at the armpits. His upper arms were meaty and sunburned, and one arm had a blue anchor tattooed inside a circle of red and blue stars. He twisted the cap off a beer bottle and toasted Vikki with it before he drank. He removed the bottle from his mouth and lifted up his shirt with two fingers and blotted his lips. “Little breezy in that car of yours, isn’t it?” he said.