“I’ve got your license number. I’m going to leave it inside with my boss,” she said.
“You got no problem with me,” he replied, smiling.
She headed for the front door of the diner, an empty coffee thermos hooked through one finger.
“Come have a drink with us,” he said at her back.
Junior was behind the cash register when she came in, his face as lined and woebegone as a prune, his sideburns razor-etched and flared on his cheeks. He was talking to the driver of the Nissan. “My delivery man didn’t come today, so I’m down on my milk. Sorry, but I cain’t sell you none.”
“Where’s the next store?” the driver of the Nissan said. His hair was scalped on the sides and long and combed straight back on top.
“Back in town,” Junior said.
“It’s closed. It’s after eleven.”
“Why didn’t you buy it before closing time?”
“We had a carton in the ice chest at the Super 8. But it must have spoiled. Mister, my baby girl is three months old. What am I going to do?”
Junior blew out his breath. He went into the kitchen and returned with a half-gallon carton of whole milk and set it on the counter.
“How much is it?” the driver of the Nissan asked.
“Two bucks.”
The driver of the Nissan put a single bill on the glass countertop and began counting pennies, nickels, and dimes on top of it. He exhausted the coins in one pocket and began searching in the other.
“Forget it,” Junior said.
“I got to pay you for it.”
“You a Christian?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Put it in the plate.”
“God bless you, sir.”
Junior nodded, his mouth a tight line. He watched the man go out the door into the lot, then turned his attention to Vikki. “Next,” he said.
“I’m sorry to quit on you without notice. I know you’ve got your hands full,” she said.
“It’s that boy, isn’t it?”
“I need my money, Junior.”
He glanced at some penciled numbers on a scrap of paper by the register. “You got a hundred and eighty-three dollars and four cents coming. You’re gonna have to take a check, though. I need it for the IRS and four other agencies I pay on your behalf.”
“Can’t you stop acting like a shit?”
He raised his eyebrows, then exhaled out his nose. He shoved a receipt book toward her and opened the cash register. “I saw that guy with the beard trying to come on to you out there,” he said as he counted out her money.
“You know him?”
“No.”
“He’s probably drunk.” She started to say something else. She looked over her shoulder. She could see the Trans Am next to the nightclub. The two men were not in it and not in the parking lot, either.
Junior handed her the bills and silver he had counted out of the drawer and added ten dollars to it. “You had that coming out of the tip jar. Take care of yourself, kid.”
She lifted her thermos. “You mind?”
“Why ask me?”
She went behind the counter and opened the coffee spigot above her thermos and filled it with scalding coffee. She closed and opened her eyes, suddenly realizing how tired she was.
She used the restroom and went back outside. The man with the orange beard was sitting in the passenger seat of his vehicle, eating Mexican food from a Styrofoam container with a small plastic fork, the car door hanging open, his feet on the gravel. The driver of the vehicle was nowhere in sight, but the engine was running, a clutch of keys vibrating in the ignition.
“I was on a destroyer escort in Fort Lauderdale three days ago,” the man with the orange beard said. “I’ve been around the world four times backward. That means I’ve been around the world eight times. What do you think of that? You ever been around the world?”
“I have,” Junior said from the door of the diner. “Want to tell me about your travels? I was middleweight champion of the Pacific fleet. You a tomato can?”
“A what?”
“A bleeder. Keep bothering my waitress like that and see what happens.”
Vikki got into her vehicle and turned around in the lot but had to wait for an eighteen-wheeler to get past before she could drive back onto the highway. In her rearview mirror, she saw the man in the top hat come out of the nightclub and get in the Trans Am. He wore jeans and suspenders and a white T-shirt, and his torso was too long for his legs. The man with the beard closed his car door and tossed the Styrofoam container and the uneaten food out the window.
Vikki pressed the accelerator to the floor, the safe electric glow of the truck stop and diner disappearing behind her. A newspaper flew off the asphalt like a bird with giant wings and whipped through the front window and wrapped itself on the crown of the passenger seat before spinning in a vortex inside the car. She slapped the tangle of pages down with one hand and tried to see who was behind her. There were several sets of headlights in her rearview mirror now, and she couldn’t tell if any of them belonged to the man with the orange beard.
A truck passed her, then an open convertible with a teenage girl sitting on top of the backseat, her arms outspread in the wind, her chin lifted, her blouse flattening on her breasts, as though the stars and the bloom of the desert and the warm nocturnal loveliness of the moment had been created especially for her.
When Vikki rounded the next curve, the headlights of the vehicle behind her reflected off a hillside and she clearly saw the Trans Am, riding low and sleek on good tires, the engine powerful and loud and steady. She mashed on the gas, but her vehicle did not accelerate. Instead, the pistons misfired, and a balloon of black oil smoke exploded out of the exhaust pipe. She felt as though she were in a bad dream in which she knew she had to run from an enemy but her legs were knee-deep in mud.
What a fool she had been. Why hadn’t she confronted the two men in front of Junior and dealt with them in front of the diner, even called the cops if she had to?
She flipped open her cell phone on her thigh, trying with her thumb to punch in the diner’s number. Up ahead, she saw the Nissan parked on the side of the road, the hatch open, the father of the three-month-old baby girl on his knees, pushing a jack under the rear bumper.
She slowed and pulled in behind him. He stared up into her high beams, his face white, distorted, his eyes watering, his narrow head and long nose and greased hair like those of a man who was out of sync with his own era, a man for whom loss was a given and ineptitude a way of life. She left the parking lights on and cut the engine.
The Trans Am streaked past her, the bearded passenger giving her a double thumbs-up, his friend in the top hat bent hard over the wheel.
But the driver of the Nissan was concentrated on Vikki, still looking up at her, blinking, his eyes straining in the darkness. “Who are you?” he said.
“I saw you at the diner. You needed milk for your little girl. Are you all right?”
She was standing directly over him. He had spread a handkerchief on the gravel to kneel on but had not taken off his coat. He had just placed the jack under the rear of the car frame, but neither of the back tires appeared to be flat.
“I think I got a bubble in my tire. I could hear it slapping. They do that sometimes when they’re fixing to blow,” he said. He got to his feet, brushing at one knee. “Problem is, I forgot I don’t have a spare.” Because of the grease in his hair, it looked wet-combed and shiny on his collar, as though he had just emerged from a fresh shower. There were soft lumps in his facial skin, similar in size to the bites of horseflies. He glanced over his shoulder at the empty road. In the distance, a pair of high beams bounced off a hillside into the sky. “We’re at the Super 8 in town. My wife probably thinks I got kidnapped. My sister’s husband has a shoe store in Del Rio. I’m supposed to go to work for him day after tomorrow.”
He waited for her to speak. The stars were smoky, like dry ice evaporating on black velvet, th
e wind starting to gust through an arroyo behind her. She thought she could smell night-blooming flowers, water braiding along the edge of a bleached riverbed, an alluvial fan of damp sand cut by the hoofprints and the clawed feet of animals.
“Ma’am?” he said.
She couldn’t concentrate. What was he asking her? “Do you want a ride to your motel?” she said.
“Maybe I can make it. It was you I was worried about.”
“Pardon?”
“I got the sense those fellows in the Trans Am were hassling you. You know those fellows? That was them that roared on by, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know who they are. Do you want a ride?”
What had he just said? He had asked about the two men in the Trans Am, but he had been looking at her, not them, when they passed. He seemed to be thinking now, with an expression like that of a fool humorously considering his alternatives at someone else’s expense. The headlights that had silhouetted a hill in the distance disappeared, and the outline of the hill dissolved into the darkness. “I can limp in with this tire as it is, I guess. But it’s kind of you to stop. You’re mighty attractive. Not many women traveling alone would stop on the road at night to help a man in distress.”
“I hope your new job works out all right for you,” she said. She turned and walked toward her vehicle. She could feel the skin on her back twitching. Then she heard a sound that didn’t belong in the situation, that didn’t fit with everything the driver had told her.
He had opened a cell phone and was talking into it. She got in her vehicle and turned the key in the ignition. The engine caught for perhaps two seconds, then coughed and died. She turned the ignition again, pumping the accelerator. The stench of gasoline from a flooded carburetor rose into her face. She turned off the ignition so she would not run down the battery. She placed her hands on the steering wheel and kept them absolutely still, making her face devoid of all expression so he could read nothing in it. He approached her window, dropping the cell phone in his coat pocket, reaching with his other hand for something stuck in the back of his belt.
She unscrewed the plastic drinking cup from the top of her thermos, then unscrewed the cap and rubber plug on the thermal insert and began pouring coffee into the cup, her heart seizing up as his silhouette filled her window.
“People call me Preacher,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Everybody has got to have a name. Preacher is mine. Step out here with me, ma’am. We have to get going pretty quick,” he said.
“In your dreams,” she said.
“I promise I’ll do everything for you I can. Arguing about it won’t help. Everybody gets to the barn. But for you maybe that won’t necessarily have to happen tonight. You’re a kind woman. I’m not forgetting that.”
She threw the coffee at him. But he saw it coming and stepped away quickly, raising one arm in front of his face. In his other hand, he held an unblued titanium revolver, one with black rubber grips. It was not much larger than his palm.
“I cain’t blame you. But it’s time for you to get yourself in the trunk of my automobile. I’ve never struck a woman. I don’t want you to be the first,” he said.
She stared straight ahead, trying to think. What was it she was not seeing or remembering? Something that lay at the tips of her fingers, something that was like a piece of magic, something that God or a higher power or a dead Indian shaman out in the desert had already put at her disposal if only she could just remember what it was.
“I have nothing you want,” she said.
“You dealt the hand, woman. It’s your misfortune and none of my own,” he said, pulling open her door. “Now you slide yourself off that car seat and come along with me. Nothing is ever as bad as you think.”
Amid the litter on the floor, she felt the coldness of a metal cylinder touch her bare ankle. She reached down with her right hand and picked up the can of wasp spray, one that the manufacturer guaranteed could be fired steadily into a nest from twenty feet away. Vikki stuck the spout directly into the Nissan driver’s face and pressed down the plastic button on the applicator.
A jet of foaming lead-gray viscous liquid struck his mouth and nose and both of his eyes. He screamed and began wiping at his eyes and face with his coat sleeves, spinning around, off balance, all the while trying to hold on to his pistol and open his eyes wide enough to see where she was. She got out of the car and fired the spray into his face again, backing away from him as she did, spraying the back of his head, hitting him again when he tried to turn with her. He slammed against her vehicle and rolled on the ground, thrashing his feet, dropping the revolver in the grass.
She tried to get back inside her vehicle, but he was on his hands and knees, grabbing at her ankles, his eyes blistered almost shut. She fell backward and felt her forearm come down hard on the revolver. She picked it up, gathering its cool hardness into her palm, and staggered to her feet. But he came at her again, tackling her around one leg, striking at her genitalia with one fist.
She pointed the revolver downward. It was a Smith & Wesson Airweight .38 that held five rounds. She was amazed at how light yet solid and comforting it felt in her hand. She aimed at the back of his calf and pulled the trigger. The frame bucked in her hand, and fire flew from the muzzle. She saw the cloth in his trousers jump and even smoke for a second. Then it seemed as though his entire pants leg was darkening with his blood.
But the man who called himself Preacher wasn’t through. He made a grinding sound down in his throat, as though both eating his pain and energizing himself, and threw his weight against her, locking his arms around her knees. She fell in the grass and struck at his head with the revolver, lacerating his scalp, to no avail. Then she screwed the muzzle into his ear. “You want your brains on your shirt?” she said.
He didn’t let go. She lowered the revolver and aimed at the top of his shoe but couldn’t position her finger adequately to pull against the trigger’s tension. She worked her thumb over the hammer, cocked it back, and squeezed the trigger against the guard. The barrel made a second loud pop, and a jet of blood exploded from the bottom of his shoe. He sat up on his haunches and grabbed his foot with both hands, his jaw dropping open, his face the pained red of a boiled crab.
She got into her vehicle and turned the ignition. This time the engine caught, and she dropped the transmission into low and began easing back onto the highway.
“My father was a Medicine Lodge police officer and taught me how to shoot when I was ten years old. Next time you won’t get off so easy, bubba,” she said.
She flung the .38 through the passenger window into the darkness and rolled across his cell phone, crushing it into pieces. Then she pushed the accelerator to the floor, a cloud of blue-black oil smoke ballooning behind her.
4
NOBODY COULD BE this unlucky, Nick Dolan told himself. He had taken his wife and daughters and son with him to their vacation house on the Comal River, outside New Braunfels, hoping to buy time so he could figure out a way to get both Hugo Cistranos and Artie Rooney off his back—in particular Hugo, whom Nick had stiffed for the thousands he claimed Nick owed him.
His vacation home was built of white stucco and had a blue-tile roof and a courtyard with a wishing well and lime and orange trees, and terraced gardens and stone steps that descended to the riverbank. The river had a soap-rock bottom that was free of silt and was green and cold and fed by springs even in August, and pooled with shadows from the giant trees that grew along the bank. Maybe he could enjoy a few days away from problems he did not create, that no one could blame him for, and this trouble would just blow over. Why shouldn’t it? Nick Dolan had never deliberately hurt anybody.
But when he looked out his window and saw a man with a shaved, waxed head stepping out of a government car, he knew the cosmic plot to make his life miserable was still in full-throttle, turbo-prop overdrive and the Fates were about to special-deliver another fuck-you message to Nick no matter where he went.
/> The government man must have been at least six-four, his shoulders like concrete inside his white shirt, his forehead knurled, his eyes luminous pools behind octagon-shaped rimless glasses, eyes that Nick could only associate with space aliens.
The government man was already holding up his ID when Nick opened the door. “Isaac Clawson, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. You Nick Dolan?” he said.
“No, I just look like him and happen to live at this address,” Nick answered.
“I need a few minutes of your time.”
“For what?”
The sun was hot and bright on the St. Augustine grass, the air glistening with humidity. Isaac Clawson touched at the sweat on his forehead with the back of his wrist. In his other hand he clutched a flat, zippered portfolio, the fingers of his huge hand spread on it like banana peels. “You want to do something for your country, sir? Or would you like me to ratchet up the procedure a couple of notches, maybe introduce you to our grand-jury subpoena process?”
“What, I didn’t pay into workman’s comp for the guy who cuts my lawn?”
Clawson’s eyes stayed riveted on Nick’s. The man’s physicality seemed to exude heat and repressed violence, a whiff of testosterone, an astringent tinge of deodorant. The formality and tie and white shirt and big octagon-shaped glasses seemed to Nick a poor disguise for a man who was probably at heart a bone breaker.
“My kids are playing Ping-Pong in the game room. My wife is making lunch. We talk in my office, right?” Nick said.
There was a beat. “That’s fine,” Clawson said.
They walked through a foyer into an attached cottage that served as Nick’s office. Down on the river, Nick could see a chain of floaters on inflated inner tubes headed toward a rapids. Nick sat in a deep leather swivel chair behind his desk, gazing abstractedly at the sets of mail-order books he had bought in order to fill the wall shelves. Clawson sat down in front of him, his elongated torso as straight as a broomstick. Nick could feel the tension in his chest rising into his throat.