They all stared at him in the silence, the bare lightbulb overhead splintering into yellow needles, reducing the differences in their lives to pools of shadow at their feet. Now, now, now, Preacher heard a voice in his head saying.
“Rosa made you some peanut-butter cookies,” Jesus said.
Was that the little girl’s name or the name of the wife? “Say again?”
“My little girl made you a present, boss.”
“I’m diabetic. I cain’t eat sugar.”
“You want to sit down? You look like you’re hurting, boss.”
Preacher’s right hand opened and closed behind his back. He sucked in slightly on his bottom lip. “How far up the dirt road to the highway?”
“Ten minutes, no more.”
Preacher swallowed drily and slid his palm over the grips of the .45. Then his stare broke, and he felt a line of tension like a fissure divide the skin of his face in half. He pulled his wallet from his back pocket and labored on the crutches to the kitchen table. He splayed open the wallet and began counting a series of bills onto the table. “There’s eleven hundred dollars here,” he said. “You educate that little girl with it, you buy her decent clothes, you get her teeth fixed, you send her to a doctor and not to some damn quack, you buy her good food, and you burn a candle at your church in thanks you got a little girl like this. You understand me?”
“You don’t got to tell me those things, boss.”
“And you get her a grammar book, too, plus one for yourself.”
Preacher worked his wallet into his pocket and thumped across the floor on his crutches and out the screen into the yard, under a purple and bloodred sky that seemed filled with the cawing of carrion birds.
He fell behind the wheel of the Honda and started the engine. Jesus came out the back screen of his house, a can of Coca-Cola in his hand.
“Some guys just don’t know how to leave it alone,” Preacher said under his breath.
“Boss, can you talk to Rosa? She’s crying.”
“About what?”
“She heard you talking in your sleep. She thinks you’re going to hell.”
“You just don’t get it, do you?”
“Get what, boss?”
“It’s right yonder, all around us, in the haze of the evening. We’re already there,” Preacher said, gesturing at the darkening plain.
“You one unusual gringo, boss.”
WHEN HACKBERRY HOLLAND woke inside a blue dawn on Saturday morning, he looked through his bedroom window and saw the FBI agent Ethan Riser in his backyard, admiring Hack’s flower beds. The FBI agent’s hair was as thick and white as cotton, the capillaries in his jaws like pieces of blue and red thread. The iridescent spray from Hackberry’s automatic sprinklers had already stained Riser’s pale suit, but his concentration on the flower beds seemed so intense he was hardly aware of it.
Hackberry dressed in a pair of khakis and a T-shirt and walked barefoot onto the back porch. There were poplar trees planted as a windbreak at the bottom of his property, and inside the shadows they made on the grass he could see a doe and her fawn watching him, their eyes brown and moist inside the gloom.
“You guys get up early in the morning, don’t you?” he said to the FBI agent.
“I work Sundays, too. Me and the pope.”
“What do you need, sir?”
“Can I buy you breakfast?”
“No, but you can come inside.”
While the agent sat at his kitchen table, Hackberry started the coffeemaker and broke a half-dozen eggs in a huge skillet and set two pork chops in the skillet with them. “You like cereal?” he said.
“No, thanks.”
At the stove, Hackberry poured a bowlful of Rice Krispies, then added cold milk and started eating them while the eggs and meat cooked. Ethan Riser rested his chin on his thumb and knuckle and stared into space, trying not to look at his watch or show impatience. His eyes were ice-blue, unblinking, marked by neither guile nor doubt. He cleared his throat slightly. “My father was a botanist and a Shakespearean actor,” he said. “In his gardens he grew every kind of flower Shakespeare mentions in his work. He was also a student of Voltaire and believed he could tend his own garden and separate himself from the rest of the world. For that reason, he was a tragic man.”
“What did you want to tell me, sir?” Hackberry said, setting his cereal bowl in the sink.
“There were two sets of prints on the Airweight thirty-eight the road gang supervisor gave you. We matched one set to the prints of Vikki Gaddis we took from her house. The other set we matched through the California driver’s license database. They belong to a fellow by the name of Jack Collins. He has no criminal record. But we’ve heard about him. His nickname is Preacher. Excuse me, are you listening?”
“I will be as soon as I have some coffee.”
“I see.”
“You take sugar or milk?” Hackberry said.
Ethan Riser folded his arms and looked out the window at the deer among the poplar trees. “Whatever you have is fine,” he said.
“Go ahead,” Hackberry said.
“Thank you. They call him Preacher because he thinks he may be the left hand of God, the giver of death.” Ethan Riser waited, his agitation beginning to show. “You’re not impressed?”
“Did you ever know a sociopath who didn’t think he was of cosmic importance? What did this guy do before he became the left hand of God?”
“He was a pest exterminator.”
Hackberry began pouring coffee into two cups and tried to hide his expression.
“You think it’s funny?” Riser said.
“Me?”
“You said you were at Pak’s Palace. I did some research. That was a brick factory where Major Pak hung up GIs on the rafters and beat them with clubs for hours. You were one of them?”
“So what if I was or wasn’t? It happened. Most of those guys didn’t come back.” Hackberry scraped the eggs and meat out of the skillet onto a platter. Then he set the platter on top of the table. He set it down harder than he intended.
“We hear this guy Preacher is a gun for hire across the border. We hear he doesn’t take prisoners. It’s a free-fire zone down there. More people are being killed in Coahuila and Nuevo León than in Iraq, did you know that?”
“As long as it doesn’t happen in my county, I’m not interested.”
“You’d better be. Maybe Collins has already killed Pete Flores and the Gaddis girl. If he’s true to his reputation, he’ll be back and brush his footprints out of the sand. You hearing me on this, Sheriff?”
Hackberry blew on his coffee and drank from it. “My grandfather was a Texas Ranger. He knocked John Wesley Hardin out of his saddle and pistol-whipped him and put him in jail.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Mess with the wrong people and you’ll get a shitpile of grief, is what it means.”
Ethan Riser studied him, just short of being impolite. “I heard you were a hardhead. I heard you think you can live inside your own zip code.”
“Your food’s getting cold. Better eat up.”
“Here’s the rest of it. After nine-eleven, Immigration and Naturalization merged with Customs and became ICE. They’re one of the most effective and successful law enforcement agencies we have under Homeland Security. The great majority of their agents are professional and good at what they do. But there’s one guy hereabouts who is off the leash and off the wall.”
“This guy Clawson?”
“That’s right, Isaac Clawson. Years ago two serial predators were working out of northern Oklahoma. They made forays up into Kansas, the home of Toto and Dorothy and the yellow brick road. I won’t describe what they did to most of their victims because you’re trying to eat your breakfast. Clawson’s daughter worked nights at a convenience store. These guys kidnapped both her and her fiancé from the store and locked them in the trunk of a car. Out of pure meanness, they set fire to the car and burned them alive.”
“You’re telling me Clawson’s a cowboy?”
“I’ll put it this way: He likes to work alone.”
Hackberry had set down his knife and fork. He gazed out the back door at the poplar trees. The sky was dark, and dust was blowing out of a field, the tips of the poplars bending in the wind.
“You okay, Sheriff?”
“Sure, why not?”
“You were a corpsman at the Chosin?”
“Yep.”
“The country owes men and women like you a big debt.”
“Not to me they don’t,” Hackberry said.
“I had to come here this morning.”
“I know you did.”
Ethan Riser got up to leave, then paused at the door. “Love your flowers,” he said.
Hackberry nodded and didn’t reply.
He wrapped the uneaten pork chops in foil and placed them in the icebox, then put on a gray sweat-ringed felt hat and in the backyard scraped the eggs off the platter for his bird dog and two barn cats that didn’t have names and a possum that lived under the house. He went back in the kitchen and took a sack of corn out of the icebox and walked down to the poplar trees and scattered the corn in the grass for the doe and her fawn. The grass was tall and green in the lee of the trees, channeled with the wind blowing out of the south. Hackberry squatted down and watched the deer eat, his face blanketed with shadow, his eyes like those of a man staring into a dead fire.
6
NICK DOLAN FELT he might have dodged a bolt of lightning. Hugo Cistranos had not shown up at the club or followed him to his vacation home on the Comal River. Maybe Hugo was all gas and flash and Afghan hash and would just disappear. Maybe Hugo would be consumed by his own evil, like a candle flame cupping and dying inside its own wax. Maybe Nick would finally get a break from the cosmic powers that had kept him running on a hamster wheel for most of his life.
Just outside the city limits of San Antonio, Nick lived in a neighborhood of eight-thousand-to-ten-thousand-square-feet homes, many of them built of stone, the yards cordoned off by thick green hedges, the sidewalks tree-shaded. The zoning code was strict, and trucks, trailers, mobile homes, and even specially outfitted vehicles to transport the handicapped could not be parked on the streets or in driveways overnight. But Nick cared less about the upscale, quasi-bucolic quality of his neighborhood than he did about the latticework enclosure and patio he had built with his own labor behind his house.
The palm trees that towered overhead had come from Florida, their root balls wrapped in wet burlap, the excavations they were dropped into sprinkled with dead bait fish and bat guano. The grapevine that wound through the latticework had been transplanted from his grandfather’s old home in New Orleans. The flagstones had been discovered during the construction of an overpass and brought by a friendly contractor to Nick’s house, four of them chiseled with a seventeenth-century Spanish coat of arms. His hedges flowered in spring and bloomed until December. In the center of his patio were a glass-topped bamboo table and bamboo chairs, all of it shaded by Hong Kong orchid trees rooted inside redwood barrels that had been sawed in half.
In the cooling of the day, Nick loved to sit at the table in fresh white tennis togs, a glass of gin and tonic and cracked ice in his hand, an orange slice inserted on the lip of the glass, and read a book, a best seller whose title he could drop in a conversation. The breeze was up tonight, the lavender sky flickering with heat lightning, the freshly clipped ends of the flowers in his hedge like thousands of pink and purple eyes couched among the leaves. Nick had smoked only nineteen cigarettes that day, a record. He had many things to be thankful for. Maybe he even had a future.
Inside the fragrance of his enclosure, he felt himself drowsing off, the weight of his book pulling itself from his hand.
His head jerked up, his eyes opening suddenly. He rubbed the sleep out of his face and wondered if he was having a bad dream. Hugo Cistranos was standing above him, grinning, his forearms thick and scrolled with veins, as though he had been wrist-curling a barbell. “Looks like you got quite a sunburn on the river,” he said.
“How’d you get in my yard?”
“Through the hedge.”
“Are you nuts coming here like this?”
Nick’s scalp constricted. He had just done it again, admitting guilt and complicity about things he hadn’t done, indicating he and Hugo had a relationship of some kind, one based on shared experience.
“Didn’t want to embarrass you at the club. Didn’t want to ring the bell and disturb your family. What’s a guy to do, Nicholas? We’ve got mucho shit-o to work through here.”
“I don’t owe you any money.”
“Okay, you owe it to my subcontractors. Put it any way you want. The vig is running as we speak. My chief subcontractor is Preacher Jack Collins. He’s a religious fanatic who did the hands-on work behind the church. Nobody knows what goes on inside his head, and nobody asks. I just delivered him his Honda and paid his medical expenses. Those services are all on your tab, too, Nicholas.”
“I don’t use that name.”
“No problemo, Nick-o. Know why I had to pay Preacher’s medical expenses? Because this broad here put two holes in him.”
Hugo placed a four-by-five color photograph on the glass tabletop. Nick stared down at the face of a girl with recessed eyes, her chestnut hair curled at the tips. “Ever see this cutie?” Hugo asked.
Nick’s scalp constricted again. “No,” he replied.
“How about this kid?” Hugo said, placing another photo next to the girl’s. A soldier in a United States Army dress uniform, an American flag on a staff as a backdrop, stared up at Nick.
“I never saw this person, either,” Nick said, studiously not letting his eyes drift back to the girl’s photograph.
“You said that pretty quick. Take another look.”
“I don’t know who they are. Why are you showing these pictures to me?”
“Those are two kids who can bring a lot of people down. They have to go off the board, Nick. People got to get paid, too, Nick. That means I’m about to be your new business partner, Nick. I’ve got the papers right here. Twenty-five percent of the club and the Mexican restaurant and no claim on anything else. It’s a bargain, little buddy.”
“Screw you, Hugo,” Nick said, his face dilating with the recklessness of his own rhetoric.
Hugo opened a manila folder and sorted through a half-inch of documents, as though giving them final approval, then closed the folder and set it on the table. “Relax, finish your drink and have a smoke, talk it over with your wife. There’s no rush.” He looked at his wristwatch. “I’ll send a driver for the papers, say, tomorrow afternoon, around three. Okay, little buddy?”
NICK HAD HOPED he would never see the girl named Vikki Gaddis again. His nonnegotiable rules for himself as the operator of a skin joint and as the geographically removed owner of escort services in Dallas and Houston had always remained the same: You paid your taxes, and you protected your girls and never personally exploited them.
Nick’s rules had preempted conflicts with the IRS and purchased for him an appreciable degree of respect from his employees. About eighteen months back, he had run a want ad in the San Antonio newspapers for musicians to play in the Mexican restaurant he had just built next to his strip club. Five days later, when he was out in the parking lot on a scalding afternoon, Vikki Gaddis had driven off the highway in a shitbox leaking smoke from every rusted crack in the car body. At first he thought she was looking for a job up on the pole, then he realized she hadn’t seen the ad but had been told he needed a folksinger.
“You’re confused,” Nick said. “I’m opening a Mexican restaurant. I need some entertainment for people while they’re eating dinner. Mexican stuff.”
He saw the disappointment in her eyes, a vague hint of desperation around her mouth. Her face was damp and shiny in the heat. Heavy trucks, their engines hammering, were passing on the highway, their air brakes hissing. Nick touched at his nose wi
th the back of his wrist. “Why don’t you come on in the restaurant and let’s talk a minute?” he said.
Nick had already hired a five-piece mariachi band, one complete with sombreros and brocaded vaquero costumes, beer-bellied, mustached guys with brass horns that could crack the tiles on the roof, and he had no need of an Anglo folksinger. As he and the girl walked out of the sun’s glare into the air-conditioned coolness of the restaurant, the girl swinging her guitar case against her hip, he knew that an adulterer had always lived inside him.
She wore white shorts and a pale blue blouse and sandals, and when she sat down in front of his desk, she leaned over a little too far and he wondered if he wasn’t being played.
“You sing Spanish songs?” he said.
“No, I do a lot of the Carter Family pieces. Their music made a comeback when Johnny Cash married June. Then the interest died again. They created a style of picking that’s called ‘hammering on and pulling off.’”
Nick was clueless, his mouth hanging open in a half-smile. “You sing like Johnny Cash?”
“No, the Carters were a big influence on other people, like Woody Guthrie. Here, I’ll show you,” she said. She unsnapped her guitar case and removed a sunburst Gibson from it. The case was lined with purplish-pink velvet, and it glowed with a virginal light that only added to Nick’s confused thoughts about both the girl and the web of desire and need he was walking into.
She fitted a pick on her thumb and began singing a song about flowers covered with emerald dew and a lover betrayed and left to pine in a place that was older than time. When she chorded the guitar, the whiteness of her palm curved around the neck, and she depressed a bass string just before striking it, then released it, creating a sliding note that resonated inside the sound hole. Nick was mesmerized by her voice, the way she lifted her chin when she sang, the muscles working in her throat.
“That’s beautiful,” he said. “You say these Carter guys were an influence on Woody Herman?”
“Not exactly,” she replied.
“I already got a band, but maybe come back in a couple of weeks. If it doesn’t work out with them—”