“I think this place is an open-air mental asylum.”
“Can I have the photo of Eriksson? Or at least a copy of it?”
“Maybe later.”
“Later?”
Hackberry heard Pam’s footsteps behind him on the St. Augustine grass.
“Why don’t you haul your ass down the road?” she said to Clawson.
“Take it easy,” Hackberry said.
Clawson removed his glasses, polished them with a Kleenex, and put them back on, crinkling his nose. “Can you tell me why you bear me such animosity?” he asked Pam.
“When your daughter and her fiancé were abducted and murdered, she was working as a night clerk at a convenience store,” Pam said. “You didn’t know the risk exposure for a woman working nights at a convenience store? You weren’t making enough money to provide a better situation for her? Is everyone else supposed to pay the price for your guilt, Agent Clawson? If that’s the case, it’s a real drag.”
Clawson’s face had gone white. “Don’t you dare talk about my daughter,” he said.
“Then you stop hiding behind her, you miserable fuck.”
“Sheriff, you get this crazy bitch out of my face.”
“No, you hold on a minute,” Hackberry replied.
But it was too late. Hackberry saw Pam Tibbs pull her blackjack from her pocket, letting the spring-mounted, leather-weighted end dip away from her wrist, tightening her fingers on the leather-braided wood handle, stepping toward Clawson all in one motion. Before Hackberry could knock her arm down, she whipped the blackjack across the side of Clawson’s head, snapping her wrist into the swing, slashing open his scalp, slinging a red stripe down his white shirt.
His glasses fell from his face, cracking on a flagstone. His eyes were wide with shock, out of focus, his mouth open in a great round O. He raised his forearm to ward off the second blow, but she caught him on the elbow, then behind the ear. His knees buckled, and he grabbed the gate to keep from going all the way down.
Hackberry locked his arms around Pam, pinning her hands at her sides, lifting her into the air, carrying her backward deeper into the yard. She fought with him, kicking the heels of her boots into his shins, pulling at his wrists to force him to unclasp his hands, butting her head into his face.
Clawson propped one hand against the fender of his car and held himself erect, struggling to get a handkerchief out of his pocket to stop the blood that ran in strings down his forehead and into his eyebrows. Hackberry carried Pam to the back of the house, her feet still off the ground, the smell of her hair and body heat rising into his face.
“You stop it, Pam. I’ll throw you in the horse tank. I swear to God I’ll do it,” he said.
They were back in the shade, the wind rustling through the mulberry tree, the lawn suddenly cool and smelling of the damp soil he had turned over with a spading fork at sunrise. He felt the stiffness go out of her back and her hands relax on top of his.
“You finished?” he said.
She didn’t answer.
“Did you hear me?”
“I’m done. Let me go,” she said.
He set her down and put his hands on her shoulders, turning her toward him. “You just dropped both of us in the cook pot,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Go in the house. I’m going to try to square it.”
“Not on my account.”
“Pam, this is one time you shut up and do what I say.”
She closed and opened her eyes as though awakening from a dream. Then she walked to the table and sat down on the bench and propped her hands on her knees and stared into space, her hair tousling in the breeze.
Hackberry went inside, took a first-aid kit and a handful of dish towels from a kitchen closet, and went back out front. Clawson was sitting in the passenger seat of his car, the door open, his feet on the gravel driveway; he was talking into a cell phone. The handkerchief wadded up in his left hand was almost entirely red. He closed the cell phone and dropped it on the seat.
“Did you call for the paramedics?” Hackberry said.
“No, I called my wife. I’m supposed to meet her in Houston tonight.”
“I’ll take you to emergency receiving.”
“You were a navy corpsman, Sheriff. Do what you need to do. This didn’t happen. I slipped on the metal stairs at the motel.”
Hackberry waited for him to go on.
“You heard me,” Clawson said.
“That’s the way you want it?”
“We take down the guys who killed those Asian women and Junior Vogel. Nothing gets in the way of that objective. You tell your deputy what I said.”
“No, you tell her.”
“Bring her out here,” Clawson said.
“You don’t take her to task.”
Clawson cleared his throat and pressed his handkerchief to a deep cut that was bleeding through his eyebrow. “No problem.”
“Let’s take a look at your head, partner,” Hackberry said.
10
NICK DOLAN SWALLOWED a tranquilizer and a half glass of water, took Esther into his office, and closed the door behind him. With the dark velvet drapes closed and the air-conditioning set to almost freezing levels, there was an insularity about his office that made Nick feel not only isolated and safe but outside of time and place, as though he could rewind the video and erase all the mistakes he had made in his journey from the schoolyard playground in the Lower Ninth Ward to the day he bought into an escort service and the attendant association with people like Hugo Cistranos.
He told Esther everything that had happened during his abduction—the ride in the SUV down the highway to the empty farmhouse, Preacher Jack Collins sitting next to him, the New Orleans button man Hugo Cistranos and the strange kid in a top hat sitting in front, the moon wobbling under the surface of a pond whose banks glistened with green cow scat. Then he told Esther how the man called Preacher had spared him at the last moment because of her name.
“He thinks I’m somebody out of the Bible?” she said.
“Who knows what crazy people think?” Nick said.
“There’s something you’re leaving out. Something you’re not talking about.”
“No, that’s it. That’s everything that happened.”
“Stop lying. What did these men do in your name?”
“They didn’t do it in my name. I never told them to do what they did.”
“You make me want to hit you, to beat my fists bloody on you.”
“They killed nine women from Thailand. They were prostitutes. They were being smuggled across the border by Artie Rooney. They machine-gunned them and buried them with a bulldozer.”
“My God, Nick,” she said, her voice breaking in her throat.
“I didn’t have anything to do with this, Esther.”
“Yes, you did.” Then she said it again. “Yes, you did.”
“Hugo was supposed to deliver the women to Houston. That’s all it was.”
“All it was? Listen to yourself. What were you doing with people who smuggle prostitutes into the country?”
“We’ve got a half-interest in a couple of escort agencies. It’s legal. They’re hostesses. Maybe some other stuff goes on, but it’s between adults, it’s a free country. It’s just business.”
“You’ve been running escort services?” When he didn’t reply, she said, “Nick, what have you done to us?” She was weeping quietly in the leather chair now, her long hair hanging in her face. Her discomposure and fear and disbelief, and the black skein of her hair separating her from the rest of the world, made him think of the women lined up in front of Preacher’s machine gun, and his lips began to tremble.
“You want me to fix you a drink?” he said.
“Don’t say anything to me. Don’t touch me. Don’t come near me.”
He was standing over her, his fingers extended inches from the crown of her head. “I didn’t want anybody hurt, Esther. I thought maybe I’d get even with Art
ie for a lot of the things he did to me when I was a kid. It was dumb.”
But she wasn’t hearing him. Her head was bent forward, her face completely obscured, her back shaking inside her blouse. He took a box of Kleenex from his desk and set it on her lap, but it fell from her knees without her ever noticing it was there. He stood in the darkened coldness of his office, the jet of frigid air from the wall duct touching his bald pate, his stomach sagging over his belt, the smell of nicotine rife on his fingers when he rubbed his hand across his mouth. If he had ever felt smaller in his life, he could not remember the instance.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and started to walk away.
“What do these gangsters plan to do now?”
“There was a witness, a soldier who was in Iraq. Him and his girlfriend could be witnesses against Hugo and the kid in the top hat and this guy Preacher.”
“They’re going to kill them?”
“Yeah, if they find them, that’s what they’ll do.”
“That can’t happen, Nick,” she said, raising her head.
“I called the FBI when I was drunk. It didn’t do any good. You want me to go to prison? You think that will stop it? These guys will kill those kids anyway.”
She stared into space, her eyes cavernous. Through the floor, she and Nick could hear the children turning somersaults on the living room carpet, sending a thud down through the walls into the foundation of the house. “We can’t have this on our souls,” she said.
THE MOTEL WAS a leftover from the 1950s, a utilitarian structure checkerboarded with huge red and beige plastic squares, the metal-railed upstairs walkways not unlike those in penitentiaries, all of it located in a neighborhood of warehouses and bankrupt businesses and joyless bars that could afford no more than a single neon sign over the door.
The swimming pool stayed covered with a plastic tarp year-round, and the apron of grass around the building was yellow and stiff, the fronds of the palm trees rattling drily in the wind. On the upside of things, hookers did not operate on its premises, nor did drug dealers cook meth in the rooms. The sodium halide lamps in the parking lot protected the cars of the guests from roving bands of thieves. The rates were cheap. Arguably, there were worse rental lodgings in San Antonio. But there was one undeniable characteristic about the motel and the surrounding neighborhood that would not go away: The rectangularity of line and the absence of people gave one the sense that he was standing inside a stage set, one that had been created for the professional sojourner.
Preacher sat in a stuffed chair in the dark, staring at the television set. The screen was filled with static, the volume turned up full blast on white noise. But the images on the screen inside Preacher’s head had nothing to do with the television set in his room. Inside Preacher’s head, the year was 1954. A little boy sat in the corner of a boxcar parked permanently on a siding in the middle of the Texas-Oklahoma Panhandle. It was winter, and the wind was gray with grit and dust, and it chapped the cheeks and lips and dried out the hands and caused the skin to split around the thumbnails. A blanket draped over a rope divided the boxcar in half. On the other side of the blanket, Edna Collins was going at it with a dark-skinned gandy dancer while two more waited outside, their hands stuffed in their canvas coat pockets, their slouch hats pulled low over their ears as protection against the wind.
Preacher’s motel windows were hung with red curtains, and the lamps in the parking lot seemed to etch them with fire. He heard footsteps on the steel stairway, then a shadow crossed his window and someone tapped tentatively on the jalousie.
“What do you want?” Preacher said, his eyes still fixed on the television screen.
“My name is Mona Drexel, Preacher. We met once,” a voice replied.
“I don’t remember the name.”
“Liam is like a client of mine.”
He turned his head slowly and looked at her shadow on the frosted glass. “Liam who?”
“Eriksson.”
“Come in,” he said.
He smelled the cigarette odor on her clothes as soon as she entered the room. Against the outside light, her hair possessed the frizzy outline and color of cotton candy. The foundation on her face made Preacher think of an unfinished clay sculpture, the lines collapsing under the jaw, the mouth a bit crooked, the eye shadow and rouge both sad and embarrassing to look at.
“Can I sit down?” she said.
“You’re in, aren’t you?”
“I heard that maybe people are looking for Liam because of this government check he took into one of these car-title loan places. I didn’t want to have my name mixed up in this, because I’m not really involved or a close friend of his. See, we had a few drinks, and he had this check, and he wanted to party some more, so I went along with him, but it kind of hit the fan for some reason, and Liam said we ought to get out of there, and he thought you were gonna be pissed off, but that was all over my head and not really my business. I just wanted to clear this up and make sure nobody has a misunderstanding. Since we’d already met, I didn’t think you’d mind me coming by to answer any questions you might have.”
“Why should I have questions for you?”
“A couple of people told me this is what I should do. I didn’t mean to bother you during your program.”
Then she looked at the empty screen. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, out of breath and holding her hands in her lap, unsure of what she should say next. She placed one foot on the top of the other as a little girl might, chewing her lip.
“I don’t like touching the bedspreads in motels,” she said, half smiling. “There’s every kind of DNA in the world imaginable on them, not that I mean this place is any worse than any other, it’s just the way all motels are, with unclean people using everything and not caring that other people are gonna use it later.”
The side of Preacher’s face was immobile, the eye that she could see like a marble pushed into tallow. “Mona Drexel is my stage name,” she said. “My real name is Margaret, but I started using Mona when I was onstage in Dallas. Believe it or not, it was a club Jack Ruby once owned, but you can call me whatever you want.”
“Where’s Liam now?”
“That’s why I’m here. I don’t know. Maybe I can find out. I just don’t want to hurt anybody or have anybody think I’m working against them. See, I’m for people, I’m not against anybody. There’s a big difference. I just want everybody to know that.”
“I can see that,” he said.
“Can you turn down the volume on the television?” she said.
“Do you know what I do for a living?”
“No.”
“Who told you I was staying at this motel?”
“Liam said you use it sometimes when you’re in town. That noise is really loud.”
“That’s what Liam told you, did he?”
“Yes,” she said. “I mean, yes, sir, he just mentioned it in passing.”
“Do you know where Liam got the government check?”
“No, he didn’t tell me. I don’t talk with clients about their personal business.”
“That’s a good way to be.”
“It is, isn’t it?” she said, crossing her leg on her knee, her mouth jerking as though she wanted to smile. She watched Preacher’s face in the white glow of the television screen. His eyes never blinked; not one muscle in his face moved. Her own expression went dead.
“I have clients that become friends,” she said. “After they’re friends, they’re not clients again. Then I have friends that are always friends. They never become clients. They’re friends from the first time I meet them, know what I mean?”
“No, I don’t,” he replied.
“I can be a friend to somebody. I have to make a living, but I believe in having friends and helping them out.” She lowered her eyes. “I mean, we could be friends if you want.”
“You remind me of someone,” he said, looking at her directly for the first time.
“Who?” she asked, the wor
d turning to a rusty clot in her throat.
He stared at her in a way no one had ever stared at her in her life. She felt the blood drain from her head and heart into her stomach.
“Somebody who never should have been allowed around small children,” he said. “Do you have children?”
“I did. A little boy. But he died.”
“It’s better that some people don’t live. They should be taken before their souls are forfeit. That means some of us have to help them in ways they don’t like, in ways that seem truly awful at the time.” Preacher reached out into the darkness and pulled a straight chair closer to him. On it were his wallet, a small automatic, an extra magazine, and a barber’s razor.
“Sir, what are you planning to do?” she said.
“You understood what I said.” He smiled. His statement was not a question but a compliment.
“Liam wanted to party. He had the check. I went with him.” Her breath was tangling in her chest, the room starting to go out of focus. “I have a mother in Amarillo. My son is buried in the Baptist cemetery there. I was gonna call her today. She’s hard of hearing, but if I shout, she knows it’s me. She’s seventy-nine and cain’t see real good, either. We still talk to each other. She doesn’t know what I do for a living.”
Preacher was holding something in his hand, but she couldn’t bring herself to look at it. She went on, “If you let me walk out the door, you’ll never see me again. I’ll never tell anyone what we talked about. I’ll never see Liam again, either.”
“I know you won’t,” he said in an almost kindly fashion.
“Please, sir, don’t.”
“Come closer.”
“I don’t want to.”
“You need to, Mona. We don’t choose the moment of our births or the hour of our deaths. There are few junctures in life when we actually make decisions that mean anything. The real challenge is in accepting our fate.”
“Please,” she said. “Please, please, please.”
“Get on your knees if you want. It’s all right. But don’t beg. No matter what else you do in this world, don’t beg.”
“Not in the face, sir. Please.”