“To turn ourselves in?”
“We haven’t done anything wrong.”
“I tried it already. That one won’t flush,” he said.
“You tried to turn us in?”
“I called a government eight hundred number. They switched me around to a bunch of different offices and finally to a guy with Immigration and Customs. He said his name was Clawson.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It didn’t go too well. He said he wanted to meet me, like somehow all this was between him and me and we were buds or something. He had a voice like a robot. You know what’s going on when people talk like robots? They don’t want you to know what they’re thinking.”
“What’d you tell him, Pete?”
“That I was by the church when the shooting started. I told him the guy who was paying me three hundred dollars to drive the truck was named Hugo. I told him I feel like a damn coward for running away while all those women were being killed. He said I needed to come in and make a statement and I’d be protected. Then he said, ‘Is Ms. Gaddis with you? We can he’p her, too.’
“I said, ‘She’s not a part of this.’ He says, ‘We know about the characters at the truck stop, Pete. We think they either killed her or she put a hole in one of them. Maybe she’s dead and lying unburied someplace. You need to do the right thing, soldier.’”
Pete sat back down on the bed and began drawing his shirt up one arm, the network of muscles in his back tightening like whipcord.
“What’d you say?”
“I told him to kiss my ass. When people try to make you feel guilty, it’s because they want to install dials on you. It also means they’re gonna sell you down the river the first chance they get.”
“Can the FBI trace a cell phone call?” she asked.
“They can locate the tower it bounces off of. Why?”
“I’m going to call Junior.”
“I think that’s a bad idea. Junior makes a lot of noise, but Junior looks after Junior.”
“You only get thirty percent disability. It’s hardly enough to pay the rent. What are we supposed to do? This all started in a bar where you were drinking with idiots who soak their brains in mescal. For three hundred dollars, you put our lives in the hands of people who are morally insane.”
She saw the injury in his face. She turned away, her eyes closed, tears squeezing onto her eyelashes. Then, in her inability to control even the tear ducts in her face, she began hammering the tops of her thighs with her fists.
THAT AFTERNOON, WHILE Pete slept, Vikki walked down the road and used the pay phone to call Junior collect at the diner. She told him about the disability check and about their financial desperation. She also told him that the man Junior had sold milk to had tried to kidnap and possibly kill her.
“Maybe that’s more information than I need to know,” he said.
“Are you serious? That guy was in your diner. A guy with an orange beard was there, too. I think he was part of it.”
“The check’s at the mailbox in front of that shack y’all were living in?” Junior said.
“You know where we were living. Stop pretending.”
“The sheriff was here. So were some federal people. They thought maybe you were dead.”
“I’m not.”
“Did you shoot that guy who came here to buy milk?”
“Are you going to help us or not?”
“Isn’t this called aiding and abetting or something?”
“You are really pissing me off, Junior.”
“Give me your address.”
She hesitated.
“Think I’m gonna turn you in?” he said.
She gave him the address of the motel, the name of the town, and the zip code. With each word she spoke, she felt like she was taking off a piece of armor.
After she hung up, she went to the bar and asked the bartender for a glass of water. The combination steak house and beer joint was a spacious place, cool and dark, with big electric floor fans humming away, the heads of stuffed animals mounted on the debarked and polished log walls. “I put some ice and a lime slice in it,” the bartender said.
“Thank you,” she replied.
“You look kind of tuckered out. You visiting here’bouts?”
She gulped from the iced drink and blew out her breath. “No, I’m a Hollywood actress on location. You need a waitress?”
PAM TIBBS WALKED from the dispatcher’s cage into Hackberry’s office, tapping with one knuckle on the doorjamb as she entered.
“What is it?” Hackberry said, looking up from some photos in a manila folder.
“There’s a disturbance at Junior’s diner.”
“Send Felix or R.C.”
“The disturbance is with that ICE agent, Clawson.”
Hackberry made a sucking sound with his teeth.
“I’ll take it,” Pam said.
“No, you won’t.”
“Are those the photos of the Thai women?” she said. When he didn’t answer, she said, “Why are you looking at those, Hack? Say a prayer for those poor women and stop sticking pins in yourself.”
“Some of them are wearing dark clothes. Some of them are wearing what were probably the best clothes they owned. They weren’t dressed for hot country. They thought they were going somewhere else. Nothing at that crime scene makes sense.”
Pam Tibbs gazed at the street and at the shadows of clouds moving across the cinder-block and stucco buildings and broken sidewalks. She heard Hackberry getting up from his chair.
“Is Clawson still at the diner?” he asked.
“What do you think?” she replied.
It took them only ten minutes to get to the diner, the flasher bar rippling, the siren off. Isaac Clawson’s motor pool vehicle was parked between the diner and the nightclub next door, both rear doors open. Junior was handcuffed in the backseat, wrists behind him, while Clawson stood outside the vehicle, talking into a cell phone.
“Hack?” she said.
“Would you give it a rest?”
She pulled up behind Clawson’s vehicle and turned off the engine. But she didn’t open the door. “That guy called you a sonofabitch. He’ll never do that in my presence again,” she said.
Hackberry put his hat back on and got out on the gravel and walked toward Isaac Clawson. To the south, he could see heat waves rippling off the hardpan, dust devils spinning in the wind, the distant ridge of mountains etched against an immaculate blue sky. He wore a long-sleeve cotton shirt snap-buttoned at the wrists, which was his custom at the office, regardless of the season, and he felt loops of moisture already forming under his armpits.
“What’s the problem?” he said to the ICE agent.
“There is no problem,” Clawson replied.
“How about it, Junior?” Hackberry said.
Junior wore white trousers and a white T-shirt and still had a kitchen apron on. The sideburns trimmed in a flare on his cheeks were sparkling with sweat. “He thinks I know where Vikki Gaddis is.”
“Do you?” Hackberry asked.
“I run a diner. I don’t monitor the lives of kids who cain’t stay out of trouble.”
“Everybody tells me you had more than an employer’s interest in Vikki,” Clawson said. “She’s broke and on the run and has no family. I think you’re the first person she would come to for help. You want to see her dead? The best way to accomplish that is to keep stonewalling us.”
“I don’t like your sexual suggestions. I’m a family man. You watch your mouth,” Junior said.
“Could I speak to you a moment, Agent Clawson?” Hackberry said.
“What you can do is butt out,” Clawson replied.
“How about a little professional courtesy?” Pam Tibbs said.
Clawson looked at her as though noticing her for the first time. “Excuse me?”
“Our department is working in cooperation with yours, right?” she said.
“And?” Clawson said.
P
am looked away and hooked her thumbs in her gun belt, her mouth a tight seam, her eyes neutral. Hackberry walked into the shade, removing his hat, blotting his forehead on his sleeve. Clawson brushed at his nose, then followed. “All right, say it,” he said.
“You taking Junior in?” Hackberry said.
“I think he’s lying. What would you do?”
“I’d give him the benefit of the doubt, at least for the time being.”
“Benefit of the doubt? You found nine dead women and girls in your county, and you’re giving a man who may be an accomplice to fugitive flight the benefit of the doubt? It’s going to take me a minute or two to process that.”
“Humiliating a man like Junior Vogel in front of his customers and employees is not going to get you what you want. Back off a little bit. I’ll come back and talk to him later. Or you can come back and we’ll talk to him together. He’s not a bad guy.”
“You seem to have a long history in the art of compromise, Sheriff Holland. I accessed your file at the Department of Veterans Affairs.”
“Really? Why would you do that, sir?”
“You were a POW in North Korea. You gave information to the enemy. You were put in one of the progressive camps for POWs who cooperated with the enemy.”
“That’s a lie.”
“It is? I had a different impression.”
“I spent six weeks in a hole in the ground in wintertime under a sewer grate that was manufactured in Ohio. I knew its place of origin because I could see the lettering embossed on the iron surface. I could see the lettering because every evening a couple of guards urinated through the grate and washed the lettering clean of mud. I spent those weeks under the grate with only a steel pot to relieve myself in. I also saw my best friends machine-gunned to death and their bodies thrown into an open latrine. However, I don’t know if the material you found at the VA contained those particular details. Did you come across that kind of detail in your research, sir?”
Clawson looked at his watch. “I’ve had about all of this I can take,” he said. “It’s against my better judgment, but I’m going to kick your man loose. I’ll be back. You can count on it.”
“Turn around, you pompous motherfucker,” Pam Tibbs said.
“Say that again?” Clawson said.
“You learn some manners or you’re going to wish you were cleaning chamber pots in Afghanistan,” Pam said.
Hackberry put on his hat and walked away, forming a pocket of air in one jaw.
ACROSS THE HIGHWAY, at an open-air watermelon stand, a man wearing black jeans and unpolished black hobnailed boots and wideband suspenders and a Grateful Dead T-shirt, the fabric washed so many times it was ash-gray, sat at a plank table in ninety-six-degree shade, the wind popping the canvas tarp above his head. A top hat rested crown-down beside him on the bench. He carved the meat out of his watermelon rind with his pocketknife and slipped each chunk off the back of the blade into his mouth, watching the scene by the side of Isaac Clawson’s vehicle play itself out.
When the people across the highway had gone their separate ways, he put on his hat and walked away from the watermelon stand to use his cell phone. His swollen lats and long upper torso and short legs gave him the appearance of a tree stump. A moment later, he returned to the table, wadded up his melon rinds in damp newspaper, and stuffed the newspaper and the rinds in a trash barrel. A cloud of blackflies swarmed out of the barrel into his face, but he seemed to give them little notice, as though perhaps they were old friends.
8
THE SALOON WAS old, built in the nineteenth century, the original stamped-tin ceiling still in place, the long railed bar where John Wesley Hardin and Wild Bill Longley drank still in use. Preacher Jack Collins sat in the back against a wall, behind the pool table, under a wood-bladed fan. Through a side window he could see a clump of banana trees, their fronds beaded with drops of moisture that looked as heavy and bright as mercury. He watched the waiter bring his food from a service window behind the bar. Then he shook ketchup and salt and pepper and Louisiana hot sauce on the fried beef patty and the instant mashed potatoes and the canned string beans that constituted his lunch.
He raised his eyes slightly when the front door opened and Hugo Cistranos entered the saloon and walked out of the brilliant noonday glare toward Preacher’s table. But Preacher’s expression was impassive and showed no recognition of the events taking place around him, not even the arrival of his food at the table or the fact that Hugo had stopped at the bar and ordered two draft beers and was now setting them on the table.
“Hot out there,” Hugo said, sitting down, sipping at his beer, pushing the second glass toward Preacher.
“I don’t drink,” Preacher said.
“Sorry, I forgot.”
Preacher continued eating and did not ask Hugo if he wanted to order.
“You eat here a lot?” Hugo said.
“When they have the special.”
“That’s the special you’re eating now?”
“No.”
Hugo didn’t try to sort it out. He looked at the empty pool table under a cone of light, the racked cues, a hard disk of pool chalk on a table, the cracked red vinyl in the booths, a wall calendar with a picture of the Alamo on it that was three years out of date, the day drinkers humped morosely over their beer glasses at the bar. “You’re an unusual kind of guy, Jack.”
Preacher set his knife on the edge of his plate and let his eyes rove over Hugo’s face.
“What I mean is, I’m glad you’re willing to work with me on this problem I’m having with Nick Dolan,” Hugo said.
“I didn’t say I would.”
“Nobody wants you to do anything you don’t want to, least of all me.”
“A sit-down with the owner of a skin joint?”
“Dolan wants to meet you. You’re the man, Jack.”
“I have a hole in my foot and one in my calf. I’m a gimp. Sitting down with a gimp is going to make him pay the money he owes you? You cain’t handle that yourself?”
“We’re gonna take fifty percent of his nightclub and his restaurant. Ten percent of it will be yours, Jack. That’s for the late payment I owed you. Later, we’ll talk about the escort services Nick owns in Dallas and Houston. Five minutes after we sit down, his signature is going to be on that reapportionment of title. He’s a sawed-off fat little Jew putting on a show for his wife. Believe me, you’ll make him shit his pants. Let’s face it, you know how to give a guy the heebie-jeebies, Jack.”
Hugo salted his beer and drank from the foam. He wore a Rolex and a pressed sport shirt with a diamond design on it. His hair had just been barbered, and his cheeks were glowing with aftershave. He did not seem to notice the tightness around Preacher’s mouth.
“Where’s the sit-down?” Preacher asked.
“A quiet restaurant somewhere. Maybe in the park. Who cares?”
Preacher cut a piece of meat and speared string beans onto the tines of his fork and rolled the meat and string beans in his mashed potatoes. Then he set down the fork without eating from it and looked at the row of men drinking at the bar, slumped on their stools, their silhouettes like warped clothespins on a line.
“He plans to pop both of us,” Preacher said.
“Nicholas Dolan? He’ll probably have to wear adult diapers for the sit-down.”
“You got him scared, and you want him even more scared?”
“With Nick Dolan, it’s not a big challenge.”
“Why do cops use soft-nose ammunition?” Preacher asked.
“How should I know?”
“Because a wounded or scared enemy is the worst enemy you can have. The man who kills you is the one who’ll rip your throat out before you know he has his hand on you. The girl who blinded me with wasp spray and pumped two holes in me? Would you say that story speaks for itself?”
“Thought I’d let you in on a good deal, Jack. But everything I say seems to be the wrong choice.”
“We’re going to talk to Dol
an, all right. But not when he’s expecting it, and not because you want to take control of his business interests. We’ll talk to Dolan because you screwed things up. I think you and Arthur Rooney have been running a scam of some kind.”
“Scam? Me and Arthur? That’s great.” Hugo shook his head and sipped from his beer, his eyes lowered, his lashes long like a girl’s.
“I paid him a visit,” Preacher said.
A smile flickered on Hugo’s face, the skin whitening around the edges of his mouth. “No kidding?”
“He’s got a new office there in Galveston, right on the water. You haven’t talked to him?” Preacher picked up his fork and slipped the combination of meat and string beans and potatoes into his mouth.
“I broke off my connections with Artie a long time ago. He’s a welcher and a pimp, just like Dolan.”
“I got the impression maybe you weren’t ’jacking the Asian women for Dolan. You just let Dolan think that way so you could blackmail him and take over his businesses. It was yours and Rooney’s gig from the jump.”
“Jack, I’m trying to get your money to you. What do I have to do to win your faith? You’re really hurting my feelings here.”
“What time does Dolan close his nightclub?”
“Around two A.M.”
“Take a nap. You look tired,” Preacher said. He started to eat again, but his food had gone cold, and he pushed his plate away. He picked up his crutches and began getting to his feet.
“What did Artie tell you? Give me a chance to defend myself,” Hugo said.
“Mr. Rooney was trying to find his finger on the floor. He didn’t have a lot to say at the time. Pick me up at one-fifteen A.M.”
PETE FLORES DID not dream every night, or at least he did not have dreams every night that he could remember. Regardless, each dawn he was possessed by the feeling he had been the sole spectator in a movie theater where he had been forced to watch a film whose content he could not control and whose images would reappear later, in the full light of day, as unexpectedly as a windowpane exploding without cause.