His phone rang again. The caller ID was blocked. “See if that’s Ethan Riser,” Hackberry called through the doorway. He heard Maydeen take the call in the other room. A moment later, she was standing in the doorway. “Better pick up,” she said.
“Who is it?”
“Same asswipe—pardon me—same dude who called yesterday and said you two were the opposite sides of the same coin.”
Hackberry lifted the receiver and put it to his ear. “Collins?” he said.
“Good morning,” the voice said.
“I’m getting pretty tired of you.”
“I watched you through binoculars yesterday afternoon.”
“Revisiting our murderous handiwork, are we?”
“I’m afraid your thinking is muddled once again, Sheriff. I didn’t murder anybody. They tried to set me up. They also threw down on me first. I wasn’t even armed. An associate was carrying my weapon for me.”
“An associate? That’s a great term. The guy with the raincoat on his arm?”
“The security camera caught that?”
“You left the camera intact deliberately, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t give it a lot of thought.”
“Why’d you kidnap Mrs. Dolan?”
“What makes you think I did?”
“Because you left a witness.”
Hackberry heard Collins breathe in, as though sucking air across his teeth while he thought of a clever response.
“I don’t think I did,” he said.
“You thought wrong. You’ll get to meet him at your trial. I have to ask you something, bub.”
“‘Bub’?”
Hackberry leaned forward in his chair, one elbow on the desk blotter, rubbing one temple with his fingers. Both Maydeen and Pam were watching from his office door. “I don’t know you well, but you seem like a man with a code. In your way, maybe you’re a man of honor. Why do you want to do so much injury to Mrs. Dolan? She has three children and a husband who need her. Set her free, partner. If you have an issue with me, that’s fine. Don’t punish the innocent.”
“Who are you to lecture me?”
“A drunkard and a whoremonger with no moral authority at all, Mr. Collins. That’s the man you’re talking to. Let Esther Dolan go. She’s not a character out of the Bible. She’s flesh and blood and is probably afraid she’ll never see her husband or children again. You want that on your conscience?”
“Esther knows she’s safe with me.”
“Where’s Hugo Cistranos?”
“Oh, you’ll find him. Just watch the sky. It takes two or three days, but you’ll see them circling.”
“And you don’t think she’s afraid?”
There was a long beat.
“Good try. I’ve always heard the inculcation of guilt is a papist trait.”
“I have an envelope filled with photos of the nine terrified women and girls you machine-gunned and buried. Did they scream when they died? Did they beg in a language you couldn’t understand? Did they dissolve into a bloody mist while you sprayed them with a Thompson? Am I describing the scene accurately? Correct me if I haven’t. Please tell me in your own words what it was like to shoot nine defenseless human beings who were so desperate for a new life they’d allow their stomachs to be filled with balloons of heroin?”
He could hear Collins breathing hard. Then the line went dead.
Maydeen filled a cup with coffee in the other room and brought it to him on a saucer. Both she and Pam watched him without speaking.
“Y’all got something to do?” he said.
“We’re going to get him,” Pam said.
“I’ll believe it when it happens,” he said, picking up the fax sheets from his desk blotter again, his thumbs crimping the edges of the paper to the point of tearing them.
AS THE MORNING passed, a seemingly insignificant detail from his conversation with Jack Collins had burrowed itself into his memory and wouldn’t leave him alone. It was the sound of Collins breathing. No, that wasn’t it. It was the way Collins breathed and the image the sound conjured up from the Hollywood of years gone by. Collins seemed to draw his air across his teeth. His mouth became a slit, his speech laconic and clipped, his face without expression, like a man speaking not to other people but to a persona that lived inside him. Perhaps speaking like a man who had a nervous twitch, who was wrapped too tight for his own good, who was at war with the Fates.
A man with dry lips and a voice that rasped as if his larynx had been fried by cigarettes and whiskey or clotted with rust. A man who wore his hair mowed on the sides and combed straight back on top, a man who wore a hat and clothes from another era, his narrow belt hitched tightly into his ribs and his unpressed slacks tucked into western boots, perhaps like a prospector of years past, his whole demeanor that of tarnished frontier gentility.
Hackberry re-sorted the fax sheets and found the third page in the transmission. He stared at one listing as though seeing it for the first time. How dumb does one lawman get, particularly one who considered himself a student of his own era? “Come in here, Pam,” he said.
She stood in the doorway. “What’s up?”
“Take a look at the names on this page.”
“What about them?”
“Which one of them sticks in your mind?”
“None.”
“Look again.”
“I’m a blank.”
He put his thumb on the edge of one name. She stood behind him, leaning down, one arm propped on his desk, her arm touching his shoulder.
“F. C. Dobbs. What’s remarkable about that?” she said.
“You remember the name Fred C. Dobbs?”
“No.”
“Did you see The Treasure of the Sierra Madre?”
“A long time ago.”
“Humphrey Bogart played the role of a totally worthless panhandler and all-around loser whose clothes are in tatters and his lips are so chapped they’re about to crack. When he thinks he’s about to be slickered, he grimaces at the camera and says, ‘Nobody is putting anything over on Fred C. Dobbs.’”
“Collins thinks he’s a character in a film?”
“No, Collins is a chameleon and a clown. He’s a self-educated guy who believes a library card makes him more intelligent than an MIT graduate. He likes to laugh at the rest of us.”
“Maybe F. C. Dobbs is a real person. Maybe it’s just coincidence.”
“There are no coincidences with a guy like Jack Collins. He’s the thing that’s wrong with all the rest of us. He just has more of it and nowhere to leave it.”
“There’s no physical address for Dobbs, just a post office box in Presidio County?” she said.
“So far.”
“Give Maydeen and me a few minutes,” she said.
But it was almost quitting time before Pam and Maydeen got off the phones. In the meantime, Hackberry had his hands full with Nick Dolan, who had called three times, each time more angry and irrational.
“Mr. Dolan, you have my word. As soon as I learn anything about your wife, I’ll call you first,” Hackberry said.
“That’s what the FBI says. I look like a douche bag? I sound like a douche bag? I am a douche bag? I’m stupid here? Tell me which it is,” Nick said.
“We’ll find her.”
“They were following me around. They were bugging my phones. But they couldn’t protect my wife.”
“You need to take that up with the FBI, sir.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m sitting in my office, the place you just called up for the third time.”
“No, like where are you on the map?”
“You don’t need to be here, Mr. Dolan.”
“I’m supposed to play with my joint while this crazoid kidnaps my wife?”
“Stay home, sir.”
“I’m getting in my car now. I’m on my way.”
“No, you’re not. You’re—”
Dead connection.
Pam Tibbs tappe
d on the doorjamb. She had a legal pad folded back in her left hand. “This is what we’ve got. A man using the name F. C. Dobbs had a Texas driver’s license two years ago but doesn’t have one now. His rent on his post office box in Presidio has lapsed. Ten years ago a man named Fred Dobbs, no middle initial, bought five hundred acres of land down toward Big Bend at a tax sale. There were four big parcels strung all over the place. He sold them six months later.”
Hackberry fiddled with his ear. “Who owned the land before Dobbs?”
Pam looked back at her notes. “A woman named Edna Wilcox. I talked to the sheriff in Brewster. He said the Wilcox woman had been married to a railroad man who died of food poisoning. He said she died of a fall and didn’t leave any heirs.”
“What happened to Dobbs?”
“The clerk of court didn’t know, and neither did the sheriff.”
“So we’ve got a dead end?” Hackberry said.
“The state offices are closing now. We can start in again tomorrow. Was that Nick Dolan calling again?”
“Yeah, he said he’s on his way here.” Hackberry leaned back in his swivel chair. Rain was blowing against the window, and the hills surrounding the town were disappearing inside the grayness of the afternoon. “Who did Fred Dobbs, no middle initial, sell the land to?”
Pam turned the page on her legal pad and studied her notes. “I don’t know if I wrote it down. Wait a minute, here it is. The buyer was Bee Travis.”
Hackberry knitted his fingers behind his head. “T-R-A-V-I-S, you’re sure that’s the right spelling?”
“I think so. There was static on the line.”
Hackberry clicked his nails on the desk blotter and looked at his watch. “Call the clerk of court again before the courthouse closes.”
“Has anyone ever talked to you about OCD problems?” She looked at his expression. “Okay, sorry, I’m on it.”
Two minutes later, she came back into his office. “The first name is actually the initial B, not ‘Bee’ with a double e. The last name is Traven, not Travis. I wrote it down wrong.” She glanced away, then looked back at him and held her gaze on his face, her chest rising and falling.
But he wasn’t thinking about her chagrin. “Collins sold the land to himself. He laundered his name and laundered the deed.”
“I’m not following you at all.”
“B. Traven was a mysterious eccentric who wrote the novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”
“Sell that one to Ethan Riser.”
“I’m not even going to try. Sign out a cruiser and pack your overnight bag.”
She went to the door and closed it, then returned to his desk. She leaned on the flats of both her hands, her breasts hanging down heavily inside her shirt. “Think about what you’re doing. If anybody could figure out Collins’s aliases, it would be someone with your educational background. You don’t think he knows that? If he’s there now, it’s because he wants you to find him.”
“Maybe he’ll get his wish.”
28
THAT’S HAIL,” PREACHER said to the woman sitting on the cot across from him. “Hear it? It’s early this year. But at this altitude, you cain’t ever tell. Here, I’ll open the flap. Look outside. See, it looks like mothballs bouncing all over the desert floor. Look at it come down.”
The woman’s face was gray, her eyes dark and angry, her black hair pulled straight back. In the gloom of the tent, she looked more Andalusian than Semitic. She wore a beige sundress and Roman sandals, and her face and shoulders and underarms were still damp from the wet cloth she had washed herself with.
“A plane will be here tomorrow. The wind is too strong for it to land today,” he said. “The pilot has to drop in over those bluffs. It’s hard to do when the wind is out of the north.”
“You’ll have to drug me,” she said.
“I just ask you to give me one year. Is that a big price, considering I protected your family and spared your husband’s life when Arthur Rooney wanted him dead? You know where Arthur Rooney is today, maybe at this very moment?”
He waited for her to reply, but the only sound in the tent was the clicking of hailstones outside.
“Mr. Rooney is under the waves,” he said. “Not quite to the continental shelf, but almost that far.”
“I wouldn’t give you the parings from my nails. I’ll open my veins before I let you touch me. If you fall asleep, I’ll cut your throat.”
“See, when you speak like that, I know you’re the one.”
“One what?”
“Like your namesake in the Book of Esther. She was born a queen, but it took Xerxes to make her one.”
“You’re not only a criminal, you’re an idiot. You wouldn’t know the Book of Esther from a telephone directory.”
Bobby Lee Motree bent inside the open tent flap, wearing a denim jacket, his top hat tied down with a scarf. He held a tin plate in each hand. Both plates contained a single sandwich, a dollop of canned spinach, and another one of fruit cocktail.
“Molo picked up some stuff at the convenience store,” Bobby Lee said. “I seasoned the spinach with some bacon bits and Tabasco. Hope y’all like it.”
“What the hell is that?” Preacher said, looking down at his plate.
“What it looks like, Jack. Fruit cocktail, spinach, and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches,” Bobby Lee said.
Preacher threw his plate outside the tent into the dirt. “Go to town and buy some decent food. You clean that shit out of the icebox and bury it.”
“You eat sandwiches every day. You eat in cafés where the kitchen is more unsanitary than the washroom. Why are you always on my case, man?”
“Because I don’t like peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Is that hard to understand?”
“Hey, Molo, Preacher says your food sucks!” Bobby Lee shouted.
“You think this is a joke?” Preacher said.
“No, Jack, I’m just indicating maybe you don’t know who your friends are. What do I have to do to prove myself?”
“For starters, don’t serve me shit to eat.”
“Then get your own damn food. I’m tired of being somebody’s nigger.”
“I’ve told you about using language like that in my presence.”
Bobby Lee flipped the tent flap shut and walked away without securing it to the tent pole, his hobnailed boots crunching on the hailstones. Preacher heard him talking to the Mexican killers, most of his words lost in the wind. But part of one sentence came through loud and clear: “His Highness the child in there…”
At first Esther Dolan had set down her plate on the table, evidently intending not to eat. But as she had listened to the exchange between Bobby Lee and the man they called Preacher, her dark eyes had grown steadily more thoughtful, veiled, turned inward. She picked up the plate and set it in her lap, then used the plastic knife to cut her sandwich into quarters. She bit off a corner of one square and chewed it slowly, gazing into space, as though disconnected from any of the events taking place around her.
Preacher tied the flap to the tent pole and sat down heavily on his cot. He drank the coffee from his cup, his fedora snugged low on his brow, the crown etched with a thin chain of dried salt.
“You should eat something,” she said.
“My main meal is always at evening. And it’s a half meal at that. Know why that is?”
“You’re on a diet?”
“A horse always has a half tank in him. He has enough fuel in his stomach to deal with or elude his enemies, but not too much to slow him down.”
She feigned attention to his words but was clearly not listening. Bobby Lee had put a paper napkin under her plate. She slipped it out and set one of the sandwich squares on it. “Take this. It’s high in both protein and sugar.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Your mother gave you too many peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches when you were little? Maybe that’s why you’re always out of sorts.”
“My mother fixed whatever a gand
y dancer brought to the boxcar where we lived. That was where she made her living, too. Behind a blanket hung over a rope.”
“What happened to her?”
“She took a fall off some rocks.”
When Esther didn’t reply, he said, “That was after she poisoned her husband. Or deliberately fed him spoiled food. It took him a while to die.”
“You’re making that up.” Before he could answer, she wrapped the piece of sandwich in the napkin and set it on his knee.
“I’ve always heard Jewish women are compulsive feeders. Thanks but no thanks,” he said, setting the sandwich square on the table.
She continued to eat, her shoulders slightly stooped, a demure quality settling over her that seemed to intrigue and arouse him.
“A woman like you is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of person,” he said.
“You’re very kind,” she said, her eyes lowered.
BY DARK HACKBERRY Holland and Pam Tibbs had had no luck finding the residence that might have been occupied by the man using the name B. Traven. On the back roads, in the blowing rain and tumbleweeds and darkness, they could find few mile markers or rural mailboxes with numbers or houses that were lighted. A crew on a utility truck told them there had been a giant power failure from Fort Stockton down to the border. No one, including the sheriff’s department, had any knowledge of a man by the name of B. Traven. One deputy who had worked previously at the tax assessor’s office volunteered that Traven was an absentee landowner who resided in New Mexico and rented his property to hippies or people who came and went with the season or tended to live off the computer.
At nine-thirty P.M. Hackberry and Pam took adjoining rooms at a motel south of Alpine. The motel had a generator that created enough power to keep the motel functional during the storm, the outside lights glowing with the low intensity and yellow dullness of sodium lamps. A number of revelers had taken refuge there, talking loudly in the parking lot and on the concourse, slamming metal doors so hard the walls shook, carrying twelve-packs and fast food to their rooms. As Hackberry looked out the window at the darkness of the night, at the lightning flashes in the clouds, at the leak of electric sparks from a damaged transformer that was trying to come back on line, he thought of candles flickering in a graveyard.