Rain Gods

  “I know what you mean,” the clerk said.

  “You hurt your eye?”

  “Yeah, put a stick in it. Not too smart, I guess.”

  After Isaac Clawson went back outside, the clerk looked in the mirror. The Band-Aid on his face had come almost completely loose, exposing a pair of tattooed blue teardrops at the corner of his eye. He flattened the Band-Aid into place once more and picked up the telephone, punching in only three digits.

  Clawson picked up a free shopper’s guide from a newspaper box and held it over his head as he walked into the motel parking lot, as though going to his automobile to confer with his wife. Then he cut around the far side of the motel and entered an outdoor breezeway in the center of the building and mounted the stairs. The clouds were purple in the west, the sun like a yellow rose buried inside them, the sky streaked with rain. In weather like this, his father used to say the devil was beating his wife. Why was Isaac having thoughts like these now, about his boyhood, about his family? Why did a great change in his life seem to be at hand?

  THERE HAD BEEN an eight-vehicle pileup by an intersection of I-35 and I-10, a chemical tanker jackknifing and sloshing its load across six lanes of traffic. Hackberry had clamped his magnetized portable flasher on the roof of his truck cab and was trying to thread his way along the road’s shoulder to an exit by a shopping center. He handed his cell phone to Pam. “Try Clawson again,” he said.

  She got Clawson’s voice mail. She closed the cell phone but kept it in her lap. “Want to call the locals for backup?” she asked.

  “For Clawson?”

  She thought about it. “No, I guess he wouldn’t appreciate that too much.”

  “Hang on,” Hackberry said.

  He swung across the swale, bouncing hard through the bottom, spinning grass and dirt off the rear tires as he powered up the far side. He went the wrong way on the road shoulder, then cut across another swale onto an entrance to I-10 that was free of congestion, the truck slamming down on the springs. Pam kept one hand fastened on the dashboard.

  “You all right?” Hackberry said.

  “What do you think Clawson plans to do if he gets to Collins before we do?” she asked.

  “Maybe he already has a team backing him up. See if you can get hold of Ethan Riser. His number is in my contacts.”

  “Who?”

  “The FBI agent.”

  Pam tried Riser’s number, but the call went directly into voice mail. She left a message.

  “Sorry for lecturing you about Clawson. I didn’t think he’d try to use us,” Pam said.

  “Reach behind the seat and get my pistol, will you?”

  It and its holster and its belt with loops for cartridges were wrapped inside a brown paper bag. Pam slipped the bag free of the gun and the belt that was wound around the holster and set them on the carpet by the console. The pistol was a customized remake of a frontier double-action .45 revolver. It was charcoal blue with white handles and a brass trigger guard and a seven-and-a-half-inch barrel. Its balance was perfect, its accuracy and lethality at forty yards not up for debate.

  “You’ve never fired it on the job, have you?” she said.

  “Who told you that?”

  “No one.”

  He looked at her.

  “I just knew,” she said.

  They were on an elevated expressway, roaring past a neighborhood of warehouses and alleyways with clumps of banana trees in them and houses with dirt yards. Against a rainy, sunlit, mauve-colored sky that made Hackberry think of the Orient, he could see a three-story building with a neon sign on the roof that read Traveler’s Rest.

  WHEN ISAAC CLAWSON reached the second floor, he realized the numbers on the room doors were going to be a challenge. The numbering was not sequential; some of the rooms were set in an alcove, inside the breezeway, and some of the rooms did not have any numbers at all. Down the walkway, a cleaning cart was parked against the handrail. A Hispanic maid sat on a bench by the cart, humped forward in a cleaning smock of some kind, eating a sandwich, a scarf knotted under her chin, the mist from the rain blowing in her face.

  The palm fronds by the pool were thrashing in the wind, twisting against the trunks. Clawson passed room 206, the room that had been offered to him by the clerk, and saw that the next room had no number and the one after that was 213 and the one after that was 215. He realized that for whatever reason, odd numbers were on one side of the breezeway and even numbers on the other.

  Except for 206.

  “Where’s two-oh-nine?” he said to the cleaning person, whose mouth was full of cheese and bread.

  “Siento mucho, seńor, pero no hablo inglés.”

  Then why not learn some inglés if you’re going to live in this country? he said to himself.

  He went in the other direction, going past the breezeway into an area of even numbers. At the far end of the building, with his hand pushed back inside his coat, his thumb hooked on the holstered butt of his semiautomatic, he paused and looked out over the city. Somewhere out there in the fading light was the Alamo, where he and his wife had taken their daughter when she was nine. He had not tried to explain to her the actuality of the events that had occurred there, the thousands of Mexican soldiers charging the walls on the thirteenth day of the siege, the desperation of the 118 men and boys inside who knew this was their last morning on earth, the screams of the wounded who were bayoneted to death in the chapel. Why should a child be exposed to the cruelty that had characterized much of human history? Hadn’t men like Bowie and Crockett and Travis died so children like his daughter could be safe? At least that was what Clawson had wanted to believe.

  How could he have known at the time that his child’s death would be a far worse one than any experienced by the Texans inside the mission? Clawson could feel his eyes watering. He hated himself for his emotions, because his remorse for not having taken better care of his daughter had always paralyzed him and made him, too, the victim of his daughter’s killers, men who had yet to be executed, who ate good food and had medical care and watched television while his daughter and her fiancé lay in a cemetery and he and his wife dwelled daily in the Garden of Gethsemane.

  Theologians claimed that anger was a cancer and that hatred was one of the seven deadly sins. They were wrong, Clawson thought. Anger was an elixir that cauterized sorrow and passivity and victimhood from the metabolism; it lit fires in the belly; it provided you with that deadening of the conscience that allowed you to lock down on someone with iron sights and forget he descended from the same tree in a Mesopotamian savannah that you did.

  He went back up the walkway to the central part of the building. The cleaning person was still by her cart, looking in the opposite direction. Then he discovered why he had not found room 209. The tin numerals on the door of room 206 had been affixed to the wood with three tiny nails. But the nails at the top and bottom of the numeral 6 had been removed or knocked loose from their holes by the constant slamming of the door. The 6 was actually the numeral 9, turned upside down on the remaining nail.

  The curtain was drawn on the window. Clawson tried to see through the corner of the jalousie with no success. Then he realized the door was slightly ajar, perhaps not over a quarter of an inch, the locking mechanism not in place. He put his left hand on the door handle and eased his semiautomatic from the holster. Behind him, he heard the wheels of the cleaning cart begin to move stiffly on the walkway. He pushed open the door, pulling his weapon, keeping it pointed at the floor, his eyes straining into the darkness of the room.

  The bed was made, the television set on, the shower drumming in the bathroom. “Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” he said.

  But there was no response.

  He walked across the carpet, past the television screen, the light flickering on his wrist and hand and the dull black hue of his weapon. The bathroom was coated with steam, the heavy plastic curtain in the shower stall barely containing the water bouncing off its opposite side.

  “Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” he repeated. “T
urn off the shower and place both your hands against the wall.”

  Again there was no response.

  He gripped the edge of the curtain and ripped it back on the rod. The shower mist welled into his face.

  “You shouldn’t go in a man’s room without a warrant,” a voice said behind him. “No, no, don’t move. You don’t want to look at me, hoss.”

  Clawson stood frozen, his weapon held out by his side, the mist from the shower dampening his clothes, the back of his neck burning. But in the instant before he had been warned not to turn around, he had seen what appeared to be a hooded shape against the blowing rain, a nickel-plated pistol barrel in the figure’s left hand.

  “Drop your piece in the commode,” the voice said.

  “The cowboy at the desk dimed me?”

  “You dimed yourself when you came here without backup. You’re guilty of the sins of pride and arrogance, my friend. But they don’t have to be your undoing. That means don’t listen to the kind of thoughts you’re having right now. This doesn’t have to end like you think.”

  The grips of the semiautomatic were damp in Clawson’s grasp. Moisture had beaded on his face and was running into his eyes and collar. He could hear a sound in his head that was like the roaring of the sea, like a whoosh of flame from the gas tank of a burning automobile.

  BY THE TIME Hackberry turned in to the motel parking lot, the sun had disappeared completely and the thunder had grown in volume, crackling across the sky like a tin roof being peeled joist by joist off a barn.

  “I can’t believe this. An honest-to-God rain,” Pam said.

  “Try Clawson again,” Hackberry said.

  “Waste of time. I think he’s gotten himself into a pile of shit.”

  He gave her a look.

  “You got it,” she said.

  He pulled in front of the motel office while she made the call. He could see a man dressed like a cowboy behind the front desk.

  “No answer,” Pam said.

  “Well, let’s see what life is like at Traveler’s Rest,” Hackberry said. He got out of the truck and buckled on his gun belt, the open door shielding him from view. Through the motel’s front window, he saw the clerk answer the phone and then go into the back. An electronic bell rang when he and Pam entered the office.

  “Be right with you,” a voice in back said.

  By leaning sideways, Hackberry could see the clerk standing in front of a mirror. He had just removed a Band-Aid from the corner of one eye. He rolled it up between his fingers and plunked it into a wastebasket, then peeled the paper off a fresh one and glued it against his skin, smoothing the adhesive down firmly with his thumb. He ran a comb through his hair, touched at his nostrils with one knuckle, and came back to the front desk with a smile on his face. His eyes dropped to the revolver on Hackberry’s hip. “Help you?” he said.

  Hackberry opened his badge holder. “Has a federal agent by the name of Isaac Clawson been here?”

  “Today?”

  “In the last hour.”

  “Federal agent? No, sir, not to my knowledge.”

  “Can you tell me who’s staying in room two-oh-nine?”

  The clerk bent to his computer, his expression earnest. “Looks like that’s a gentleman who paid cash. For five days, in advance. I’ll have to look up his registration card.”

  “Can you describe what he looks like?”

  “I don’t think it was me who checked him in. I don’t place him offhand.” The clerk touched at his nose. His eyes drifted off Hackberry’s onto the parking lot and a palm tree beating in the wind. “Y’all must have brought that weather with you. We can use it,” he said.

  “Know a hooker by the name of Mona Drexel?”

  “No, sir, we don’t allow hookers in here.”

  “Did you see a man who has a shaved head and octagonal-shaped glasses and looks like a weight lifter?”

  “Today? I don’t recollect anybody like that.”

  “You know who Preacher Jack Collins is?”

  “I know some preachers, but not one by that name.”

  “I hear the A.B. is for life. Is that true?”

  “Sir?”

  “Those blue teardrops by your eye, the ones under your Band-Aid.”

  “Yes, sir, I had some trouble when I was younger.”

  “But the Aryan Brotherhood is for life, correct?”

  “No, sir, not for me, it isn’t. I put all that behind me.”

  “You were in Huntsville?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Give me the key to two-oh-nine. Don’t pick up that phone while we’re here. If it rings, let it ring off the wall. If you’ve lied to me, you’ll wish you were in lockdown back at the Walls.”

  The clerk had to sit down when Hackberry and Pam went out of the office.

  ISAAC CLAWSON HAD always subscribed to the belief that a person’s life was governed by no more than two or three choices that usually seemed of little consequence at the time one made them. He had also wondered how many thoughts a man could experience in under a second, at least if his adrenaline level didn’t blow his circuits first.

  But was this moment in his life really one that presented him a viable choice? What was the governing principle for any lawman caught in his situation with an armed adversary? That one was easy. You never surrendered your weapon. You hung tough, you kept your enemy talking, you brassed it out, you created an electric storm of “spray-and-pray fire” no sane person would choose to walk into. If all that failed, you ate the bullet.

  What were Shakespeare’s words? “By my troth, I care not; we owe God a death, and let it go which way it will, he who dies this year is quit for the next.” Yes, that was it. By accepting your mortality, you walked right through its shadow into the light on the far side.

  But the lesson of Shakespeare and the principles Isaac Clawson had learned at Quantico and as many as five other training programs weren’t entirely applicable here. If he was executed in room 209, his killer would walk free and kill again and again. In fact, there would probably be no prosecutable evidence to link Clawson’s death to Preacher Jack Collins. Clawson had been acting alone, confirming his colleagues’ perception that he was a driven man teetering on the edges of nervous collapse. Maybe some of his colleagues and superiors might even be glad Jack Collins had rid them of an agent no one felt at ease with.

  If Isaac had just one more season to run, he could find Jack Collins and the others who had murdered the Thai women and girls and take them off the board one by one, each of them in some way payback for the death of his daughter. Even his worst detractors conceded that no one at ICE was more dedicated and successful in hunting down the traffickers in misery who were metastasizing on America’s southern border.

  “Last chance, hoss,” the voice said behind him.

  “You think you can pop a federal agent and just blow town? They’ll have to pick you up with tweezers.”

  “Looks to me like they’ve done a piss-poor job of it so far.”

  “You’re the one they call Preacher?”

  “You violated the Fourth Amendment. A man’s rental lodging is the same as his home. Y’all don’t abide by your own Constitution. That’s why you’re not deserving of respect. I say y’all are hypocrites, sir. I say a pox on your house.”

  Isaac Clawson spun in a half-circle, swinging his semiautomatic at arm’s length, the rain blowing through the door into his face. The figure he saw standing against the wall to one side of the door seemed out of context, unrelated to the events transpiring around him. It was the cleaning woman, or what he had thought was a woman, in a head scarf and a smock, a two-barrel nickel-plated derringer aimed with her left hand, her right hand supporting herself heavily on a chair back as though she were in pain.

  Isaac was sure he squeezed off a round. He must have. His finger had tightened inside the trigger guard. He had not flinched; his eyes were wide open. He should have heard the report and felt the solid kick against the heel of his hand and seen the barrel jump with the recoil, the ejected casing tinkling on the floor.

  Instead, he had seen a pinpoint of brightn
ess leap from the muzzle of the derringer. The bright circle of light made him think of fire leaking through a metal surface that had been superheated beyond its tolerance, its stress level giving way to the roaring furnace it tried to contain.

  He felt a finger touch his brow, and he saw hands reaching toward him from a cool fire that somehow had been rendered harmless, as though the flames had been robbed of their heat and could have no more effect on living tissue than waving shadows could, and he knew that this time he had done something right, that he could pull his daughter and her fiancé from the burning automobile and undo the cruelty and suffering the world had visited upon them.

  But as he reached for his daughter’s hands, he realized his life would always be defined by inadequacy and failure. It was his daughter’s hands that grasped his, not the other way around, extending out of a white radiance, slipping up higher on his wrists, seizing them with superhuman strength, pulling him into a place where resistance and rage and even the desire to make choices seemed to have dissolved into nothingness a million years ago.