Page 21 of Rain Gods

  He crawled through a concrete culvert onto the north side of the two-lane state highway, then got to his feet and began running across a stretch of hill-flanged hardpan traced with serpentine lines of silt and gravel that felt like crustaceans breaking apart under his shoes.

  He had created a geographic forty-five-degree angle between his present location and the Fiesta motel, where Vikki waited for him. The distance, by the way the crow flies, was probably around forty-five miles. With luck, if he ran and walked all night, he would be at the motel by sunrise. As he raced across the ground, the lightning threw his shadow ahead of him, like that of a desperate soldier trying to outrun incoming mail.

  12

  WHEN HACKBERRY HOLLAND was captured by the Chinese south of the Yalu and placed in a boxcar full of marines whose clothes smoked with cold, he tried to convince himself during the long transportation to the POW camp in No Name Valley that he had become part of a great historical epic he would remember one day as one remembers scenes from War and Peace. He would be a chronicler who had witnessed two empires collide on a snowy waste whose name would have the significance of Gallipoli or Austerlitz or Gettysburg. A man could have a worse fate.

  But he quickly learned that inside the vortex, you did not see the broad currents of history at work. No grand armies stood in position behind rows of cannons that were given the order to fire in sequence, almost in tribute to their own technological perfection rather than as a means of killing the enemy. Nor did you see the unfolded flags flapping in the wind, the caissons and ambulance wagons being wheeled into position, the brilliant colors of the uniforms and the plumes on the helmets of the officers and the sun shining on the drawn sabers. You saw and remembered only the small piece of ground you had occupied, one that would forever be filled with sounds and images that you could not rinse from your dreams.

  You remembered shell casings scattered along the bottom of a trench, field dressings stiff with blood, frozen dirt clods raining down on your steel pot, the chugging sound of a 105 round arching out of its trajectory, coming in short. You remembered the rocking of the boxcar, the unshaved jaws of the men staring back at you out of their hooded parkas; you remembered the face of hunger in a shack where fish heads and a dollop of rice were considered a banquet.

  When Hackberry returned from San Antonio after the shooting death of Isaac Clawson, he pulled off his boots on the back steps and walked inside the house in his socks, undressed in the bath, and stayed in the shower until there was no more hot water in the tank. Then he dried himself and put on fresh clothes and took his shoeshine kit out on the steps and used the garden hose and a can of Kiwi polish and a brush and a rag to clean Isaac Clawson’s blood from the sole and welt of his right boot.

  He had burst into the motel room where Isaac Clawson died, not knowing what was on the other side of the door, and stepped into a pool of Clawson’s blood, printing the carpet with it, printing the walkway outside, smearing it into the grit and worn fabric that marked the passage of a thousand low-rent trysts.

  And that was the way he would always remember that moment—as one of ineptitude and unseemliness and violation. Later, after the arrival of a journalist and a photographer, someone had placed a hand towel over Clawson’s head and face. The towel didn’t cover his features adequately and provided him neither anonymity nor dignity. Instead, it seemed to add to the degradation done to him by the world.

  The shooter, who was probably Preacher Jack Collins, had gotten away. In his wake, he had left the ultimate societal violation for others to clean up. For Hackberry, those details and none other would always define the death of Isaac Clawson. Also, he would never lose the sense that somehow, by stepping in Clawson’s blood, he had contributed to the degradation of Clawson’s person.

  Hackberry used a second rag to wipe the moisture from the hose off his boots. When his boots were dry and clean and smooth to the touch, he slipped them on his feet and put his rags, his shoe brush, and the can of Kiwi polish in a paper bag, soaked the bag with charcoal starter, and burned it in the metal trash barrel by his toolshed. Then he sat down on the steps and looked at the sun rising above the poplars at the back of his property.

  Inside the shadows, he saw a doe with twin fawns looking back at him. Two minutes later, Pam Tibbs pulled her cruiser into the driveway and rang the bell.

  “Back here,” Hackberry yelled.

  When she came around the side of the house, she was holding a thermos in one hand and a bag of doughnuts in the other. “You get some sleep?” she said.

  “Enough.”

  “You coming to the office?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “You eat yet?”

  “Yeah, I think I did. Yeah, I’m sure I did.”

  She sat on the step below him and unscrewed the top of the thermos and popped open the bag of doughnuts. She poured coffee into the thermos top and wrapped a doughnut in a napkin and handed both to him. “You worry me sometimes,” she said.

  “Pam, I’m your administrative superior. That means we don’t personalize certain kinds of considerations.”

  She glanced at her watch. “Until eight A.M. I’ll do what I damn please. How do you like that? Can I get a cup out of your kitchen?”

  He started to answer, but she opened the screen door and went inside before he could speak. When she came back out, she filled her cup and sat down beside him. “Clawson went in without backup. His death is not on either one of us,” she said.

  “I didn’t say it was.”

  “But you thought it.”

  “Jack Collins got away. We were probably within a hundred feet of him. But he got out of the motel and out of the parking lot and probably out of San Antonio while I was tracking an ICE agent’s blood all over the crime scene.”

  “That’s not what’s bothering you, is it?”

  When he blinked, like a camera lens clatching open and closing just as quickly, he saw the faces of the Asian women staring up at him from the killing ground behind the stucco church, grains of dirt on their lips and in their nostrils and hair.

  “Ballistics shows that all the women were killed by the same weapon,” he said. “There was probably only one shooter. From what the FBI knows about Collins, he seems to be the one most capable of that kind of mass murder. We could have put Collins out of business.”

  “We will. Or if we don’t get to him first, the feds will.”

  Hackberry looked at the doe with her fawns in the poplar trees and could feel Pam’s eyes on the side of his face. He thought of his twin sons and his dead wife and the sound the wind made at night when it channeled through the grass in the pasture. Pam moved her foot slightly and touched the side of her shoe against his boot. “Are you listening to me, Hack?”

  He could feel a great fatigue seep through his body. He cupped his hands on his knees and turned his head toward her. There was no mistaking the look in her eyes. “I’m too old,” he said.

  “Too old for what?”

  “The things young people do.”

  “Like what?”

  “You got me. How about we change the subject?”

  “You’re a stubborn and unteachable man. That’s why somebody needs to look after you.”

  He got to his feet, shifting a growing pocket of pain out of his spine. “I must have committed some terrible sins in my past life,” he said.

  She drank from her coffee, her gaze lifting to his. He let out his breath and went inside to get his hat and gun before going to the office.

  THREE DAYS LATER, at five P.M., Ethan Riser called Hackberry at the department and asked him to have a drink.

  “Where are you?” Hackberry asked.

  “At the hotel.”

  “What are you doing down here?”

  “Soliciting some help.”

  “The FBI can’t handle its problems on its own?”

  “I heard you like Jack Daniel’s.”

  “The word is ‘liked,’ past tense.”

  “I’ll meet you at that joint down the street,” Ethan Riser said.

  One block from
the jail, behind the Eat Café, was a saloon with a sign over the bar that warned the customer YOU ARE STANDING ON THE HARDEST FLOOR IN TEXAS, SO YOU BEST NOT LAND FACEDOWN ON IT. The floor was made from old railroad ties that were grimed black with diesel and creosote and cinders and smoke from prairie fires and anchored to their crossbeams with rusted steel spikes. The bar itself was fitted with a brass footrail that had three cuspidors pushed neatly under it. On top of the bar were a bowl of hard-boiled eggs and a jar of pickled hogs’ feet and another jar that contained a urine-yellow liquid and a rattlesnake whose thick coils and open mouth were pressed against the glass. The lights behind the bar were hooded with green plastic shades, and a wood-bladed fan turned slowly on the ceiling. Ethan Riser was standing at the far end of the bar, a cone-shaped glass of draft beer in one hand, a leather cup in the other.

  “What’s up?” Hackberry said.

  Ethan Riser rattled five poker dice in the leather cup and rolled them on the bar. “Your grandfather really put John Wesley Hardin in the can?”

  “He locked him in chains and nailed the links to the bed of a wagon and drove him there personally, after first raking him off the top of his horse.”

  “Know how Hardin died?”

  “He was rolling dice in the Acme saloon in El Paso. He said, ‘You got four sixes to beat’ to the man drinking next to him. Then he heard a pistol cock behind his head. Then next thing he heard was a pistol ball entering his skull just above the eye.”

  “I wish I could roll four sixes, but I can’t,” Riser said. “I’ve got a psychopath on the loose that some other people want to cut a deal with, even if this lunatic has murdered a federal agent.”

  “Jack Collins?”

  “These people I work with, or under, think Collins can help us nail somebody we’ve wanted to take off at the neck for a long time. A Russian by the name of Josef Sholokoff. Ever hear of him?”

  “No.”

  “I think my colleagues are wrong on two counts. I believe Collins is a button man others hire and discard like used Kleenex. I don’t think he’s wired in to people of any importance. Second, I don’t believe in making deals with the killers of federal agents.” Riser saw the expression in Hackberry’s eyes, a brief flicker of disappointment that seemed to make Riser reexamine what he had just said. “Okay, I don’t believe in making deals with guys who mow down defenseless women, either.”

  “Why tell me all this?”

  “Because you’re smart and not political. Because you’ve been around awhile and you don’t care a lot about what people think of you or what happens to you.”

  “You know how to say it, Mr. Riser.” Hackberry signaled to the bartender. He leaned on his elbows and waited for Riser to continue. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the beer in Riser’s glass going flat.

  “We think we got a break down by the Big Bend,” Riser said. “A guy caused a commotion in a convenience store, and the clerk called it in. The guy had been putting gas in his SUV, and his buddy had gone inside to buy beer. Except the buddy left the beer on the counter and went out the back door and hauled ass.”

  The bartender set a glass of ice and carbonated water and lime slices in front of Hackberry.

  “You drink that?” Riser asked.

  “Go on about the guy.”

  “He came into the convenience store and wanted to know where Pete went. The clerk said he didn’t know. The guy called him a liar and pulled a semiauto out of his overalls. The clerk called nine-one-one, and the sheriff decided to lift some prints off the fuel-pump handle. They got a hit. The guy with the semiauto is Robert Lee Motree, also known as Bobby Lee Motree. He did six months in the Broward County stockade for illegal possession of a firearm. He’s also worked for a New Orleans private investigative service owned by a guy named Arthur Rooney. You recognize that name?”

  “Yeah, but I thought Rooney ran some escort fronts in Houston or Dallas,” Hackberry said.

  “That’s the same guy. Rooney got blown out of New Orleans by Katrina and is in Galveston now.” Riser seemed to hesitate, as though his words were leading him into an area he hadn’t fully given himself consent to enter.

  “Go on,” Hackberry said.

  “Rooney is a careful man, but we put a tap on his current punch of the day. He made a call from her apartment to a contract hitter by the name of Hugo Cistranos. On the tape, it sounds like Rooney and Cistranos are going to clip Jack Collins.”

  “Why?”

  “Get this. Collins cut off Rooney’s finger with a barber’s razor on Rooney’s own desktop.” Riser started laughing.

  “What’s the Russian’s role in all this?”

  “We’re not sure. He’s a big player in Arizona and Nevada and California. He owns whole networks of whores and porn studios and has a lot of outlaw bikers muling his tar and crystal meth up from the border. How much China white do you see here?”

  “Not much. It’s upscale stuff. Addicts with money can smoke it and not worry about needles and AIDS.”

  “DEA says a two-million-dollar shipment was off-loaded from a two-engine plane that landed on a highway in your county last week.”

  “Tell them thanks for letting us in on that.”

  “If you were looking for Vikki Gaddis and Pete Flores down in the Big Bend, where would you start?”

  “I’d have to give that some thought.”

  “You don’t like us much, do you?” Riser drank from his beer and wiped his mouth.

  “I like y’all just fine. I just don’t trust you,” Hackberry said.

  THAT NIGHT HACKBERRY ate dinner by himself in a back booth at a restaurant out on the highway, his Stetson crown-down on the seat beside him. Working-class families were lined up at the salad bar, and country music filtered through the swinging doors of the lounge annex on the far side of the cashier’s counter. He saw Pam Tibbs enter the front door with an athletic-looking man dressed in sport clothes and shined loafers, his dark hair wet-combed and sun-bleached at the tips, his face confident and tanned and unwrinkled by either worry or age. Pam wore a purple skirt and black pumps and a black top with a gold cross and chain; she had just had her hair cut and looked not only lovely but ten years younger than her age in the way that women look when they love someone. When she saw Hackberry, she jiggled her fingers at him and went inside the lounge with her friend.

  Ten minutes later, she came back out of the swinging doors and sat down across from Hackberry. He could smell her perfume and the hint of bourbon and ice and crushed cherries on her breath. “Join us,” she said.

  “Who is ‘us’?” he asked, and wondered if she caught the tinge of resentment in his voice.

  “My cousin and me. His wife will be here in a few minutes,” she said, her fingers spreading on the table, her expression not quite able to contain her surprise at his reaction.

  “Thanks, I have to get home.”

  “Hack?”

  “What?”

  “Come on.”

  “Come on, what?”

  He felt her foot touch his under the table. “Ease up,” she said.

  “Pam—”

  “I mean it. Give yourself a break. People can’t be alone all the time.”

  “You’re my chief deputy. Act like it,” he said. He looked sideways to see if anyone had heard him.

  “What if I am?” she said, leaning forward now.

  “I’d like to finish my dinner.”

  “You make me mad. I want to hit you sometimes.”

  “I’m going to get some salad.”

  “Your chicken-fried steak will get cold.”

  Hackberry thought he might have discovered the source of many unexplained brain aneurysms.

  THAT NIGHT HE returned home and sat on a folding chair in the yard under a sky that roiled with thunderclouds. It was not a rational act. The hour was late, the wind bending the poplar trees at the foot of his property, the air filled with bits of desiccated matter that stung his face like insects. Overhead, yellow pools of dry lightning flared and pulsed in the clouds but made no sound. Even though he had soaked the lawn that morning, the ground under his feet felt as hard
as brick. Five or six deer had clustered down in the trees as though preparing for an impending storm. Then he realized the deer were there for other reasons. On a rise just above his property, he saw the silhouettes of four coyotes slink across the crest. When lightning lit the sky behind them, he saw the yellow-gray of their coats, the peculiar way they hung their heads, the neck bones and jaws loose and not completely connected, a suggestion of slather on the teeth and lips.

  Was this what it was all about? he wondered. One creature killing and eating another? Or even worse, the fanged predator with eyes in the front hunting down and tearing apart the gentle grass-eating animal born with eyes on the sides of its head, forever condemned to be food for coyotes and wolves and cougars and, finally, man with his sharpened stick?