Rain Gods

  He sat up and slipped his boots on and went out on the porch. A car had pulled off the asphalt and driven onto the dirt track beyond the northern border of his property. The car’s lights were off, but the engine was still running. Hackberry went back into the bedroom and removed his holstered revolver from under his bed and unsnapped the strap from the hammer and let the holster slide off the barrel onto the bedspread. He walked back outside and crossed the yard to the horse lot. Missy’s Playboy and Love That Santa Fe were standing by their water tank, frozen, looking to the north, the wind drifting a cloud of dust across them.

  “It’s okay, fellows. We’re just going to check this guy out,” Hackberry said, walking between them, the white-handled .45 hanging from his left hand.

  As Hackberry approached the north fence on the pasture, the driver of the car shifted into gear without apparent urgency, the lights still off, and turned in a circle, dead tree branches and uncropped Johnson grass raking under the car’s frame. Then he drove in a leisurely fashion onto the asphalt and continued down the road, clicking on his headlights when he passed a clump of oaks on the bend.

  Hackberry went back to the house, set his revolver on the nightstand, and gradually fell asleep. He dreamed of a rodeo bull exploding out of a bucking chute. The rider’s bones seemed to be breaking apart inside his skin as the bull reared and corkscrewed between his thighs. Suddenly, the rider was in the air, his wrist still tied down with a suicide wrap, his body over the side, whipped and dirt-dragged and flung into the boards and finally horned.

  Without ever quite waking from the dream, Hackberry reached for his revolver and clenched its white handles in his palm.

  PREACHER CONSIDERED HIMSELF a tolerant man. But Bobby Lee Motree could be a challenge.

  “Holland is an old man,” Bobby Lee said over the cell phone. “When he was running for Congress, he was known as a drunk and a gash hound. He got religion after he started representing a Mexican farmworkers’ union, probably because he’d already screwed up everything else he touched. His first wife dumped him and cleaned out his bank account. His second wife was a Communist organizer of some kind. She died of cancer. The guy’s a loser, Jack.”

  Preacher was sitting at a card table in the shade behind his stucco house, watching a lizard crawl across the top of a big gray rock while he talked. The table was spread with a clean cloth. On top of the cloth, Preacher had disassembled his Thompson machine gun. Next to the disassembled parts were a can of lubricant and a bore brush and a white rag stained yellow with a fresh application of oil. While he talked, Preacher touched the oiled surface of the Thompson’s barrel and studied the wispy tracings his fingerprints left on the steel.

  “Listen, Jack, if it’s not broken, you don’t fix it,” Bobby Lee said. “The guy couldn’t even save his own grits. Liam would have capped him if that cunt of a deputy hadn’t shown up.”

  “Don’t use that term around me.”

  “We’re talking about popping a Texas sheriff, and you’re worried about language?”

  Preacher wiped his fingertips on the gun cloth and studied a hawk flying above the mountainside, its shadow racing across the slope.

  “You there?” Bobby Lee said.

  “Where else would I be?”

  “I’m just saying Holland is a retread and a rural schmuck who surrounds himself with other losers. Why borrow trouble?” Bobby Lee said.

  “The man has the Navy Cross.”

  “So, rah-rah, he’s a swinging dick. Maybe he ran in the wrong direction.”

  “You have a serious problem, Bobby Lee.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You come to conclusions without looking at the evidence. Then you find reasons to justify your shoddy conclusions. It’s like inventing a square wheel and trying to convince yourself you like your wagon to ride a little rough.”

  “Jack, you smoked a federal agent. You want to add another cop to your tally? They not only execute in this state, they have beer parties at the prison gates when they do it. I’m risking my life throwing in with you. We’ve got Hugo and Artie Rooney to deal with. Then there’s Vikki Gaddis and the soldier boy. What’s next, dropping a hydrogen bomb on Iran?”

  “I’ll handle Artie Rooney.”

  “You ought to get laid. You know what Hugo said? I’m quoting Hugo, I didn’t say it, it’s Hugo talking, not me. He said, ‘Preacher’s last sexual encounter was a visit to his proctologist.’ How long has it been since you got your ashes hauled?”

  Preacher watched the lizard’s throat puff out in a red balloon on the rock. The lizard’s tongue uncoiled and wrapped around a tiny black ant and pulled the ant into the lizard’s mouth. “I’m glad you’re on my side, Bobby Lee. You have loyalty in your lineage. That’s why General Lee stuck with the state of Virginia, isn’t it? Loyalty has no surrogate. Blood will out, won’t it?”

  There was a long silence. “Why are you always ridiculing me? I’m the only guy who stood with you. You really hurt my feelings, man.”

  “You got a point. You’re a good boy, Bobby Lee.”

  “That means a lot to me, Jack. But you got to quit renting space in your head to bozos who couldn’t shine your shoes.”

  “Artie Rooney is going to pay me a half million dollars. Ten percent of that will go to you.”

  “That’s generous of you, man. You got a kind heart.”

  “In the meantime, Artie is going to leave the Jews alone. That one isn’t up for grabs.”

  “You still worried about the Jews after what Ms. Dolan did to you? What about the Gaddis broad and the soldier boy? Are they out?”

  “They’re in.”

  “They’re in?”

  “You heard me.”

  “What about Holland?”

  “I’ll give it some thought.”

  “I think he saw me. I pulled off the road to case his place. I thought he was asleep. He came outside and saw my car. But it was too dark for him to get my tag or see my face. If we leave him alone, he’ll forget about it.”

  “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “So I just did. Use your head, Jack. Artie Rooney hijacked Josef Sholokoff’s whores. Who do you think Rooney is gonna put that on? You got the rep from L.A. to Miami. Mexican cops think you walk through walls. Artie gets on the phone, tells Sholokoff you’re a psycho, tells him you’re working for Nick Dolan, and gets you permanently out of his hair. You taught me to be a fly on the wall, Jack.”

  “Want to spell that out?”

  “That agent you capped wasn’t just a fed, he was from ICE. They’re fanatics, worse than Treasury agents. You got any idea of how hot you are?”

  “You just said ‘you.’”

  “Okay, ‘we.’”

  “Call me when you find Vikki Gaddis.”

  “Is this girl worth clipping? Think about it. A waitress from a truck stop?”

  “Did I say anything about clipping her? Did you hear me say that?”

  “No.”

  “You find her, but you don’t touch her.”

  “Why should I want to touch her? It’s not me who’s got—”

  “Got what?”

  “An obsession. Like a tumor on the brain. The size of a carrot.”

  Again Preacher let his silence speak for him; it was a weapon Bobby Lee never knew how to deal with.

  “You still there?”

  “Still here,” Preacher said.

  “You’re the best there is, Jack. Nobody else could have done what you did behind the church. It took guts to do that.”

  “Say again?”

  “To step across the line like that, to grease every one of them, to burn the whole magazine and bulldoze them under and mark it off. It takes maximum cojones to do a mass whack like that, Jack. That’s why you’re you.”

  This time Preacher’s silence was not of his own volition. He took the cell phone from his ear and opened his mouth to clear a blockage in his ear canal. The side of his face felt both numb and hot to the touch, as though he had been stung by a bee. He stared at the gray rock. The lizard was gone, and at the base of the rock, he saw a spray of tiny purple flowers that looked like tiny violets. He
wondered how any flower that lovely and delicate could grow in the desert.

  “You still there? Talk to me, man,” he heard Bobby Lee’s voice say. Preacher closed his cell phone without replying. He picked up the Thompson and ran a bore brush through the barrel and swabbed it with a clean oil patch. He folded a piece of white paper and inserted it in the open chamber, reflecting the sunlight up through the rifling. The inside of the barrel was immaculate, the whorls of light an affirmation of the gun’s mechanical integrity and reliability. He lifted up the drum and snapped it cleanly into place under the barrel and laid the gun across his lap, his palms resting on the wood stock and steel frame. He could hear whirring sounds in his head, like wind blowing in a cave or perhaps the voices of women whispering to him through the ground, whispering inside the wildflowers.

  AT THAT SAME moment, one hundred miles away, three bikers were headed down a two-lane highway, full-bore, their arms wrapped with jailhouse tats, the points of their shoulders bright with sunburn. Sometimes, out of boredom, they lazed across the solid yellow stripe or stopped at a roadside rathole for a beer and a grease burger or caught a live hillbilly band at a shitkicker nightclub or steak house. But otherwise, they burned their way across the American Southwest with the dedication of Visigoths. The crystal that coursed in their veins, the dirty thunder of their exhaust flattening against the asphalt, the blowtorch velocity of the wind on their skin, the surge of the engines’ power into their genitalia, blended together in a paean to their lives.

  They topped a rise and turned onto a dirt road and followed it for two miles until they came out on the cusp of a sloping plain of alluvial grit and alkali and green mesquite. They stopped between two dun-colored bluffs, and their leader consulted a topographical map without dismounting, then used binoculars to study a small stucco house set against a mountain that contained a shadow-darkened opening in its face. “Bingo,” he said.

  The three men dismounted and touched fists and parked their hogs down in a gulley and built a fire and cooked their food on sticks. When they had finished eating, they pissed on the flames in the sunset and rolled out their sleeping bags and smoked weed and, like spectators at an exotic zoo, silently watched a coyote with a stiffened back leg try to keep up with a pack climbing a hill. Then they fell asleep.

  On the fair side of the plain, the stucco house was quiet. A solitary figure sat on a metal chair in front of the opening to a shored-up cave, staring at the mantle of gold light on the hills, his expression as removed from earthly concerns as that of a man whose severed head had just been placed on a platter.

  17

  BUT IN THE morning, the man who lived upon occasion in the stucco house was not to be found. The bikers had approached the house on foot from three directions, the sun still buried beneath the earth’s rim, the light so weak their bodies cast no shadows on the ground. A compact car was parked twenty yards away from the house, the doors unlocked, the keys hanging in the ignition. The bikers kicked open the front and back doors of the house, turned over the bed, raked the clothes out of the closets, and tore the plywood out of the ceiling to see if Preacher was hiding in an attic or crawl space.

  “The mine shaft,” one of them said.

  “Where?” another said.

  “Up on the mountain. There’s no other place he could be. Josef said he’s on crutches.”

  “How’d he know we were coming?”

  “The Mexicans say he walks through walls.”

  “That’s why their country would make a great golf course, as long as it was run by white people.”

  The bikers spread out and approached the opening on the mountainside, their weapons hanging loosely at their sides. They wore needle- nosed cowboy boots that were metal-plated around the heels and toes, jeans that were stiff with grit and road grime, and shirts whose sleeves were razored off at the armpits. Their hair was sunburned at the tips and grew in locks on the backs of their necks. Their bodies had the tendons and lean hardness of men who lifted weights daily and for whom narcissism was a virtue and not a character defect.

  Their leader was named Tim. He stood two inches taller than his companions and wore a gold earring in one earlobe and a beard that ran along his jawline like a cluster of black ants. A Glock semiautomatic hung from his right hand. He paused in front of the cave and slipped the gun into the back of his belt, as though enacting a private ritual unrelated to what anyone thought of him. He took a breath and entered the cave. He produced a penlight from his jeans, clicked it on, and shone it into the darkness.

  “It’s a mine?” one of his companions said.

  “I can feel a breeze blowing through it. It’s got to have a second opening.”

  “You see the guy?”

  “No, that’s why I said it’s got a second opening. Maybe he went through it and out the other side.”

  “Where’s it go?”

  Tim continued to walk deeper into the cave, the beam of his penlight watery and diffuse on the walls. “Come have a look at this.”

  “At what?”

  “Did you see Snakes on a Plane?”

  The two bikers who had remained outside the cave stepped into the darkness. Tim aimed the penlight in front of him, pointing it down a passageway that twisted into the mountain.

  “Jesus!” one of them said.

  “They go where there’s food or water. Maybe a cougar dragged its kill in here,” Tim said. “You ever see that many in one place?”

  “Maybe Collins is a ghoul. Maybe he dumps his victims in here.”

  “Go down and check it out. They rattle before they strike. They’re not rattling. You’ll be okay.”

  “How about that one on the ledge behind you?”

  The other two bikers waited, smiles on their faces, expecting Tim to jump. Instead, he turned around and shone the light into a diamondback’s eyes. He picked up a piece of splintered timber that had fallen from the roof. He poked at the snake’s head with it, then bedeviled it in the stomach, and finally, lifted it up in a coil and flipped it into the darkness.

  “You’re not afraid of snakes?”

  “I’m afraid of bad information. I think this Texas bunch is jerking Josef around. This guy Collins is a hitter, not a pimp. Hitters don’t boost somebody else’s whores.”

  “Where do you think he went?”

  “One thing is for sure. He didn’t go out the other side.”

  “Then where is he?”

  “Probably watching us.”

  “No way. From where?”

  “I don’t know. The guy has been killing people for twenty years and never went inside.”

  “This blows, Tim.”

  They were outside the cave now, the stucco house still in shadow, the morning cool, the wind ruffling the mesquite. The three men stared at the surrounding hills, looking for the glint of binoculars or the lens on a telescopic rifle sight.

  “Who are we supposed to check in with?”

  “The guy who ratted out Collins. His name is Hugo Cistranos.”

  “What are we gonna do?”

  Tim slipped the Glock from behind his belt and strolled down the gravel path from the cave to Preacher’s compact car. He circled the car, taking careful aim, and shot out each tire. He went inside the house and closed all the windows, like a man securing his home from an impending storm. He found a candle in a kitchen drawer, lit it, and melted the wax in a pool so he could affix it to the drainboard. Then he shut the front door and turned on the propane stove and shut the kitchen door behind him as he exited the house.

  “Let’s fang down some frijoles,” he said.

  SHERIFF HACKBERRY HOLLAND had just picked up Danny Boy Lorca for public intoxication and locked him in a cell upstairs when Maydeen told him Ethan Riser was on the phone.

  “How you doing, Mr. Riser?” Hackberry said, picking up the receiver on his desk.

  “Can’t you call me Ethan?”

  “It’s a southern inhibition.”

  “You were right about the origins of your mystery caller. We think his name is Nick Dolan. He was a floating casino operator in New Orleans
before Katrina.”

  “How’d you ID him?”

  “His name was in Isaac Clawson’s notes. Clawson figured the Thai murder victims for prostitutes somebody was smuggling into the country, so he started running down anybody with major ties to escort services. It appears Clawson was giving Arthur Rooney a hard look and decided to check out Nick Dolan at the same time. Evidently, he interviewed Dolan at his vacation home in New Braunfels.”