Rain Gods

  He closed the curtain and sat on the bed in the dark and called the department. Maydeen Stoltz picked up.

  “You’re not on duty tonight,” he said.

  “You and Pam are. Why shouldn’t I be?”

  “So far we haven’t gotten any leads on B. Traven or the guy calling himself Fred C. Dobbs. Did you hear anything from Ethan Riser?”

  “Nothing. But Nick Dolan was here. Boy, was he here.”

  “What happened?”

  “I put some earplugs in. I mean that literally. That guy has a voice like a herd of pygmies. He went into your office without permission and said he’d wait there until you got back. That’s not all.”

  “What’s the rest of it?”

  “Did you have the flag folded up in your drawer?”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “I think he took it. The drawer was open when he left, and the flag wasn’t in it.”

  “What does he want with our flag?”

  “Ask him.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I’m not real sure. He went to your house.”

  “Don’t tell me that.”

  “What can Dolan do at your house?”

  “I gave Vikki Gaddis and Pete Flores an approximate idea where we were going. I thought Collins might have said something to Gaddis that would link him to the properties he’s bought and sold under an alias.”

  “That was the right thing to do, Hack. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Early in the morning, get on the horn to Riser.”

  “What do you want me to tell him?”

  “Give him all the information we have on Collins. Tell him to send the cavalry or stay home. It’s his call.”

  “Hack?”

  “What?”

  “Pam thinks Collins is trying to steal your soul.”

  “So?”

  “Pam’s feelings are not objective.”

  “What are you telling me?”

  “Don’t take chances with Collins.”

  “The man has a hostage.”

  “In one way or another, they all do. It’s what they use most effectively against us. You blow that bastard out of his socks.”

  “Maydeen, you’re a good woman, but you’ve got a serious character defect. I can never be quite sure where you stand on an issue.”

  After he closed his cell phone, he continued to sit on the side of the bed in the dark, the long day starting to catch up with him. Someone had left the engine running on a diesel-powered vehicle immediately outside Hackberry’s window. The sound vibrated through the wall and floor, staining the air with noxious fumes and a ceaseless hammering that was like a deliberate assault on the sensibilities. It was the signature act of the modern correspondent of the classical Vandal—senseless and stupid and at war with civilization, like someone graffiti-spraying a freshly painted white wall or smearing his feces on someone’s furniture.

  Nazis were not ideologues. They were bullies and sackers of civilization. Their logos and ethos were that simple. Hackberry felt that he had lived into a time when gangbangers who sold crack to their own people and did drive-bys with automatic weapons were treated as cultural icons. Concurrently, outlaw white bikers muled crystal meth into every city in the United States. When they went down, it was only because they were murdered by their own kind. They were like creatures that had been incarnated from a Mad Max script. And like any form of cognitive dissonance in a society, they existed because they were given sanction and even lionized.

  Who was to blame? Maybe no one. Or maybe everyone.

  He opened the door and stepped out on the concourse. A bright red oversize pickup truck with an extended cab was parked two feet from him. The sound of the diesel engine was so loud he had to open and close his mouth to clear his ears. He could hear a party roaring two doors down. He walked out onto the lawn by the parking lot and picked up a brick from the border of the flower garden. The brick felt cool and heavy in his hand and smelled faintly of moist soil and chemical fertilizer.

  He returned to the pickup truck and broke the driver’s window with the brick, setting off the alarm. Then he reached inside and unlocked the door and ripped the wiring from under the dashboard. He tossed the brick into a shrub.

  A minute later, the driver, an unshaved man in greasy denims, was at his truck, aghast. “What the fuck?” he said.

  “Yeah, too bad,” Hackberry said. “I’d file a report if I was you.”

  “You saw it?”

  “A guy with a brick,” Hackberry said.

  Pam Tibbs had opened the door to her room and was drinking a beer in the doorway. She was dressed in jeans and a maroon Texas Aggie T-shirt. “I saw him running across the lawn,” she said.

  “Look at my fucking truck.”

  “The world is really sliding down the bowl,” Pam said.

  A few minutes later, she tapped on the bolted door that connected her room to Hackberry’s. “Are you having a nervous collapse?” she said.

  “Not me,” he said.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Help yourself.”

  “Why are you sitting in the dark?”

  “Why waste electrical power?”

  “You thinking about Jack Collins?”

  “No, I’m thinking about everything.” He was sitting at the small wood table against the wall. There was a telephone on it and nothing else. The chair on which he sat was as utilitarian as wood was capable of being. She walked into a blade of light from the window so he could see her face. “You think we’re firing in the well?” she said.

  “No. Collins is out there. I know it.”

  “Out where?”

  “Someplace we don’t suspect. It won’t be part of a pattern. It won’t be in a place we look for the bad guys. He won’t be surrounded by whores or dope or stolen goods or even weapons. He’ll be in a place that’s as ordinary as rocks and dirt.”

  “What are you saying, Hack?”

  He shrugged and smiled. “Where’s your beer?”

  “I drank it.”

  “Open another one. It doesn’t bother me.”

  “I only bought one.”

  He stood up, towering over her. Her shadow seemed to dissolve against his body. She lowered her head and folded her arms across her breasts. He could hear her breathing in the dark.

  “I’m really old,” he said.

  “You’ve said that.”

  “My history is suspect, my judgment poor.”

  “Not to me.”

  He cupped his hands on her shoulders. She hooked her thumbs in her back pockets. He could see the gray part in the shine on her hair. He bent over her, his arms circling her back, his hands touching her ribs and sliding up between her shoulder blades into the stiffness of her hair on the nape of her neck. Then he drifted his fingers across her cheek and the corner of her eye, brushing a lock of hair back from her forehead.

  He felt her step on top of his feet, and before he knew it, she had raised her mouth inches from his, the yeasty smell of beer touching his lips.

  WHEN PREACHER UNZIPPED the flap on Bobby Lee’s polyethylene tent, the storm had passed and the heavens were ink-black again, bursting with stars that stretched from horizon to horizon, the mesas in the east pink and barely visible against the few distant thunderheads that still flickered with lightning.

  Bobby Lee pushed his head out of his sleeping bag, his hair matted, his eyes bleary with sleep. “Is the plane here?”

  “Not yet. But I made coffee. Get up. I want to take care of some business,” Preacher said.

  “It’s cold.”

  “Put your coat and hat on. Take my gloves.”

  “I’ve never seen it this cold this time of year.”

  “I’ll get your coffee. Where are your boots?”

  “What’s going on, Jack?”

  Preacher lowered his voice. “I want to give you your money now. Don’t wake up Molo and Angel. Nor the woman.”

  “You’re really taking her with us?”

  “What did you think I was going to do?”

  “Shoot your wad and get it out of your system?”

  Preacher was squatting, balancing on his
haunches. He looked at the fire curling and then flattening under the tin coffeepot he had set on the refrigerator grille propped across a ring of blackened rocks. His eyes were as empty as glass in the firelight, his shoulders poking through his suit coat. “Coarseness toward women doesn’t behoove a man, son.”

  “You slept in the tent with her?” Bobby Lee said, pulling on his boots.

  “No, I wouldn’t do that, not unless I was invited.”

  “She invited us to kidnap her? You’re one for the books, Jack.” Bobby Lee climbed out of the tent, pulling on a black sheep-lined leather coat that was spiderwebbed with cracks. “Where’s the spendolies—”

  Preacher placed a finger to his lips and began walking up the compacted footpath to the cave opening in the side of the mountain, his body bent slightly forward into the incline, his right hand hooked through the bail of a battery-powered lantern. He glanced back at the large tent where the two Mexican killers slept, then smiled enigmatically at Bobby Lee. “The freshness of the predawn hour has no equivalent,” he said. When he stepped inside the cave, the darkness enveloped him like a cloak.

  “Jack?” Bobby Lee said.

  “In here,” Preacher said, turning on the lantern, which gave off a glow that was gray and dim and created wispy shadows on the cave walls.

  Bobby Lee sat down on a rock and watched Preacher pull a suitcase from behind a wood pallet that he sometimes dried his clothes on.

  “I promised you ten percent. That’s twenty thousand dollars,” Preacher said, squatting to unlatch the suitcase. “Looks nice bundled in rubber bands, doesn’t it? What are you going to do with all that money, Bobby Lee?”

  “I’m thinking about leasing a building in Key West and starting up an interior decorating business there. The place is full of rich fudge-packers building condos.”

  “I’ve got a question to ask you,” Preacher said. “Remember when you told me you and Liam had been talking about my health, about what I ate and didn’t eat, that sort of thing? I just cain’t quite get that image out of my head. Why would you two be so concerned about my food intake? It seems a peculiar subject for young fellows to have any investment in. Wouldn’t you say so?”

  “I don’t even remember what we were talking about.” Bobby Lee yawned, his eyes going out of focus with fatigue. He turned his face to the cold air puffing through the cave entrance. “The stars are beautiful over those bluffs.”

  “I don’t talk about what you eat and drink, Bobby Lee. It’s of no consequence to me. So why would you and Liam be having these discussions about my diet?”

  Bobby Lee shook his head. “It’s too early in the morning for this stuff.”

  “You’ve always been loyal to me, Bobby Lee. You have, haven’t you? No temptations, so to speak?”

  “I’ve modeled my life on you.”

  “Can you see the little crack of light in the east? It’s behind those thunderheads. A little rip in all that blackness. Our pilot is going to fly us right through that hole into the sunlight. Then we’ll make a wide turn to the south and cross into Mexico and fly all the way to the ocean. This afternoon we’ll be eating pineapple and mangoes on a beach and watch people race horses in the surf. But first you have to tell me the truth, or our relationship will remain permanently damaged. We cain’t allow that to happen, boy.”

  “Truth about what? How’d I damage our relationship?”

  “You were plotting with Liam to hurt me, Bobby Lee. People are frail. They get scared and betray their friends. I forgive you for it. You thought you’d go where the smart bet was. But you’ve got to own up to it. Otherwise I can only conclude you think I’m a stupid man. You think I’ll abide someone letting on like I’m a stupid man?”

  “You’re not stupid, Jack.”

  “Then what am I?”

  “Pardon?”

  “If I’m not stupid or ignorant, then what am I? Somebody you can deceive and not pay any price for it? Somebody with no honor or self-respect who lets other people wipe their feet on him? Which is it?”

  Bobby Lee propped his hands on his thighs. He stared at his feet and at the cave opening and at the landscape starting to gray with the coming of dawn. “Everybody thought you were losing it. I did, too, at least for a while. You’re right, though, I was selfish and thinking of myself. Then I realized you were the only guy I admired, that Liam and Artie and Hugo and the others weren’t real soldiers, but you were.”

  “You and Liam were going to pop me?”

  “It didn’t get that far.”

  Preacher was smiling. “Come on, Bobby Lee. You’ve given honest witness about your failure. Don’t water the drink now. You’ll undo the courage and the principle you’ve shown me.”

  “Yeah, we talked about popping you.”

  “You and Liam?”

  “I told Liam that was the order from Artie Rooney and Hugo. But I decided all of them were a bunch of dirtbags, and I called you up on my cell phone and told you how much I respected you.”

  “That was just before you decided to let Liam eat a bullet point-blank in the women’s restroom? I’ll hand it to you. You can slide around and reshape yourself faster than quicksilver.”

  Bobby Lee started to speak, then realized Preacher had already disengaged from the conversation and was standing in the cave’s entrance, his hands on his hips, watching the wind ripple the tents down below, watching the mysterious transformation of the desert from darkness to a pewterlike stillness that resembled a photograph defining itself inside developing fluid. Then Preacher said something Bobby Lee couldn’t quite hear.

  “Say again?” Bobby Lee asked.

  Preacher turned and reached behind the wood pallet. Unconsciously, Bobby Lee fastened the top button on his cracked sheep-lined coat as though protecting himself from a gust of cold air.

  “I told you I always wanted you to be a piece of this property,” Preacher said. “That sentiment has not changed one iota.”

  Down below, the Mexican killers and Esther were wakened by a burst of machine-gun fire and a tinkling of brass hulls on stone. But the sounds were absorbed so quickly inside the earth, they each wondered if they had been dreaming.

  AT FIRST LIGHT Hackberry Holland and Pam Tibbs talked to an elderly man and a small boy at a dirt crossroads where they were picking up trash out of a ditch. The land was level and hard, marked by little other than fence lines and loading pens that were gray with rot and impacted with tumbleweed. Far to the east, the sun was pale and watery behind a low range of hills that looked coated with frost, ragged like glass along the crests.

  “Traven?” the old man said. “No, there’s nobody here’bouts by that name.”

  “How about Fred Dobbs?” Hackberry said.

  “No, sir, never heard of him, either.” The old man was very large and straight in physique for his age, his hands horned with calluses, his face oblong, as big as a jug, the creases so deep there were shadows in them. He wore strap overalls and a yellow canvas coat and no cap. He studied the departmental logo on the cruiser’s door, obviously noting Hackberry was out of his jurisdiction. “It’s the frozen shits this morning, ain’t it?”

  Hackberry showed him photographs of Jack Collins, Liam Eriksson, Bobby Lee Motree, and Hugo Cistranos.

  “No, sir, if they live around here, I ain’t seen them. What’d these fellows do?”

  “Take your choice,” Hackberry said from the passenger window. “Did you know a woman by the name of Edna Wilcox?”

  “Died of an accident or a fall of some kind?”

  “I think she did,” Hackberry said.

  “She owned a big chunk of land about ten miles up the road and to the east. People have rented there off and on, but the house burned down. There’s some Mexicans been working there. Show your pictures to my grandson. Look right at him when you talk. He cain’t hear.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Roy Rogers.”

  Hackberry opened the passenger door and leaned over so he was eye level with the little boy. The boy’s hair was jet-black, his skin brown, his eyes filled with a black luminosity sometimes characteristic of people who live inside them
selves.