“Who’s it from?” Hackberry asked, looking up from his desk.
“I don’t know. There’s nothing written on it except your name. I got a call telling me to pick it up at the ticket counter and to keep the fifty dollars in the envelope tucked under the twine.”
“Where’s the envelope?”
“In the trash. I didn’t think it was important. What, you reckon it’s a bomb or something?”
“Leave it there.”
“It’s cold. Maybe it’s some food.”
After the taxi driver had gone, Hackberry went into the outer office. “Pam, tell Felix to go to the airport and see what he can find out about a package that was left for me at the ticket counter. Then come into my office, please.”
He pulled on a pair of latex gloves and removed a pocketknife from his desk drawer and opened the long blade on it. He placed the flat of his hand on the wrapping paper. He could feel the coldness in the box through his glove.
“Put on a vest and a face shield, Hack,” Pam said.
“Step back,” he replied, and cut the twine. He inserted his fingers under the paper and peeled it away in sections from the top of a corrugated cardboard box.
“Hack, call the FBI,” Pam said.
He pulled back a strip of tape holding the flaps on the box’s top in place and folded the flaps back against the sides. He looked down at a carefully packed layer of Ziploc bags containing dry ice. One of the bags had broken open, and the ice had slid down deeper into the box and was vaporizing against a round, compacted lump of matter wrapped inside a sheet of clear plastic. There were whorls of color pressed against the plastic that made him think of an uncured ham that had been freezer-burned in a meat locker.
“What is it?” Pam said, staring at the blankness of his expression.
He stepped back from the box, his hands at his sides. He shook his head. She stepped closer and looked down into the box. “Oh, boy,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“It was flown here?”
He nodded and cleared his throat. “Get the key to Barnum’s cell,” he said.
They went up the stairs together, Hackberry holding the box, Pam walking in front of him. She turned the key in the cell door and pulled it open. Noie Barnum was lying on his bunk, reading a magazine. He put the magazine on the floor but didn’t get up.
“Come in and close the door behind you,” Hackberry said to Pam.
“Something going on?” Barnum said.
“Yeah, sit up,” Hackberry said. “See this?”
“Yeah, a box.”
“Look inside it.”
“What for?”
Hackberry set the box on the foot of the bunk and picked up the magazine from the floor. He rolled it into a cone and slapped Barnum across the head. Then he slapped him a second time and a third. “I want to tear you up, Mr. Barnum. I don’t mean that figuratively. I want to throw you down those stairs. That’s how I feel about you.”
Barnum’s eyes were filming, his face blotched. “You don’t have the right to treat me like this.”
“Look inside that box.”
“Somebody’s head is in there?” Barnum said, his expression defiant, his eyes lifted to Hackberry’s.
Hackberry hit him again, this time tearing the cover loose from the magazine. Barnum lifted his hand to protect himself, then looked down into the box. The blood drained from his face. “Oh God,” he said.
“Tell me what you see.”
“It’s a hand and a foot.”
“Are they male or female?”
“Sir?”
“Answer the question.”
“There’s hair on the ankle. It must be a man’s.”
“Look at the hand.”
“What about it?”
“Look closer. There’s a ring on it. Look at it.”
“I’m not responsible for this.”
“That’s a University of Texas class ring. The hand and the ring belong to Temple Dowling. The people who did this to him will probably start on Anton Ling next. Right now I’d like to rip you apart. Instead of doing that, I’m going to ask you a couple of questions, and you’re going to answer them. Got that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where were you and Jack Collins hiding?”
“Just like you said earlier, right south of the border. But Jack’s gone by now.”
“Gone where?”
“That’s anybody’s guess. You see him and then he’s gone. He’s standing in one place, then in another, without seeming to move. I’ve never known anybody like him.”
“You’re just catching on to the fact that there’s something a little unusual about him?”
“I don’t know where Jack is. I don’t know where Miss Anton is, either. I feel awful about what’s happened. My sister died in the Towers. I wanted to get even with the people who killed her. I didn’t want any of these other things to happen.”
Hackberry let out his breath and felt the heat rise out of his chest like ash off a dead fire. “I want you out of here,” he said.
“Say again?”
“You heard me. Hit the road.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You don’t have to. You just got eighty-sixed from my jail. It’s a first. Burn a candle the next time you’re in church.”
“Maybe I don’t want to leave.”
“Son, you’d better get a lot of gone between you and this jailhouse,” Pam said.
“Well, you’re gonna see me again,” Barnum said.
Pam raised her eyebrows threateningly.
“Yes, ma’am, I’m gone,” he said.
Downstairs, ten minutes later, Pam said, “Hack, what in the hell are you doing?”
“Fixing to call the FBI,” he replied.
But it wasn’t for the reasons she thought.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
PAM WAS STILL staring at him when he got off the phone. “You told the feds about Dowling’s mutilation but not about Barnum?”
“That’s right,” he replied.
“Why does Barnum get a pass?”
“Because if the feds get him into custody, they’ll probably lose interest in Anton Ling. Second, Barnum isn’t a bad kid and, in my opinion, deserves another chance.”
“You have a funny way of looking at the world, Hack.”
“My father used to say, ‘The name of the game is five-card draw. You never have to play the hand you’re dealt.’ He believed everything we see around us now was once part of the Atlantic Ocean, with mermaids sitting up on the rocks, and that one day I would see the mermaids return.”
“We’d better get some breakfast, kemo sabe.”
“I told you that’s what Rie called me, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, I’m sorry, I forgot,” she said.
“Don’t say you’re sorry. You didn’t know Rie. She’d like for you to call me that. She’d like you.”
She looked at him in a strange way, her mouth slightly parted, her face suddenly vulnerable, but he did not see it. Maydeen had just come out of the dispatcher’s cage, her anger palpable. “He’s on the line, Hack,” she said.
“Who is he?”
“He just told me, ‘Put the sheriff on the line, woman.’”
“Collins?”
“I say we hang up on him. Don’t let him jerk you around like this, Hack.”
“No, I think this is the call we’ve been waiting on,” Hackberry said.
JACK COLLINS WAS sitting at a small table under a canvas tarp propped on poles next to an airplane hangar, a corked green bottle of seltzer and a glass and a saucer of salted lime slices by his hand. A clutch of banana plants grew tightly against the hangar wall, beads of moisture the size of BBs sliding down the leaves. The wind was hot, the canvas riffling above his head, the desert lidded from horizon to horizon with a layer of solid blue-black clouds that seemed to force the heat and humidity radiating from the desert floor back into the earth. The clouds crackled with electricity but offered
no real promise of rain or even a moment of relief from the grit and alkali in the wind and the smell of salt and decomposition that whirled with the dust devils out of the streambeds. Jack decided there was nothing wrong with Mexico that a half-dozen hydrogen bombs and a lot of topsoil couldn’t cure.
Jack’s pilot and two hired killers, the cousins Eladio and Jaime, were waiting for him by the two-engine Beechcraft on the airstrip. The pilot was on retainer, at Jack’s beck and call on a twenty-four-hour basis. Eladio and Jaime were available for any activity that put money in their pockets, night or day; if there were any lines they would not cross, any deeds they would not perform, including a drive-by for La Familia Michoacána on a teenage birthday party in Juárez, Jack had not seen it. Their greatest problem, in his view, was the impaired thought processes that seemed to live behind the indolence in their faces. The inside of Jaime’s head could only be described as a tangled web of cruelty that was linked somehow to his stupidity and sullen nature. The more intelligent of the two, Eladio, thought that his transparent childlike deceit and attempts at manipulation were signs of sophistication. During a rare loss of restraint with the two cousins, Jack had asked Eladio if his mother had been impregnated by a bowling pin. Eladio had responded, “You are a man of knowledge, Señor Jack. But you must not misjudge simple men. We think and feel deeply about our mothers. They are the center of our lives.”
“Then why do you say chinga tu madre to each other at every opportunity?” Jack had said.
“I am not equipped to discuss abstractions with a man of your intelligence,” Eladio had said. “But my mother is eighty and still tells stories of her mother, who was a concubine of Pancho Villa and one of those who helped hide his severed head in the Van Horn Mountains. That is the level of respect we have for the women in our family.”
Jack had made a mental note about the level of stability in his employees.
At this particular moment, he was irritated with the weather, the clouds of black flies buzzing over a calf’s carcass in a nearby streambed, and the fact that the two cousins seemed incapable of doing anything right except killing people. The man who owned the airstrip and the hangar and the improvised café outside it had installed a jukebox just inside the hangar door, one loaded with gangsta-rap recordings that blasted through the speakers so loudly that the side of the tin hangar shook. Jack had told Eladio and Jaime to talk with the jukebox’s owner, but either the owner had ignored the warning or they had not bothered. So while he was trying to make notes in preparation for his conversation with the sheriff, his eardrums were being assailed by a level of electronic percussion that was like having a studded snow tire driven over his head.
Jack capped his pen, stuck it between the pages of his notebook, and went inside the hangar, where the owner was cleaning the concrete pad with a push broom. “Can I help you, señor?” he said.
Jack pointed to his ear, indicating he couldn’t hear.
“You got a problem with your ear?” the owner shouted.
Jack pulled the plug on the jukebox, cut the electric cord in two with his pocketknife, and set the plug on top of the casing. “No, I’m fine now. Thanks,” he said.
Then he sat down at his table under the canvas flap and drank a glass of seltzer and chewed on a lime slice, staring into space, each eye like a glass orb with a dead insect frozen inside it. He dialed his cell phone with his thumb and lifted the phone to his ear and waited, his body heat increasing inside his clothes, his pulse quickening. Why would his metabolism react to calling the sheriff? It could be anything, he told himself. Why dwell on it? Maybe it was because he had finally found a worthy opponent.
Or maybe it was something else.
What?
Don’t think about it, he told himself.
Why not? I’m supposed to be afraid of my own thoughts? he asked himself.
Maybe Holland is the father you never had. Maybe you want him to like you.
Like hell I do.
You could have taken him off the board a couple of times. Why didn’t you do it, Jackie Boy?
The situation was one-sided. There’s no honor in that. Don’t call me that name.
There was honor in the shooting of the nine Thai women?
I don’t want to talk about that. It’s over. I did my penance in the desert.
He thought he heard the hysterical laughter of a woman, someone who always hung just on the edge of his vision, ridiculing him, waiting for him to slip up, her smile as cruel as an open cut in living tissue.
When the female deputy answered, Jack said, “Put the sheriff on the line, woman.”
Whatever she said in response never registered. Instead, he heard the voice of the woman who lived in his dreams and his unconscious and his idle daytime moments and his futile attempts at joy. He heard her incessant, piercing laughter, louder and louder, and he knew that eventually, he would once again resort to the release that never failed him, an eruption of gunfire that reverberated through his hands and arms like a jackhammer and made his teeth rattle and cleansed his thoughts and deadened his ears to all sound, both outside and inside his head.
“What do you need, Mr. Collins?” the sheriff’s voice said.
“I know where the Asian woman is. I can take you there,” he replied.
“Where might that be?”
“Down in Mexico, way to heck and gone by car, not so far by air.”
“She’s with Sholokoff?”
“She and Temple Dowling and the ’breed known as Krill. How’s Noie doing?”
“I don’t know. I kicked him loose.”
“You did what?”
“Last time I saw him, he was walking toward the city-limits sign, whistling a song.”
“The feds aren’t going to be happy with you.”
“I’ll try to live with it. Where can we meet, Mr. Collins?”
“You ever lie?”
“No.”
“Not ever?”
“You heard me the first time,” Hackberry said.
“I’m trusting you. I don’t do that with most people.”
“Do whatever you want, sir. But don’t expect me to feel flattered.”
“I’ll give you some coordinates and see you no later than four hours from now. I suppose you’ll bring the female deputy with you?”
“Count on it. Why are you doing this, Mr. Collins?”
“Sholokoff shouldn’t have taken the Asian woman. She’s not a player.”
“There’s another reason.”
“Sholokoff tried to have me capped. I owe him one.”
“There’s another reason.”
“When you find out what it is, tell me so we’ll both know. Don’t bring anybody besides the female deputy and your pilot. A couple of my men will pick you up. If you violate any aspect of our arrangement, the deal is off and you won’t hear from me again. The Asian woman’s fate will be on your conscience.”
“If you try to harm me or my deputy, I’m going to cool you out on the spot. I’m like you, Jack—over-the-hill and out of place and time, with not a lot to lose.”
“Then keep your damn word, and we’ll get along just fine.”
Jack clicked off his cell phone. Unbelievably, the jukebox sprang to life and began blaring rap music out the door. He remembered that the cord he’d cut had both a female and a male plug and was detachable from the box. The owner of the hangar had probably replaced it and decided to prove he could be as assertive and unpleasant as an imperious gringo from Texas who thought he could come to Mexico and wipe his ass on the place.
Jack went to the plane and removed his guitar case and set it on top of the table. The wind was blowing harder, the heat and dust swirling under the canopy as Jack unfastened the top of the case and inserted plugs in his ears and removed his Thompson and snapped a thirty-round box magazine into the bottom of the receiver and went inside the hangar. The owner took one look at him and dropped his push broom and began running for the back door. Jack raised the Thompson’s barrel an
d squeezed the trigger, ripping apart the jukebox, scattering plastic shards and electronic components all over the concrete pad, stitching the tin wall with holes the size of nickels.
“Señor, what the fuck you doin’?” Eladio said behind him.
Jack still had the plugs stoppered in his ears and could not hear him. The only sound he heard was his mother’s laughter—maniacal, forever taunting, a paean of ridicule aimed at a driven man who would never escape the black box in which a little boy had been locked.
KRILL DID NOT know a great deal about the complexities of politics. A man owned land or he did not own land. Either he was allowed to keep the product of his labor or he was not allowed to keep it. The abstractions of ideology seemed the stuff that fools and radicals and drunkards argued about in late-hour bars because they had nothing else to occupy their time. Though Krill did not understand the abstruse terms of social science or economics, he understood jails. He had learned about them in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and he knew how you survived or didn’t survive inside them. Men in confinement all behaved and thought in a predictable fashion. And so did their warders.
Krill had a very strong suspicion that his captors did not understand how jails worked. The gringo Frank was a good example of what American convicts called a “fish.” He had not only baited a prisoner but had informed the prisoner of his ultimate fate, which in this case was death and burial in concrete, telling the prisoner in effect that he had nothing to lose. Frank had made another mistake. He had not bothered to note that when Krill was placed in the cell, he was wearing running shoes, not pull-on boots.
Krill had slept three hours on the floor, his head cushioned on a piece of burlap he had found in the corner. As the early glow of morning appeared through the window on the far side of the cellar, a man came down the stairs carrying two bowls filled with rice and beans. He was a strange-looking man, with dirty-blond hair and a duckbilled upper lip and eyes that were set too far apart and skin that had the grainy texture of pig hide. He took one bowl to the cell where Krill believed La Magdalena was being held, then squatted in front of Krill’s cell and pushed the second bowl through the gap between the concrete floor and the bottom of the door.