“Pick up the cell phone and hit redial again. I want you to give somebody a message.”
“What message? That you’re killing your own people?”
“I want to tell Josef Sholokoff I’m just getting started. Can you do that for me, Jaime?”
“No, I will not do this. I didn’t have nozzing to do with Eladio’s transactions. I don’t know nobody in there. I am not responsible for what Eladio may have done.”
“‘Nozzing’ again,” Jack said. “I changed my mind about taking you to a speech therapist, Jaime. There’s no cure for certain kinds of stupidity. It’s kind of like laminitis in a horse. Instead of the hoof curling up, your kind of stupidity shrinks the brain into a walnut. We put horses down, don’t we?”
Jaime was breathing through his mouth, staring at the muzzle of the Thompson, his nose crinkling, as though he had no place to put the fear and tension coursing through his body.
“You still have your Uzi,” Jack said.
“I want to go back home.”
“That’s what everybody wants, Jaime. Even if home is just a place they made up in their minds. You know what home is? It’s a black hole in the ground where somebody shovels dirt in your face.”
Jaime swallowed. “Like Eladio, I took money from the gringo to betray you. My family lives in Monterrey. Get word to them that I am buried someplace and that my spirit will not wander, even if this is not true.”
Jack sighed and gazed out the window at the rain sweeping across the fields and the wind troweling green and gold swaths through the corn. “Damn if you guys don’t always make it hard. Leave the piece,” he said.
“You will let me go? You will not harm me when my back is turned?” Jaime said.
“Did I ever lie to you?”
“I will never tell anybody what has happened here. I will always praise your name when I hear it mentioned.”
“Time to haul freight, Jaime. I got my hands full. If I see you on the street somewhere, keep on going.”
“I do not know what that means.”
“It means some people are hopeless. Come on, there’s the door, pilgrim,” Jack said, and made a snicking sound in his cheek.
Jaime went out the French doors into the rain and crossed the patio and began running through the backyard, his head bent low. He ran past the slop bucket the maid had dropped on the lawn, past the barn and the cornfield, his clothes darkening in the rain, and was almost to the pecan orchard before he looked back at the house. His face was white and round and small inside the grayness of the afternoon. Jack watched all this from the window, simultaneously looking at the empty hallway, listening to the creaking of the house and the drumming of the rain, waiting to hear the whisper of voices or the sound of footsteps moving across the hardwood floors or perhaps a door slamming or an order being shouted. All he heard were the sounds of the wind and rain.
Jaime, maybe you’re a whole lot luckier than I thought, he said to himself.
That was when someone from a back window zeroed in on Jaime with what sounded like a fifty-caliber sniper’s rifle and squeezed off a single round and sent him crashing headlong into a tree trunk, dead before his knees struck the earth.
HACKBERRY HAD LED the way from the barn and across the yard, the rain wilting his hat, driving as hard as ice crystals into his face. He could no longer see the patio and could barely make out the stairs that led down to the cellar door. When he reached the lee of the house, his clothes were wrapped around his body like wet Kleenex. Then he heard the first burst of machine-gun fire. He dropped down inside the stairwell and pulled Pam Tibbs after him.
He wiped the water off the dial of his watch. “That idiot went in early,” he said.
“I told you he has his own agenda,” she said.
He couldn’t argue with her. Trying to put himself inside the thoughts of a man like Jack Collins had been insane. Collins had a Mixmaster in his head instead of a brain.
The door on the cellar was made of metal and had no windows. Hackberry placed his hand on the knob and twisted slowly. The knob rotated less than a quarter of an inch and then locked solid. “So much for Collins’s intel,” he said.
“Was that the Thompson firing?”
“Yeah, there’s no mistaking it.” He pressed his ear against the metal door but could hear nothing inside. He propped the cut-down Remington pump against the side of the stairwell and took out his Swiss Army knife and opened the long blade and worked it into the doorjamb, hoping to get it over the tongue of the lock. He heard a second burst from the Thompson.
“Sholokoff’s people aren’t firing back,” Pam said.
“They’ve pulled back into the house. They’re going to make Collins come after them,” Hackberry said.
“I think something else is going on. I think he might be shooting his own people.”
“Because I told him I saw Eladio making a phone call?”
“That or maybe he found the GPS locator we hid under the cookies and fruitcake and blamed them. It doesn’t take much to set him off. He stubs a toe, and somebody has to die for it.”
Hackberry pushed on the handle of the knife and felt the blade break off in the jamb. “Darn it,” he said under his breath. Just then he heard a solitary shot from what sounded like a high-powered rifle. He picked up his shotgun and went to the top of the steps and looked out into the rain. He could see the cornstalks thrashing in the wind and the gray barn against the pecan orchard and lightning striking in the hills, but he could see nothing of Jack Collins or Eladio and Jaime. Why would the shooter of the high-powered rifle fire only one round? The submachine-gun fire had sounded like it was coming from within the house. Why would someone be using a sniper rifle at close quarters against men armed with automatic weapons?
Unless one of the men with an automatic weapon had bailed and started running and someone had tried to pot him from a door or window?
It was foolish to waste more time trying to figure out the madness of Jack Collins. “Pam, any element of surprise is gone,” he said. “So this is the way we’re going to do it. I’m going in first. Anybody who’s not a friendly dies on the spot. Temple Dowling is probably already dead. The only two friendlies we know about are the hostages, Anton Ling and Krill. The servants are probably gone. That means everybody else is fair game. If I go down, don’t worry about me. You blow up their shit, and we’ll worry about me later. You got all that?”
“Stop playing the hero. You kick open the door and I go in first,” she said. “You’re bigger than I am, and you can shoot over and around me. I can’t do that with you. I can’t even see around you.”
“You always argue, no matter what the issue is, no matter what I say, you always argue,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. You’re unrelenting. It’s like having a conversation with the side of an aircraft carrier.”
She wasn’t listening. She had tied a blue kerchief around her forehead to keep her hair and the rain out of her eyes. Her white cowboy shirt was drenched and split in back, her jeans and boots splattered with mud, and her eyes were charged with light, the way they became when she was either angry or hurt. He knew that in this instance, neither of those emotions was the cause of the intensity in her eyes. She moistened her lips.
“If we don’t get out of this one, it’s been a great ride,” she said.
“It wasn’t just a great ride, kiddo. You’re a gift, Pam, the kind a fortunate man receives only once or twice in a life span. But you’ve got to make it out of here, you understand? I’ve been on borrowed time since the Chosin Reservoir, and at this point in my life, I don’t want somebody else paying my tab. I’m going in first, and you’re going to cover my back. If I go down, you stand on my dead body and waste every one of these guys, then pop Collins, no matter what he says or does. But you get back home to tell the story. You got it?”
“What am I supposed to say? You’re pigheaded,” she replied. “If we weren’t in this spot, I’d shoot you myself.”
“You and Ri
e will always remain the best people I ever knew,” he replied. “And both of you became a permanent part of my life. How many guys can have that kind of luck?”
He held his shotgun with one hand and the railing attached to the brick side wall of the stairwell with the other. Then he raised his right leg and drove the bottom of his boot into the metal door. The reverberation shook the lock and the jamb and the knob, but the door held fast. He raised his foot and smashed his boot into the door again, then again and again, each time bending the lock’s tongue inside the jamb, until the door flew back on its hinges.
He heard the Thompson begin firing again and empty casings bouncing on the hardwood floors and feet running down a hallway. Then he was inside the cellar, inside the damp-smelling coolness that was not unlike a tomb’s, inside the reek of sweat that had dried on the bodies of people who had been tortured, inside the dirty glow of a yellow lightbulb that shone on the faces of Anton Ling and Krill, which seemed as wizened as prunes, as though they had already entered a realm from which no one returned.
The first man to come down the stairs from the hallway may or may not have been armed. Hackberry could remember no details about him other than he was not wearing a shirt, that his head was shaved and his mouth was ringed with whiskers, that there was blood splatter on his chest and arms, that his boots sounded like they had lugs on them as they struck the wood stairs, that his cargo pants were buttoned under his navel, that his mouth dropped open and his face seemed to turn into a bowl of pudding when Hackberry pulled the trigger on the twelve-gauge and watched him buckle over as though he had swallowed a piece of angle iron.
The man who had been first down the cellar stairs had not suffered in vain. As he clutched himself and stumbled and fell down the stairs, three more men followed, shooting over their comrade’s head, filling the cellar with a deafening roar of gunfire that echoed off the walls, the ejected casings shuddering in the electric light, the ricochets sparking off the stone walls and the bars and iron plating of the cells.
Hackberry worked the pump on his twelve-gauge and got another shell into the chamber and fired a second time at the top of the stairs. He saw the lightbulb hanging from the ceiling explode and buckshot cut a pattern across the wooden door that opened onto the hallway, but his adversaries were already into the cellar, firing blindly, breaking the glass in the far window, hitting the body of a man who lay on the floor by one of the cells, driving him and Pam Tibbs back toward the outside stairwell.
“Hack! The guy behind the post!” Pam shouted. Then she began firing the semiauto AR15 into a dark corner of the cellar, pulling the trigger as fast as she could, ignoring a bullet crease on her cheek and a blood-flecked rip in her shirt at the top of her shoulder.
Hackberry felt a blow strike him just above the hip, hard, a pain that punched through tissue and spread deep into the bone the way a dull headache might. He pressed his palm against the wound and saw blood well through his fingers, then something vital inside him seemed to fold in upon itself and melt into gelatin and cause him to lose balance and topple sideways toward a pile of cardboard boxes. All the while Pam kept firing, advancing toward the dark place in the corner, positioning herself between the shooter and Hackberry, shouting, “Suck on this, you motherfucker! How does it feel? Did you like that? Take it, take it, take it!”
Hackberry could not see the man she was shooting at. When Hackberry fell into the boxes, he saw Anton Ling and Krill and the silhouettes of two men who had made it to the bottom of the stairs without being hit. Mostly, he saw the cellar turning sideways and the cardboard boxes coming up to meet him and his shotgun falling from his grasp as the boxes collapsed on top of him, all of this inside a roar of sound that was like a locomotive engine blowing apart, like an artillery barrage marching across a frozen rice paddy south of the Yalu River.
The shooting stopped as quickly as it had begun. The air was filled with smoke and lint and dust and tiny pieces of fiberboard. In the light from the hallway door, he could see two of Sholokoff’s men standing in the drift of smoke, one with a revolver, the other with a semiautomatic carbine that was fitted with a skeleton stock. He realized that Pam Tibbs was down, somewhere behind several crates of wine bottles that were broken and draining onto the floor. He could not see either Krill or Anton Ling. He found his shotgun among the cardboard boxes and propped the butt against the floor and used it to raise himself to one knee, his side and back on fire.
He saw the silhouette of a small man go across the doorway at the head of the stairs. “Frank?” a voice with a Russian accent said. “What’s happening down there?”
“We nailed the sheriff and his deputy,” Frank said. “I’ve got everything under control.”
“Are they dead?” the man with the Russian accent said.
“I’m not sure, sir.”
“Then be sure. Kill them. I want to see their heads.”
“You want to see their—”
“I want you to bring me their heads,” the man with the Russian accent said.
“Where’s Collins, sir?” Frank asked.
“Somewhere in the house. You finish down there and come around behind him. This is your opportunity to redeem yourself. Do not disappoint me, Frank.”
Frank raised the carbine with the wire stock to his shoulder and began firing at random all over the cellar, the bullets notching the stone walls, whanging off the cell doors, splintering the cases of wine that were bleeding pools of burgundy on the floor. With one knee for support, Hackberry raised the twelve-gauge and fired at the two men who stood at the bottom of the stairs. Most of the pattern struck a wood post, and the rest of the load flattened harmlessly against a wall behind the stairs.
Hackberry tried to work the pump and hold the shotgun with one hand, but instead of ejecting the spent shell, the mechanism jammed, and the spent shell was crimped sideways between the bolt and the chamber. In the gloom, he saw Pam sitting flatly on her buttocks behind a stack of rubber tires, her legs stretched out straight in front of her. There was a bullet wound in her back and what appeared to be an exit wound in the top of her left arm. She was trying to free her .357 from her holster, but her hand kept fluttering on the grips and the leather strap fastened at the base of the hammer.
“Throw out your piece, Sheriff Holland,” Frank said. “I’ll talk with Mr. Sholokoff. He’s a businessman. This doesn’t have to end badly. Our common enemy up there is that smelly son of a bitch Jack Collins. Why take his weight?”
Hackberry’s side was throbbing, his face breaking with sweat. He could hear glass crunching under the boots of Sholokoff’s men as they began working their way carefully toward the pile of tires behind which Pam Tibbs had taken cover.
“Think about it, Sheriff,” Frank said. “The people you’re trying to rescue down here are killers. They murdered a guy who tried to treat them in a kindly way. Yeah, that’s right. Mike was his name. He was a good guy. He’s lying dead on the floor now, with shoestrings wrapped around his throat. How about it, Sheriff? How many guys get a second chance like this?”
Frank had grown cavalier about Krill and the Asian woman. When Anton Ling gathered herself up from the floor with the Air-weight .38 five-round Smith & Wesson in her hand, Frank’s expression seemed amused, taking her inventory, his eyes sliding over her blood-streaked shift, the bruises on her face and arms and shoulders, the gash in her lower lip.
“I had a Chinese bitch of my own once,” Frank said. “Play your cards right and I might keep you around.”
Her first shot hit him an inch above the groin; the second one entered his mouth and exited an inch above the neatly etched hairline on the back of his neck.
His friend dropped his semiautomatic to the floor and lifted his hands in the air just before Anton Ling shot him in the heart.
Upstairs, the Thompson began firing again without letup, the rounds thudding into walls all over the house, the casings dancing on the floors, as though Jack Collins had declared war on all things that were level or squ
are or plumb or that possessed any degree of geometric integrity.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
NOBODY COULD SAY Preacher Jack Collins wasn’t a fan of Woody Guthrie. “Adiós to you Juan, adiós Rosalito, adiós mi amigo Jesus and Maria,” he sang above the roar of the Thompson as he burned the entire ammo drum, hosing down the house from one end to the other, the barrel so hot that it scalded his hands when he reloaded.
He hunted down Sholokoff’s men in closets, crawl spaces, and behind and under the furniture and kitchen counters, blowing them apart as they cowered or tried to break and run.
These were the dreaded transplants from Russia and Brighton Beach or their surrogates in Phoenix? What a laugh.
Jack was having a fine time. He even enjoyed the rain blowing through the broken windows. It filled the house with a soft mist and the wet smell of grass and cornstalks and freshly plowed fields. The smell reminded him of rural Oklahoma during a summer rain, when the rivers and buttes were red and the plains green. His mother took him once to an Easter-egg roll behind a church where she had decided to get reborn. For whatever reason, Jack thought, it sure didn’t take. In fact, he’d always had the feeling that his mother had seduced the preacher.
No matter. When Jack’s Thompson was deconstructing the environment and people around him, he was no longer troubled by thoughts of his mother’s cruelty and the strange form of catatonic trance that seemed to take control of her metabolism and cause her to slip from one personality into another. Well, she got hers when she took a fall off the rocks on the property that eventually became his. It was an accident, of course. More or less. Yes, “accident” was a good word for it, he thought. Even though he had been in his late thirties when it happened, the details had never quite come together for him. How had the chain of events started? She had tried to grab his hand, right? Yes, he was sure about that, although he was a little hazy on what caused her to trip and start slipping backward off the ledge. But he definitely remembered her reaching out, her fingers clutching at his shirt, then at his wrist, then at the ends of his fingers. So he was not really a player in any of it, just a witness. Maybe that was her way of airbrushing herself out of his life. One second she was there; a second later, she was receding into the ground, growing smaller and smaller as she fell, looking back at him as if she had just spread herself out on a mattress for a brief nap.