Billy Bob and Hackberry Holland Ebook Boxed Set (53 page)

Clawson stood frozen, his weapon held out by his side, the mist from the shower dampening his clothes, the back of his neck burning. But in the instant before he had been warned not to turn around, he had seen what appeared to be a hooded shape against the blowing rain, a nickel-plated pistol barrel in the figure's left hand.

“Drop your piece in the commode,” the voice said.

“The cowboy at the desk dimed me?”

“You dimed yourself when you came here without backup. You're guilty of the sins of pride and arrogance, my friend. But they don't have to be your undoing. That means don't listen to the kind of thoughts you're having right now. This doesn't have to end like you think.”

The grips of the semiautomatic were damp in Clawson's grasp. Moisture had beaded on his face and was running into his eyes and collar. He could hear a sound in his head that was like the roaring of the sea, like a whoosh of flame from the gas tank of a burning automobile.

 

B
Y THE TIME
Hackberry turned in to the motel parking lot, the sun had disappeared completely and the thunder had grown in volume, crackling across the sky like a tin roof being peeled joist by joist off a barn.

“I can't believe this. An honest-to-God rain,” Pam said.

“Try Clawson again,” Hackberry said.

“Waste of time. I think he's gotten himself into a pile of shit.”

He gave her a look.

“You got it,” she said.

He pulled in front of the motel office while she made the call. He could see a man dressed like a cowboy behind the front desk.

“No answer,” Pam said.

“Well, let's see what life is like at Traveler's Rest,” Hackberry said. He got out of the truck and buckled on his gun belt, the open door shielding him from view. Through the motel's front window, he saw the clerk answer the phone and then go into the back. An electronic bell rang when he and Pam entered the office.

“Be right with you,” a voice in back said.

By leaning sideways, Hackberry could see the clerk standing in front of a mirror. He had just removed a Band-Aid from the corner of one eye. He rolled it up between his fingers and plunked it into a wastebasket, then peeled the paper off a fresh one and glued it against his skin, smoothing the adhesive down firmly with his thumb. He ran a comb through his hair, touched at his nostrils with one knuckle, and came back to the front desk with a smile on his face. His eyes dropped to the revolver on Hackberry's hip. “Help you?” he said.

Hackberry opened his badge holder. “Has a federal agent by the name of Isaac Clawson been here?”

“Today?”

“In the last hour.”

“Federal agent? No, sir, not to my knowledge.”

“Can you tell me who's staying in room two-oh-nine?”

The clerk bent to his computer, his expression earnest. “Looks like
that's a gentleman who paid cash. For five days, in advance. I'll have to look up his registration card.”

“Can you describe what he looks like?”

“I don't think it was me who checked him in. I don't place him offhand.” The clerk touched at his nose. His eyes drifted off Hackberry's onto the parking lot and a palm tree beating in the wind. “Y'all must have brought that weather with you. We can use it,” he said.

“Know a hooker by the name of Mona Drexel?”

“No, sir, we don't allow hookers in here.”

“Did you see a man who has a shaved head and octagonal-shaped glasses and looks like a weight lifter?”

“Today? I don't recollect anybody like that.”

“You know who Preacher Jack Collins is?”

“I know some preachers, but not one by that name.”

“I hear the A.B. is for life. Is that true?”

“Sir?”

“Those blue teardrops by your eye, the ones under your Band-Aid.”

“Yes, sir, I had some trouble when I was younger.”

“But the Aryan Brotherhood is for life, correct?”

“No, sir, not for me, it isn't. I put all that behind me.”

“You were in Huntsville?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Give me the key to two-oh-nine. Don't pick up that phone while we're here. If it rings, let it ring off the wall. If you've lied to me, you'll wish you were in lockdown back at the Walls.”

The clerk had to sit down when Hackberry and Pam went out of the office.

 

I
SAAC
C
LAWSON HAD
always subscribed to the belief that a person's life was governed by no more than two or three choices that usually seemed of little consequence at the time one made them. He had also wondered how many thoughts a man could experience in under a second, at least if his adrenaline level didn't blow his circuits first.

But was this moment in his life really one that presented him a viable
choice? What was the governing principle for any lawman caught in his situation with an armed adversary? That one was easy. You never surrendered your weapon. You hung tough, you kept your enemy talking, you brassed it out, you created an electric storm of “spray-and-pray fire” no sane person would choose to walk into. If all that failed, you ate the bullet.

What were Shakespeare's words? “By my troth, I care not; we owe God a death, and let it go which way it will, he who dies this year is quit for the next.” Yes, that was it. By accepting your mortality, you walked right through its shadow into the light on the far side.

But the lesson of Shakespeare and the principles Isaac Clawson had learned at Quantico and as many as five other training programs weren't entirely applicable here. If he was executed in room 209, his killer would walk free and kill again and again. In fact, there would probably be no prosecutable evidence to link Clawson's death to Preacher Jack Collins. Clawson had been acting alone, confirming his colleagues' perception that he was a driven man teetering on the edges of nervous collapse. Maybe some of his colleagues and superiors might even be glad Jack Collins had rid them of an agent no one felt at ease with.

If Isaac had just one more season to run, he could find Jack Collins and the others who had murdered the Thai women and girls and take them off the board one by one, each of them in some way payback for the death of his daughter. Even his worst detractors conceded that no one at ICE was more dedicated and successful in hunting down the traffickers in misery who were metastasizing on America's southern border.

“Last chance, hoss,” the voice said behind him.

“You think you can pop a federal agent and just blow town? They'll have to pick you up with tweezers.”

“Looks to me like they've done a piss-poor job of it so far.”

“You're the one they call Preacher?”

“You violated the Fourth Amendment. A man's rental lodging is the same as his home. Y'all don't abide by your own Constitution. That's why you're not deserving of respect. I say y'all are hypocrites, sir. I say a pox on your house.”

Isaac Clawson spun in a half-circle, swinging his semiautomatic at arm's length, the rain blowing through the door into his face. The figure
he saw standing against the wall to one side of the door seemed out of context, unrelated to the events transpiring around him. It was the cleaning woman, or what he had thought was a woman, in a head scarf and a smock, a two-barrel nickel-plated derringer aimed with her left hand, her right hand supporting herself heavily on a chair back as though she were in pain.

Isaac was sure he squeezed off a round. He must have. His finger had tightened inside the trigger guard. He had not flinched; his eyes were wide open. He should have heard the report and felt the solid kick against the heel of his hand and seen the barrel jump with the recoil, the ejected casing tinkling on the floor.

Instead, he had seen a pinpoint of brightness leap from the muzzle of the derringer. The bright circle of light made him think of fire leaking through a metal surface that had been superheated beyond its tolerance, its stress level giving way to the roaring furnace it tried to contain.

He felt a finger touch his brow, and he saw hands reaching toward him from a cool fire that somehow had been rendered harmless, as though the flames had been robbed of their heat and could have no more effect on living tissue than waving shadows could, and he knew that this time he had done something right, that he could pull his daughter and her fiancé from the burning automobile and undo the cruelty and suffering the world had visited upon them.

But as he reached for his daughter's hands, he realized his life would always be defined by inadequacy and failure. It was his daughter's hands that grasped his, not the other way around, extending out of a white radiance, slipping up higher on his wrists, seizing them with superhuman strength, pulling him into a place where resistance and rage and even the desire to make choices seemed to have dissolved into nothingness a million years ago.

Isaac's eyes were open wide when he struck the floor. Preacher Jack Collins looked at him briefly, fitted his hands on the cleaning cart, and worked his way down the walkway to the stairs at the far end of the building.

N
O MATTER HOW
many pain pills Artie Rooney ate, the throbbing in his hand wouldn't quit. Nor could he rid himself of the well of fear that was eating its way through the bottom of his stomach. Nor could he get the name of Jack Collins out of his head. It hovered behind his eyes; he woke with it in the morning; it was in his food; it was in his coupling with his whores.

And now it was in his conversation with Hugo Cistranos, here, inside his elegant beachfront office, his helplessness as palpable as the smell of fear that rose from his armpits. He couldn't believe that only weeks ago, Jack Collins had been a name without a face, the mention of which would have caused him to yawn.

“Jack wants a half million from you?” Hugo said, slumped comfortably in a white leather chair, dressed in golf slacks and a print shirt and Roman sandals, his red-streaked hair glistening with gel.

“He blames me for the loss of his soul,” Artie said.

“Jack doesn't have one. How can he blame you for losing it?”

“Because he's crazy?”

Hugo studied the backs of his hands. “You just sat there and let Jack cut off your finger? That's hard to believe, Artie.”

“He was going to cut my throat. He held the razor right by my eye.”

Hugo's expression became philosophical. “Yeah, I guess Jack's capable of that. Must have been terrible. How'd you explain it at the hospital?”

Artie got up from his desk, cradling his injured hand. A hurricane was building in intensity by the hour, three hundred miles southeast of Galveston. Through the enormous glass wall that fronted the beach, he could see a band of greenish cobalt along the southern horizon, and the slick leathery backs of stingrays in the swells and waves threading into yellow froth inside the wind. He wanted to put a bullet in Hugo Cistranos.

“You didn't tell anybody what happened, huh?” Hugo said. “That was probably the right choice. Must be hard accepting all this—I mean, a religious creep like that walking into your office and turning your desk into a chopping block. Gives me the willies thinking about it.”

“Collins is onto us,” Artie said.

“Who's this ‘us' you're talking about?”

“You set up the scam, Hugo. It was your idea to kidnap the Russian's whores. You got Nick Dolan to think he was boosting the girls from me, and you got him to believe the mow-down was on him, too. From the beginning, this whole nightmare has had your name all over it.”

But Hugo was already waving a finger back and forth. “Oh, no, you don't. You knew those girls' stomachs were loaded with China white, and you thought you'd rip off the Russian for both his cooze and his skag at the same time. You got greedy, Artie. I'm not taking your weight on this, my friend.”

“I didn't tell you to kill them.”

“When did you ever tell me
not
to kill somebody? Remember that sex freak who creeped your house in Metairie? Why is it you never asked about him, Artie? The
Times-Picayune
did a big spread on the body parts that floated up into a picnic ground. You never made the connection?”

Artie Rooney's face had an expression on it like that of a blowfish with a hook in its mouth. Hugo took a stick of peppermint from the big clear plastic jar on Artie's desk. He gazed reflectively at the beach and the waves exploding on the tip of a jetty. “It's too bad about the whores. But
they could have stayed in Thailand if they wanted. There's a gold mine in sex tours for Japanese businessmen. I'm sorry about what happened out there. But there wasn't any choice in the matter. The balloons were busting in their stomachs, and they were screaming about going to a hospital. ‘Hey, guys, pump out my nine whores loaded with fifteen balloons each of uncut white heroin. While you're at it, let them tell you about the coyote we capped and buried on federal land.'”

“Oh, funny man.”

“Artie, we're all sacks of fertilizer. You, me, Preacher Jack, your secretary, the families out there on the beach. You think if it was us buried by that dozer, the Asian girls would be burning incense in a Buddhist temple? They'd be shopping for makeup at Walmart.”

Artie stared wanly at the Gulf and at the hurricane warning flags snapping straight out from their lanyards. Then it struck him: Hugo was talking too much, too cleverly, filling the air with words at Artie's expense in order to control the conversation. “You're scared of him,” he said.

“I've worked with Preacher before. I respect his boundaries, I respect his talents.”

“His boundaries? You been watching
Dr. Phil
or something? You just called Collins a religious creep. I think you're starting to rattle. I think you've had some kind of confrontation with him.”

Hugo crossed his legs and untwisted the cellophane from the stick of peppermint, sucking in his cheeks thoughtfully. “Good try, no cigar. You ought to spend some time at the library, Artie, bone up on some history. Foot soldiers don't go to the wall. Officers do. Foot soldiers are always given the chance to adjust. Your bandage is leaking.”

“What?”

“You're spotting your shirt. You ought to go to the hospital. What'd you do with the finger? If you put it on ice, maybe they can sew it back on.”

Artie's desk phone buzzed. He picked up the receiver with his good hand. “I told you not to disturb me,” he said.

“A Mr. Nick Dolan and his wife are here to see you.”

“What are
they
doing here?”

The secretary didn't answer.

“Get rid of them. Tell them I'm out of town,” Artie said.

“I don't think they're going away, Mr. Rooney,” the secretary whispered.

Artie paused, his eyes locked on Hugo's. “Tell them to wait a minute,” he said. He replaced the receiver in the cradle. “Go in my conference room and stay there.”

“What for?” Hugo said.

“You ever meet Esther Dolan?”

“What about her?”

“You've energized Batgirl, you idiot.”

 

W
HEN
N
ICK AND
Esther entered the room, Artie Rooney was sitting behind his desk in a powder-blue suit and a blue-and-gold striped tie and a silk shirt that was as bright as tin, his swivel chair tilted back, his hands hanging loosely over the arms of the chair, a man in charge and at peace with the world.

“Long time, Miss Esther,” Artie said, addressing her in the traditional manner that a gentleman who was a family friend would address a woman in New Orleans.

Esther didn't reply, her gaze boring into his face.

“We need to straighten out some things,” Nick said.

“I'm always happy to see old friends,” Artie said.

“What happened to your hand?” Nick said.

“An accident with my electric hedge clipper.”

Even while he addressed Nick, Artie's attention was fixed on Esther, who wore a tight purple dress with green flowers printed on it. “Y'all sit down. I got some shrimp and a pitcher of vodka martinis in the refrigerator. You been doin' okay, Miss Esther?”

“We've tried to contact Hugo Cistranos,” Esther said. “He's going to hurt a young woman and her boyfriend, an ex-soldier.”

“Hugo? News to me.”

“Cut the crap, Artie,” Nick said.

“You came to Galveston to insult me?” Artie said.

“Nick has told me everything,” Esther said. “About those gangsters working for you and how they almost killed Nick by a farmhouse. He told me about the Oriental girls, too.”

“You sure about what you're saying here? This has got me all confused.”

“They were killed because you were smuggling them into the United States. They were peasant girls machine-gunned by one of your hired animals,” Esther said.

“I'm part owner of some dating services. Maybe I'm not altogether proud of that. But I have to put food on the table like everybody else. Your husband is not innocent in this, Miss Esther. And don't be saying I murdered anybody.”

“Nick just signed over all his interests in what you call ‘dating services.'”

Artie looked at Nick. “I'm hearing this right? You sold out in Houston and Dallas?”

“No, I didn't sell out, I got out,” Nick said.

Artie straightened in his chair and rested his arms on his desk pad. He took a pill from a tiny tin container and put it in his mouth, then swallowed it with a half-glass of water. A look of tension, of pain held carefully in place, seemed to recede back into his face. “I don't have contact with Hugo anymore. I think maybe he's in New Orleans. Maybe I'll be hanging it up here and moving back there myself.”

“You going to stop that killer from hurting those kids or not?” Esther said.

“Don't be implying what you're implying, Miss Esther. You try to bring the house down, you'll find yourself standing in the living room with the roof caving on Nick's head and maybe yours, too,” Artie said.

“Don't you talk to her like that,” Nick said.

“Remember that time at the Prytania Theatre when we did a swirlie with your face in the commode?” Artie said.

“How about I mash your hand in your drawer?” Nick said.

“You survived in New Orleans because we allowed you to, Nick. Didoni Giacano once said your mother was probably knocked up by a yeast infection and you were not to be trusted. I told Dee-Dee his perceptions were on target but that you were also gutless and greedy, and for those reasons alone, you'd do whatever he told you, all the way to the graveyard. So in a way, I helped make your career. I think you ought to show a little gratitude.”

“Dee-Dee Gee said that about my family and me?”

Artie gestured at the glass wall behind him. “See that storm building out there?” he said. “Katrina washed out most of the Ninth Ward. I hope this one changes course and hits New Orleans just like Katrina did and finishes the job. I hope you're there for it, Nick. I hope you and your people are washed off the earth. That's how I feel.”

Esther leaned forward in her chair, her hands folded in her lap, a realization growing in her face. “You deceived Nick, didn't you?” she said.

“About what?”

“The smuggling and the murder of the girls. You were using Nick somehow. That's how you set up the extortion.”

“I got news for you. Your husband is a pimp. The houses you own, the cars you drive, the country club you belong to, they're all paid for by money he makes off whores. The ones you think are just college bimbos taking off their clothes at the club do lap dances and jerk off guys in the back rooms. You're a smart woman, Miss Esther. You married Mighty Mouse. Why pretend otherwise?”

She rose from her chair, her hands crimped on her purse. “My husband is a good man,” she said. “I'll never allow you to hurt him. You threaten my family again, and I'll make your life awful.”

“Right. Sorry you have to run,” Artie said, taking another pain pill from the tin box.

“You hurt the soldier or his girlfriend, we're calling the FBI,” Nick said. “I know what you can do to me, Artie. It doesn't matter. I'm not gonna have the blood of those kids on my conscience.”

“How do you like that, you cheap gangster?” Esther said. “You were talking about doing swirlies on people? Think about yourself in a prison cell full of sexual degenerates. I hope you're in there a thousand years.”

After they were gone, Artie opened the door to his conference room. Hugo was smoking a cigarette, gazing at the waves crashing on the beach.

“You get an earful?” Artie asked.

“Enough,” Hugo replied. He mashed out his cigarette in an ashtray on the conference table. “How do you want to play it?”

“I got to tell you?”

“I'm lots of things, but omniscient isn't one of them.”

“Hose everybody who needs to go. That means the soldier and his broad, that means Preacher Jack Collins, that means anybody who can dime us. That means that fat little kike and his wife and, if necessary, his kids. When I say ‘hose,' I mean slick down to the tile from one end of the building to the other. I'm getting through loud and clear here?”

“No problem, Artie.”

“If you're working in close?”

Hugo waited.

“Put one in Esther's mouth,” Artie said. “I want her to know where it came from, too.”

 

Y
EARS AGO, IN
a Waycross, Georgia, public library, Bobby Lee Motree happened to see a book titled
My Grandfather Was the Only Private in the Confederate Army
. He was puzzled by the title and, flipping through the pages, tried to figure out what it meant. Then he stopped thinking about the matter altogether, in part because Bobby Lee's interest in history was confined largely to his claim that he was a descendant of perhaps the greatest military strategist in American history, a claim based on the fact that his first and second names were respectively Robert and Lee, as were those of his father, a petty thief and part-time golf caddie who was killed while sleeping on a train trestle.

Now, during a sunset that seemed somehow to be a statement about his life, he stood by his vehicle, not far from a jagged mountain whose bare slopes were turning darker and darker against the sky. The wind was hot and smelled of creosote and dust and road-patch tar that had dissolved into licorice during the day. In the distance, he saw a trio of buzzards circling high above the hardpan, their outstretched wings stenciled against a yellow sun that reminded him of light trapped behind a dirty window shade. He opened a cell phone and punched in a number.

Then he hesitated and removed his thumb from the send button. Bobby Lee wasn't feeling well. He could see torn pieces of color floating behind his eyelids, as though his power to think were deteriorating, as though his uncontrolled thoughts had become his greatest enemy.

He reached inside his SUV and drank from a can of warm soda. Was he coming down with something? No such luck. His world was coming
apart. He had always admired Preacher for his professionalism and invisibility, and for the way he had become a legend, a one-man Murder, Inc., without ever going inside the system. But Preacher had gone along with Hugo on the mass mow-down of the Asians, and now he'd popped a federal agent. Somebody would have to go down for it. Hugo? That was a laugh. Preacher? Jack would eat a Gatling gun before he'd allow anyone to take him into custody. Who did that leave?