Billy Bob and Hackberry Holland Ebook Boxed Set (55 page)

Bill grinned. “Come on, we'll flush him out. Afraid of rattlers?”

“Never given them much thought.”

“Think I'm gonna rape you?”

“What?”

“Just a bad joke. But your behavior strikes me as a little bit queer.”

“How are you using the word ‘queer'?”

“That's what I mean. You're wrapped too tight, trooper. If you ask me, you need to get your pole polished.”

Bill seemed to lose interest in the conversation. He reached down and picked up a rock. He studied the clump of brush with buttonlike leaves at the bottom of the wash and flung the rock into it hard enough to break a branch and make a clattering sound far down the wash. “See him scoot? Told you he was in there,” he said.

“Yeah, you called it.”

Bill turned and faced Pete. His nine-millimeter was pointed downward, along his thigh, the butterfly safety pushed to the fire position. He formed a pocket of air in one cheek, then the other, like a man rinsing his mouth. “Yes, sir, you're a mite spooky, Pete. A hard man to read, I'd say. I bet you blew up some hajji ass over there, didn't you?”

Pete tried to remember giving his name to Bill. Maybe he had, if not at the meet, perhaps at the café.
Think, think, think,
he told himself. He could feel his scalp tightening. “I'd better be getting on home. I'd like to introduce you to my girlfriend.”

“She's waiting on you, huh?”

“Yeah, she's a good one about that.”

“Wish I was you. You bet I do,” Bill said. He looked southward into the darkness, his thoughts hidden. Then he released the magazine on his gun and stuck it in his pocket. He cleared the chamber and inserted the ejected round into the top of the magazine and shoved the magazine back into the frame with the heel of his hand. “Think fast,” he said, throwing the gun to Pete.

“Why'd you do that?”

“See if you were paying attention. Scared you, didn't I?”

“Pert' near,” Pete replied. “You're quite a card, Bill.”

“Not when you come to know me,” Bill said. “No, sir, I wouldn't say I was a card at all. Just stick my piece back in the glove box, will you?”

Five miles farther down the road, the hills flattened and the moon sat on the horizon like a huge, bruised white balloon. Up ahead, Pete could see a passing lane, then a brightly lit convenience store and gas-pump island. “We're just about two miles or so from the dirt track that goes to our house,” he said. “I can get off up yonder if you want.”

“In for a penny, in for a pound. I'll take you all the way.”

“I got to be honest about something, Bill.”

“You kill somebody with your car while you were in a blackout?”

“The reason I don't have a lot of sobriety is I want to drink.”

“You mean now?”

“Now, yesterday, last week, tomorrow, next month. When I catch the bus, the undertaker will probably have to set a case of Bud on my chest to keep me in the coffin.”

“What are you trying to tell me?”

“Like they say, unless you've reached your bottom, you're just jerking on your dork. Pull into the store yonder.”

“Sure that's what you want to do?”

“Hell, yes, it is. What about you?”

“One or two cold brews wouldn't hurt. I'm no fanatic. What about your girlfriend?”

“She doesn't complain. You'll like her.”

“I bet I will,” Bill said.

He pulled the SUV into the gas island and got out to fill the tank while Pete went inside the convenience store. The air was thick and warm and smelled of burned diesel. Hundreds of moths had clustered on the overhead lights. Pete took two packs of pepperoni sausage from a shelf and two cartons of king-size beers from the cooler. The cans were silver and blue and beaded with moisture and cold inside the cardboard. He set them on the counter and waited while another customer paid for a purchase, clicking his nails on top of one carton, looking around the store as though he had forgotten something. Then he adjusted his belt and made a face and asked the cashier where the men's room was. The cashier lifted his eyes only long enough to point toward the rear of the
store. Pete nodded his thanks and walked between the shelves toward the back exit, out of view from the front window.

Seconds later, he was outside in the dark, running between several eighteen-wheelers parked on a grease-compacted strip of bare earth behind the diesel island. He dropped down into an arroyo and ran deeper into the night, his heart beating, clouds of insects rising into his face, clotting in his mouth and nostrils. The heat lightning flaring in the clouds made him think of the flicker of artillery rounds exploding beyond the horizon, before the reverberations could be felt through the earth.

He crawled through a concrete culvert onto the north side of the two-lane state highway, then got to his feet and began running across a stretch of hill-flanged hardpan traced with serpentine lines of silt and gravel that felt like crustaceans breaking apart under his shoes.

He had created a geographic forty-five-degree angle between his present location and the Fiesta motel, where Vikki waited for him. The distance, by the way the crow flies, was probably around forty-five miles. With luck, if he ran and walked all night, he would be at the motel by sunrise. As he raced across the ground, the lightning threw his shadow ahead of him, like that of a desperate soldier trying to outrun incoming mail.

W
HEN
H
ACKBERRY
H
OLLAND
was captured by the Chinese south of the Yalu and placed in a boxcar full of marines whose clothes smoked with cold, he tried to convince himself during the long transportation to the POW camp in No Name Valley that he had become part of a great historical epic he would remember one day as one remembers scenes from
War and Peace
. He would be a chronicler who had witnessed two empires collide on a snowy waste whose name would have the significance of Gallipoli or Austerlitz or Gettysburg. A man could have a worse fate.

But he quickly learned that inside the vortex, you did not see the broad currents of history at work. No grand armies stood in position behind rows of cannons that were given the order to fire in sequence, almost in tribute to their own technological perfection rather than as a means of killing the enemy. Nor did you see the unfolded flags flapping in the wind, the caissons and ambulance wagons being wheeled into position, the brilliant colors of the uniforms and the plumes on the helmets of the officers and the sun shining on the drawn sabers. You saw and remembered only the small piece of ground you had occupied, one
that would forever be filled with sounds and images that you could not rinse from your dreams.

You remembered shell casings scattered along the bottom of a trench, field dressings stiff with blood, frozen dirt clods raining down on your steel pot, the chugging sound of a 105 round arching out of its trajectory, coming in short. You remembered the rocking of the boxcar, the unshaved jaws of the men staring back at you out of their hooded parkas; you remembered the face of hunger in a shack where fish heads and a dollop of rice were considered a banquet.

When Hackberry returned from San Antonio after the shooting death of Isaac Clawson, he pulled off his boots on the back steps and walked inside the house in his socks, undressed in the bath, and stayed in the shower until there was no more hot water in the tank. Then he dried himself and put on fresh clothes and took his shoeshine kit out on the steps and used the garden hose and a can of Kiwi polish and a brush and a rag to clean Isaac Clawson's blood from the sole and welt of his right boot.

He had burst into the motel room where Isaac Clawson died, not knowing what was on the other side of the door, and stepped into a pool of Clawson's blood, printing the carpet with it, printing the walkway outside, smearing it into the grit and worn fabric that marked the passage of a thousand low-rent trysts.

And that was the way he would always remember that moment—as one of ineptitude and unseemliness and violation. Later, after the arrival of a journalist and a photographer, someone had placed a hand towel over Clawson's head and face. The towel didn't cover his features adequately and provided him neither anonymity nor dignity. Instead, it seemed to add to the degradation done to him by the world.

The shooter, who was probably Preacher Jack Collins, had gotten away. In his wake, he had left the ultimate societal violation for others to clean up. For Hackberry, those details and none other would always define the death of Isaac Clawson. Also, he would never lose the sense that somehow, by stepping in Clawson's blood, he had contributed to the degradation of Clawson's person.

Hackberry used a second rag to wipe the moisture from the hose off his boots. When his boots were dry and clean and smooth to the touch,
he slipped them on his feet and put his rags, his shoe brush, and the can of Kiwi polish in a paper bag, soaked the bag with charcoal starter, and burned it in the metal trash barrel by his toolshed. Then he sat down on the steps and looked at the sun rising above the poplars at the back of his property.

Inside the shadows, he saw a doe with twin fawns looking back at him. Two minutes later, Pam Tibbs pulled her cruiser into the driveway and rang the bell.

“Back here,” Hackberry yelled.

When she came around the side of the house, she was holding a thermos in one hand and a bag of doughnuts in the other. “You get some sleep?” she said.

“Enough.”

“You coming to the office?”

“Why wouldn't I?”

“You eat yet?”

“Yeah, I think I did. Yeah, I'm sure I did.”

She sat on the step below him and unscrewed the top of the thermos and popped open the bag of doughnuts. She poured coffee into the thermos top and wrapped a doughnut in a napkin and handed both to him. “You worry me sometimes,” she said.

“Pam, I'm your administrative superior. That means we don't personalize certain kinds of considerations.”

She glanced at her watch. “Until eight
A.M
. I'll do what I damn please. How do you like that? Can I get a cup out of your kitchen?”

He started to answer, but she opened the screen door and went inside before he could speak. When she came back out, she filled her cup and sat down beside him. “Clawson went in without backup. His death is not on either one of us,” she said.

“I didn't say it was.”

“But you thought it.”

“Jack Collins got away. We were probably within a hundred feet of him. But he got out of the motel and out of the parking lot and probably out of San Antonio while I was tracking an ICE agent's blood all over the crime scene.”

“That's not what's bothering you, is it?”

When he blinked, like a camera lens
clatch
ing open and closing just as quickly, he saw the faces of the Asian women staring up at him from the killing ground behind the stucco church, grains of dirt on their lips and in their nostrils and hair.

“Ballistics shows that all the women were killed by the same weapon,” he said. “There was probably only one shooter. From what the FBI knows about Collins, he seems to be the one most capable of that kind of mass murder. We could have put Collins out of business.”

“We will. Or if we don't get to him first, the feds will.”

Hackberry looked at the doe with her fawns in the poplar trees and could feel Pam's eyes on the side of his face. He thought of his twin sons and his dead wife and the sound the wind made at night when it channeled through the grass in the pasture. Pam moved her foot slightly and touched the side of her shoe against his boot. “Are you listening to me, Hack?”

He could feel a great fatigue seep through his body. He cupped his hands on his knees and turned his head toward her. There was no mistaking the look in her eyes. “I'm too old,” he said.

“Too old for what?”

“The things young people do.”

“Like what?”

“You got me. How about we change the subject?”

“You're a stubborn and unteachable man. That's why somebody needs to look after you.”

He got to his feet, shifting a growing pocket of pain out of his spine. “I must have committed some terrible sins in my past life,” he said.

She drank from her coffee, her gaze lifting to his. He let out his breath and went inside to get his hat and gun before going to the office.

 

T
HREE DAYS LATER
, at five
P.M
., Ethan Riser called Hackberry at the department and asked him to have a drink.

“Where are you?” Hackberry asked.

“At the hotel.”

“What are you doing down here?”

“Soliciting some help.”

“The FBI can't handle its problems on its own?”

“I heard you like Jack Daniel's.”

“The word is ‘liked,' past tense.”

“I'll meet you at that joint down the street,” Ethan Riser said.

One block from the jail, behind the Eat Café, was a saloon with a sign over the bar that warned the customer
YOU ARE STANDING ON THE HARDEST FLOOR IN TEXAS, SO YOU BEST NOT LAND FACEDOWN ON IT
. The floor was made from old railroad ties that were grimed black with diesel and creosote and cinders and smoke from prairie fires and anchored to their crossbeams with rusted steel spikes. The bar itself was fitted with a brass footrail that had three cuspidors pushed neatly under it. On top of the bar were a bowl of hard-boiled eggs and a jar of pickled hogs' feet and another jar that contained a urine-yellow liquid and a rattlesnake whose thick coils and open mouth were pressed against the glass. The lights behind the bar were hooded with green plastic shades, and a wood-bladed fan turned slowly on the ceiling. Ethan Riser was standing at the far end of the bar, a cone-shaped glass of draft beer in one hand, a leather cup in the other.

“What's up?” Hackberry said.

Ethan Riser rattled five poker dice in the leather cup and rolled them on the bar. “Your grandfather really put John Wesley Hardin in the can?”

“He locked him in chains and nailed the links to the bed of a wagon and drove him there personally, after first raking him off the top of his horse.”

“Know how Hardin died?”

“He was rolling dice in the Acme saloon in El Paso. He said, ‘You got four sixes to beat' to the man drinking next to him. Then he heard a pistol cock behind his head. Then next thing he heard was a pistol ball entering his skull just above the eye.”

“I wish I could roll four sixes, but I can't,” Riser said. “I've got a psychopath on the loose that some other people want to cut a deal with, even if this lunatic has murdered a federal agent.”

“Jack Collins?”

“These people I work with, or under, think Collins can help us nail
somebody we've wanted to take off at the neck for a long time. A Russian by the name of Josef Sholokoff. Ever hear of him?”

“No.”

“I think my colleagues are wrong on two counts. I believe Collins is a button man others hire and discard like used Kleenex. I don't think he's wired in to people of any importance. Second, I don't believe in making deals with the killers of federal agents.” Riser saw the expression in Hackberry's eyes, a brief flicker of disappointment that seemed to make Riser reexamine what he had just said. “Okay, I don't believe in making deals with guys who mow down defenseless women, either.”

“Why tell me all this?”

“Because you're smart and not political. Because you've been around awhile and you don't care a lot about what people think of you or what happens to you.”

“You know how to say it, Mr. Riser.” Hackberry signaled to the bartender. He leaned on his elbows and waited for Riser to continue. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the beer in Riser's glass going flat.

“We think we got a break down by the Big Bend,” Riser said. “A guy caused a commotion in a convenience store, and the clerk called it in. The guy had been putting gas in his SUV, and his buddy had gone inside to buy beer. Except the buddy left the beer on the counter and went out the back door and hauled ass.”

The bartender set a glass of ice and carbonated water and lime slices in front of Hackberry.

“You drink that?” Riser asked.

“Go on about the guy.”

“He came into the convenience store and wanted to know where Pete went. The clerk said he didn't know. The guy called him a liar and pulled a semiauto out of his overalls. The clerk called nine-one-one, and the sheriff decided to lift some prints off the fuel-pump handle. They got a hit. The guy with the semiauto is Robert Lee Motree, also known as Bobby Lee Motree. He did six months in the Broward County stockade for illegal possession of a firearm. He's also worked for a New Orleans private investigative service owned by a guy named Arthur Rooney. You recognize that name?”

“Yeah, but I thought Rooney ran some escort fronts in Houston or Dallas,” Hackberry said.

“That's the same guy. Rooney got blown out of New Orleans by Katrina and is in Galveston now.” Riser seemed to hesitate, as though his words were leading him into an area he hadn't fully given himself consent to enter.

“Go on,” Hackberry said.

“Rooney is a careful man, but we put a tap on his current punch of the day. He made a call from her apartment to a contract hitter by the name of Hugo Cistranos. On the tape, it sounds like Rooney and Cistranos are going to clip Jack Collins.”

“Why?”

“Get this. Collins cut off Rooney's finger with a barber's razor on Rooney's own desktop.” Riser started laughing.

“What's the Russian's role in all this?”

“We're not sure. He's a big player in Arizona and Nevada and California. He owns whole networks of whores and porn studios and has a lot of outlaw bikers muling his tar and crystal meth up from the border. How much China white do you see here?”

“Not much. It's upscale stuff. Addicts with money can smoke it and not worry about needles and AIDS.”

“DEA says a two-million-dollar shipment was off-loaded from a two-engine plane that landed on a highway in your county last week.”

“Tell them thanks for letting us in on that.”

“If you were looking for Vikki Gaddis and Pete Flores down in the Big Bend, where would you start?”

“I'd have to give that some thought.”

“You don't like us much, do you?” Riser drank from his beer and wiped his mouth.

“I like y'all just fine. I just don't trust you,” Hackberry said.

 

T
HAT NIGHT
H
ACKBERRY
ate dinner by himself in a back booth at a restaurant out on the highway, his Stetson crown-down on the seat beside him. Working-class families were lined up at the salad bar, and country music filtered through the swinging doors of the lounge annex
on the far side of the cashier's counter. He saw Pam Tibbs enter the front door with an athletic-looking man dressed in sport clothes and shined loafers, his dark hair wet-combed and sun-bleached at the tips, his face confident and tanned and unwrinkled by either worry or age. Pam wore a purple skirt and black pumps and a black top with a gold cross and chain; she had just had her hair cut and looked not only lovely but ten years younger than her age in the way that women look when they love someone. When she saw Hackberry, she jiggled her fingers at him and went inside the lounge with her friend.