Billy Bob and Hackberry Holland Ebook Boxed Set (61 page)

It's because it's dishonorable for an old man to sleep with a young woman who is looking for her father,
he thought.

“What did you say?”

“I said nothing. I said let me buy you a late supper. I said I'm happy you came by. I said let's go to the fair.”

“All right, Hack. If you say so. I won't—”

“Won't what?”

She smiled and shrugged.

“You won't what?” he repeated.

She continued to smile, her feigned cheerfulness concealing her resignation. “I'll drive,” she said.

 

T
HAT NIGHT AFTER
she dropped him off, he sat for a long time in his bedroom with the lights turned off. Then he lay down on top of the bedcovers in his clothes and stared at the ceiling, the heat lightning flickering on his body. Outside, he heard his horses running in the pasture, their hooves heavy-sounding, swallowed by the wind, as though they were wrapped in flannel. He heard his garbage-can lid rattle on the driveway, blown by the wind or pulled loose from the bungee cord by an animal. He heard the trees thrashing and wild animals walking through the yard and the twang of his smooth wire when a deer went through his back fence. Then he heard a noise that shouldn't have been there, a car engine in closer proximity to his house than the state road would allow.

He sat up and slipped his boots on and went out on the porch. A car had pulled off the asphalt and driven onto the dirt track beyond the northern border of his property. The car's lights were off, but the engine
was still running. Hackberry went back into the bedroom and removed his holstered revolver from under his bed and unsnapped the strap from the hammer and let the holster slide off the barrel onto the bedspread. He walked back outside and crossed the yard to the horse lot. Missy's Playboy and Love That Santa Fe were standing by their water tank, frozen, looking to the north, the wind drifting a cloud of dust across them.

“It's okay, fellows. We're just going to check this guy out,” Hackberry said, walking between them, the white-handled .45 hanging from his left hand.

As Hackberry approached the north fence on the pasture, the driver of the car shifted into gear without apparent urgency, the lights still off, and turned in a circle, dead tree branches and uncropped Johnson grass raking under the car's frame. Then he drove in a leisurely fashion onto the asphalt and continued down the road, clicking on his headlights when he passed a clump of oaks on the bend.

Hackberry went back to the house, set his revolver on the nightstand, and gradually fell asleep. He dreamed of a rodeo bull exploding out of a bucking chute. The rider's bones seemed to be breaking apart inside his skin as the bull reared and corkscrewed between his thighs. Suddenly, the rider was in the air, his wrist still tied down with a suicide wrap, his body over the side, whipped and dirt-dragged and flung into the boards and finally horned.

Without ever quite waking from the dream, Hackberry reached for his revolver and clenched its white handles in his palm.

 

P
REACHER CONSIDERED HIMSELF
a tolerant man. But Bobby Lee Motree could be a challenge.

“Holland is an old man,” Bobby Lee said over the cell phone. “When he was running for Congress, he was known as a drunk and a gash hound. He got religion after he started representing a Mexican farmworkers' union, probably because he'd already screwed up everything else he touched. His first wife dumped him and cleaned out his bank account. His second wife was a Communist organizer of some kind. She died of cancer. The guy's a loser, Jack.”

Preacher was sitting at a card table in the shade behind his stucco
house, watching a lizard crawl across the top of a big gray rock while he talked. The table was spread with a clean cloth. On top of the cloth, Preacher had disassembled his Thompson machine gun. Next to the disassembled parts were a can of lubricant and a bore brush and a white rag stained yellow with a fresh application of oil. While he talked, Preacher touched the oiled surface of the Thompson's barrel and studied the wispy tracings his fingerprints left on the steel.

“Listen, Jack, if it's not broken, you don't fix it,” Bobby Lee said. “The guy couldn't even save his own grits. Liam would have capped him if that cunt of a deputy hadn't shown up.”

“Don't use that term around me.”

“We're talking about popping a Texas sheriff, and you're worried about language?”

Preacher wiped his fingertips on the gun cloth and studied a hawk flying above the mountainside, its shadow racing across the slope.

“You there?” Bobby Lee said.

“Where else would I be?”

“I'm just saying Holland is a retread and a rural schmuck who surrounds himself with other losers. Why borrow trouble?” Bobby Lee said.

“The man has the Navy Cross.”

“So, rah-rah, he's a swinging dick. Maybe he ran in the wrong direction.”

“You have a serious problem, Bobby Lee.”

“What's that?”

“You come to conclusions without looking at the evidence. Then you find reasons to justify your shoddy conclusions. It's like inventing a square wheel and trying to convince yourself you like your wagon to ride a little rough.”

“Jack, you smoked a federal agent. You want to add another cop to your tally? They not only execute in this state, they have beer parties at the prison gates when they do it. I'm risking my life throwing in with you. We've got Hugo and Artie Rooney to deal with. Then there's Vikki Gaddis and the soldier boy. What's next, dropping a hydrogen bomb on Iran?”

“I'll handle Artie Rooney.”

“You ought to get laid. You know what Hugo said? I'm quoting Hugo, I didn't say it, it's Hugo talking, not me. He said, ‘Preacher's last sexual encounter was a visit to his proctologist.' How long has it been since you got your ashes hauled?”

Preacher watched the lizard's throat puff out in a red balloon on the rock. The lizard's tongue uncoiled and wrapped around a tiny black ant and pulled the ant into the lizard's mouth. “I'm glad you're on my side, Bobby Lee. You have loyalty in your lineage. That's why General Lee stuck with the state of Virginia, isn't it? Loyalty has no surrogate. Blood will out, won't it?”

There was a long silence. “Why are you always ridiculing me? I'm the only guy who stood with you. You really hurt my feelings, man.”

“You got a point. You're a good boy, Bobby Lee.”

“That means a lot to me, Jack. But you got to quit renting space in your head to bozos who couldn't shine your shoes.”

“Artie Rooney is going to pay me a half million dollars. Ten percent of that will go to you.”

“That's generous of you, man. You got a kind heart.”

“In the meantime, Artie is going to leave the Jews alone. That one isn't up for grabs.”

“You still worried about the Jews after what Ms. Dolan did to you? What about the Gaddis broad and the soldier boy? Are they out?”

“They're in.”

“They're in?”

“You heard me.”

“What about Holland?”

“I'll give it some thought.”

“I think he saw me. I pulled off the road to case his place. I thought he was asleep. He came outside and saw my car. But it was too dark for him to get my tag or see my face. If we leave him alone, he'll forget about it.”

“You didn't tell me that.”

“So I just did. Use your head, Jack. Artie Rooney hijacked Josef Sholokoff's whores. Who do you think Rooney is gonna put that on? You got the rep from L.A. to Miami. Mexican cops think you walk through walls. Artie gets on the phone, tells Sholokoff you're a psycho, tells him
you're working for Nick Dolan, and gets you permanently out of his hair. You taught me to be a fly on the wall, Jack.”

“Want to spell that out?”

“That agent you capped wasn't just a fed, he was from ICE. They're fanatics, worse than Treasury agents. You got any idea of how hot you are?”

“You just said ‘you.'”

“Okay, ‘we.'”

“Call me when you find Vikki Gaddis.”

“Is this girl worth clipping? Think about it. A waitress from a truck stop?”

“Did I say anything about clipping her? Did you hear me say that?”

“No.”

“You find her, but you don't touch her.”

“Why should I want to touch her? It's not me who's got—”

“Got what?”

“An obsession. Like a tumor on the brain. The size of a carrot.”

Again Preacher let his silence speak for him; it was a weapon Bobby Lee never knew how to deal with.

“You still there?”

“Still here,” Preacher said.

“You're the best there is, Jack. Nobody else could have done what you did behind the church. It took guts to do that.”

“Say again?”

“To step across the line like that, to grease every one of them, to burn the whole magazine and bulldoze them under and mark it off. It takes maximum cojones to do a mass whack like that, Jack. That's why you're you.”

This time Preacher's silence was not of his own volition. He took the cell phone from his ear and opened his mouth to clear a blockage in his ear canal. The side of his face felt both numb and hot to the touch, as though he had been stung by a bee. He stared at the gray rock. The lizard was gone, and at the base of the rock, he saw a spray of tiny purple flowers that looked like tiny violets. He wondered how any flower that lovely and delicate could grow in the desert.

“You still there? Talk to me, man,” he heard Bobby Lee's voice say. Preacher closed his cell phone without replying. He picked up the Thompson and ran a bore brush through the barrel and swabbed it with a clean oil patch. He folded a piece of white paper and inserted it in the open chamber, reflecting the sunlight up through the rifling. The inside of the barrel was immaculate, the whorls of light an affirmation of the gun's mechanical integrity and reliability. He lifted up the drum and snapped it cleanly into place under the barrel and laid the gun across his lap, his palms resting on the wood stock and steel frame. He could hear whirring sounds in his head, like wind blowing in a cave or perhaps the voices of women whispering to him through the ground, whispering inside the wildflowers.

 

A
T THAT SAME
moment, one hundred miles away, three bikers were headed down a two-lane highway, full-bore, their arms wrapped with jailhouse tats, the points of their shoulders bright with sunburn. Sometimes, out of boredom, they lazed across the solid yellow stripe or stopped at a roadside rathole for a beer and a grease burger or caught a live hillbilly band at a shitkicker nightclub or steak house. But otherwise, they burned their way across the American Southwest with the dedication of Visigoths. The crystal that coursed in their veins, the dirty thunder of their exhaust flattening against the asphalt, the blowtorch velocity of the wind on their skin, the surge of the engines' power into their genitalia, blended together in a paean to their lives.

They topped a rise and turned onto a dirt road and followed it for two miles until they came out on the cusp of a sloping plain of alluvial grit and alkali and green mesquite. They stopped between two dun-colored bluffs, and their leader consulted a topographical map without dismounting, then used binoculars to study a small stucco house set against a mountain that contained a shadow-darkened opening in its face. “Bingo,” he said.

The three men dismounted and touched fists and parked their hogs down in a gulley and built a fire and cooked their food on sticks. When they had finished eating, they pissed on the flames in the sunset and
rolled out their sleeping bags and smoked weed and, like spectators at an exotic zoo, silently watched a coyote with a stiffened back leg try to keep up with a pack climbing a hill. Then they fell asleep.

On the fair side of the plain, the stucco house was quiet. A solitary figure sat on a metal chair in front of the opening to a shored-up cave, staring at the mantle of gold light on the hills, his expression as removed from earthly concerns as that of a man whose severed head had just been placed on a platter.

B
UT IN THE
morning, the man who lived upon occasion in the stucco house was not to be found. The bikers had approached the house on foot from three directions, the sun still buried beneath the earth's rim, the light so weak their bodies cast no shadows on the ground. A compact car was parked twenty yards away from the house, the doors unlocked, the keys hanging in the ignition. The bikers kicked open the front and back doors of the house, turned over the bed, raked the clothes out of the closets, and tore the plywood out of the ceiling to see if Preacher was hiding in an attic or crawl space.

“The mine shaft,” one of them said.

“Where?” another said.

“Up on the mountain. There's no other place he could be. Josef said he's on crutches.”

“How'd he know we were coming?”

“The Mexicans say he walks through walls.”

“That's why their country would make a great golf course, as long as it was run by white people.”

The bikers spread out and approached the opening on the mountainside, their weapons hanging loosely at their sides. They wore needle-
nosed cowboy boots that were metal-plated around the heels and toes, jeans that were stiff with grit and road grime, and shirts whose sleeves were razored off at the armpits. Their hair was sunburned at the tips and grew in locks on the backs of their necks. Their bodies had the tendons and lean hardness of men who lifted weights daily and for whom narcissism was a virtue and not a character defect.

Their leader was named Tim. He stood two inches taller than his companions and wore a gold earring in one earlobe and a beard that ran along his jawline like a cluster of black ants. A Glock semiautomatic hung from his right hand. He paused in front of the cave and slipped the gun into the back of his belt, as though enacting a private ritual unrelated to what anyone thought of him. He took a breath and entered the cave. He produced a penlight from his jeans, clicked it on, and shone it into the darkness.

“It's a mine?” one of his companions said.

“I can feel a breeze blowing through it. It's got to have a second opening.”

“You see the guy?”

“No, that's why I said it's got a second opening. Maybe he went through it and out the other side.”

“Where's it go?”

Tim continued to walk deeper into the cave, the beam of his penlight watery and diffuse on the walls. “Come have a look at this.”

“At what?”

“Did you see
Snakes on a Plane
?”

The two bikers who had remained outside the cave stepped into the darkness. Tim aimed the penlight in front of him, pointing it down a passageway that twisted into the mountain.

“Jesus!” one of them said.

“They go where there's food or water. Maybe a cougar dragged its kill in here,” Tim said. “You ever see that many in one place?”

“Maybe Collins is a ghoul. Maybe he dumps his victims in here.”

“Go down and check it out. They rattle before they strike. They're not rattling. You'll be okay.”

“How about that one on the ledge behind you?”

The other two bikers waited, smiles on their faces, expecting Tim to jump. Instead, he turned around and shone the light into a diamondback's
eyes. He picked up a piece of splintered timber that had fallen from the roof. He poked at the snake's head with it, then bedeviled it in the stomach, and finally, lifted it up in a coil and flipped it into the darkness.

“You're not afraid of snakes?”

“I'm afraid of bad information. I think this Texas bunch is jerking Josef around. This guy Collins is a hitter, not a pimp. Hitters don't boost somebody else's whores.”

“Where do you think he went?”

“One thing is for sure. He didn't go out the other side.”

“Then where is he?”

“Probably watching us.”

“No way. From where?”

“I don't know. The guy has been killing people for twenty years and never went inside.”

“This blows, Tim.”

They were outside the cave now, the stucco house still in shadow, the morning cool, the wind ruffling the mesquite. The three men stared at the surrounding hills, looking for the glint of binoculars or the lens on a telescopic rifle sight.

“Who are we supposed to check in with?”

“The guy who ratted out Collins. His name is Hugo Cistranos.”

“What are we gonna do?”

Tim slipped the Glock from behind his belt and strolled down the gravel path from the cave to Preacher's compact car. He circled the car, taking careful aim, and shot out each tire. He went inside the house and closed all the windows, like a man securing his home from an impending storm. He found a candle in a kitchen drawer, lit it, and melted the wax in a pool so he could affix it to the drainboard. Then he shut the front door and turned on the propane stove and shut the kitchen door behind him as he exited the house.

“Let's fang down some frijoles,” he said.

 

S
HERIFF
H
ACKBERRY
H
OLLAND
had just picked up Danny Boy Lorca for public intoxication and locked him in a cell upstairs when Maydeen told him Ethan Riser was on the phone.

“How you doing, Mr. Riser?” Hackberry said, picking up the receiver on his desk.

“Can't you call me Ethan?”

“It's a southern inhibition.”

“You were right about the origins of your mystery caller. We think his name is Nick Dolan. He was a floating casino operator in New Orleans before Katrina.”

“How'd you ID him?”

“His name was in Isaac Clawson's notes. Clawson figured the Thai murder victims for prostitutes somebody was smuggling into the country, so he started running down anybody with major ties to escort services. It appears Clawson was giving Arthur Rooney a hard look and decided to check out Nick Dolan at the same time. Evidently, he interviewed Dolan at his vacation home in New Braunfels.”

“Why are y'all just finding this out?”

“Like I told you, Clawson liked to work alone. He didn't put everything he did in the official file.”

“But so far you're not absolutely sure Dolan is the same guy who called me?”

“Dolan knows Rooney. Dolan has been mixed up with prostitution for the last two years. Clawson had him in his bombsights. Also, Dolan just dissolved his partnership in his escort services and fired all the strippers at his nightclub. Either Clawson scared the shit out of him, or Dolan has developed problems of conscience.”

“You haven't interviewed him yet?”

“No.”

“You're putting a tap on him instead?”

“Did I say that?”

“I think you're calling me because you don't want me to find Dolan on my own.”

“Some people have a way of putting themselves in the middle of electric storms, Sheriff.”

“I don't think the problem is mine. Your colleagues want Collins as a conduit to this Russian out on the West Coast. I think they might want to use Dolan as bait. In the meantime, I'm a hangnail.”

This time Ethan Riser was silent.

“You're telling me I'm bait, too?” Hackberry said.

“I can't speak for the actions of others. But I sleep nights. I do so because I treat people as honestly as I can. Watch your ass, Sheriff. Guys like us are old school. But there's not many of us left.”

 

A
FEW MINUTES
later, Hackberry filled a Styrofoam cup with black coffee, dropped three sugar cubes in it, and removed a folded-up checkerboard and a box of wood checkers from his bottom desk drawer. He walked up the old steel stairs to the second floor and pulled up a chair to Danny Boy Lorca's cell. He sat down and placed the coffee and the checkerboard inside the bars and unfolded the checkerboard on the concrete floor. “Set 'em up,” he said.

“I fell off the wagon again,” Danny Boy said, sitting up on the edge of his bunk, rubbing his face. His skin was as dark as smoked leather, his eyes dead, like coals that have been consumed by their own fire.

“One day you'll quit. Between now and then, don't fret yourself about it,” Hackberry said.

“I dreamed it rained. I saw a dried-out field of corn stand up straight in the rain. I had the same dream for three nights.”

Hackberry's eyes crinkled at the corners.

“You don't pay no attention to dreams, huh?” Danny Boy said.

“You bet I do. Your move,” Hackberry said.

 

T
HE THREE BIKERS
checked in to a motel next to a truck stop and nightclub, partially because the portable sign in front of the nightclub said
LADIES FREE TONIGHT—TWO-FERS
5
TO
8. They showered and changed into fresh clothes and drank Mexican beer at the bar and picked up a woman who said she worked at the dollar store in town. They also picked up her friend, who was sullen and suspicious and claimed she had a ten-year-old boy waiting alone at home.

But when Tim showed the friend his tin Altoids box packed to the brim with a lovely white granular cake of nose candy, she changed her
mind and joined him and her girlfriend and the other two bikers for a couple of lines, some high-octane weed, and an order-in pizza back at the motel.

Tim had rented a room at the end of the building, and while his companions and their new friends went at it full-throttle on two beds, he drank a soda outside and crushed the can in one hand and threw it in the trash. He sat on a bench under a tree throbbing with cicadas and opened his cell phone. He could hear the bedstead banging against the motel wall and the cacophonous laughter of the two dimwits his friends had picked up, as if their laughter were outside them and not part of anything that was funny. He put an unlit cigarette in his mouth and tried to clear his head. What would the smart money do in a situation like this? You didn't blow a hit for Josef Sholokoff. You also didn't mess up when you took on a guy like Jack Collins, at least if he was as good as people said he was.

The eaves of the motel were lit with pink neon tubing. The light was fading from the sky, and the air was purple and dense and moist, with a smell of dust in it that suggested a drop in the barometer, perhaps even a taste of rain. The fronds on a palm tree by the entrance to the motel straightened and rattled in the wind. He thought about going back inside and trying out one of the dimwits. No, first things first. He dialed a number on his cell phone. While he listened to the ring, he wondered what was keeping the pizza man with their order.

“Hugo?”

“Yeah, who's this?”

“It's Tim.”

“Tim who?”

“Tim who works for Josef. Lose the charade. You want an update or not?”

“You got Preacher?”

“We're working on it.”

“Explain that.”

“We had him boxed, but he disappeared. I don't know how he did it.”

“Preacher is onto you but he got away? Do you have any idea what you're telling me?”

“It sounds like you overloaded on your Ex-Lax.”

“You listen, asshole—”

“No, you listen. The guy has got no wheels and no house to go back to. We'll find him. In the meantime—”

“What do you mean, he has no house to—”

“There was a propane accident in his kitchen. Some vandals blew the tires off his car at about the same time. Everything is under control. Here's the good news. You said you were looking for a broad.”

“No, I said Preacher was looking for a broad. He's got an obsession about her. You said you shot out his tires? What the fuck do you think this is? Halloween?”

“Man, you just don't listen, do you?”

“About what?”

“The broad and the soldier you're looking for. She has chestnut hair and green eyes, looks like a fine piece of ass, sings Gomer Pyle spirituals to beer-drinking retards who don't have a clue? If that sounds right, I know where you can find her.”

“You found Vikki Gaddis?”

“No, Michelle Obama. You got a pencil?”

“There's one here somewhere. Hang on.”

“One day you guys have to explain to me how you got into the life.”

Inside the motel room, the women got up and dressed in the bathroom. The woman from the dollar store came out first, blotting her face with a towel, smoothing her hair out of her face. She was overweight and round-shouldered, her arms big like a farm girl's; without makeup, her face was as stark as a pie plate. “Where's the pizza?” she asked.

“The guy must have got lost,” one biker said.

The other biker wanted to use the bathroom, but the second woman had locked the door. “What are you doing in there?” he said, shaking the knob.

“Calling my son. Hold your water,” she said through the door.

“I love family values,” he said.

The second woman came out of the bathroom. Unlike her friend, her bone structure looked like it had been created from an Erector Set. Her face was triangular in shape, her skin bad, her eyes filled with a glint that seemed to teeter without cause on malevolence.

“Your kid okay?” one of the bikers said.

“You think I'd be here if he wasn't?” she replied.

“Not everybody is such a good mother.”

The two women went out the door. A beaded sky-blue sequined purse hung on a string from the overweight woman's shoulder. She looked back once, smiling as though to say good night.

Tim came back into the room and sat down in a chair by the window. He pulled off his metal-sheathed boots and cupped his hands on his thighs, staring at the floor. “We've got to clean this up.”

“You talk to Josef?”

“To this lamebrain Hugo. He says we spit in the tiger's mouth.”

“A guy on crutches with no car or house? I think this guy is some kind of urban legend.”

“Maybe.”

“I'm hungry. You want me to call the pizza place again or go out?”