Rain Gods (22 page)

“How about carbonated water on ice?” Pam said.

“Make that two,” Hackberry said.

Neither Hackberry nor Pam noticed a solitary man sitting at a back table, deep in the gloom behind the pool table. The man was holding up a newspaper, appearing to study it in the poor light that filtered through an alleyway window. His crutches were propped on a chair, out of sight. He did not lower his newspaper until Hackberry and Pam had left the saloon.

THE BRAZOS HOTEL was made of red sandstone, built in the 1880s, and seemed to rise like a forgotten reminder of lost Victorian elegance in the midst of twenty-first-century urban decay. The lobby contained potted palms, a threadbare carpet, furniture from a secondhand store, a telephone switchboard with disconnected terminals jacked into the holes, and an ancient registration desk backdropped by pigeonholes with room keys and mail in them.

A short-necked, heavyset Mexican woman was behind the desk, a big smile on her face when she talked. Hackberry showed her the photo of Liam Eriksson.

“Yeah, I seen him. Not for a few days, but I seen him here a couple of times, sitting in the lobby or going up the stairs. The elevator don’t always work, so he’d take the stairs.”

“Did he rent a room here?” Hackberry asked.

“No, he was here to see his girlfriend.”

“Mona?” Hackberry said.

“That’s right, Mona Drexel. You know her?”

“I’ve been looking for her. Is she in now?”

“You a sheriff, huh? How come you don’t have a gun?”

“I don’t want to scare people. Which room is Ms. Drexel in?”

“Her room is one-twenty-nine. But I haven’t seen her in a couple of days. See, the key is in her box. She always leaves her key when she goes out, ’cause sometimes maybe she drinks a little too much and loses it.”

“Could I have the key, please?”

“Are you supposed to do that, go in somebody’s room when they ain’t there?”

“If you give us permission, it’s okay,” Hackberry said.

“You sure?”

“She could be sick in there and need help.”

“I’ll open it for you,” the Mexican woman said.

The three of them took the elevator upstairs. When the Mexican woman inserted the key in the door and started to turn it, Hackberry put his hand on hers. “We’ll take it from here,” he said, his voice almost a whisper.

Before the woman could respond, Pam fitted her hands on the woman’s shoulders and moved her away from the door. “It’s okay,” she said, slipping a revolver from under her shirt. “We appreciate what you’ve done. Just stay back.”

Hackberry turned the key and pushed the door open, staying slightly behind the jamb.

The room had been vacated, the closet cleaned out, the drawers in the dresser hanging open and empty. Pam stood in the middle of the room and bit on a thumbnail. She put her revolver back inside the clip-on holster on her belt and pulled her shirt over the handles. “What a waste of time,” she said.

Hackberry went into the bathroom and came back out. In the shadows between a small writing table and the bed, he saw a wastebasket crammed full of newspaper and fast-food wrappers and soiled paper towels. He picked up the can and dumped it on the bedspread. Used Q-tips and balls of hair and dust and wads of Kleenex fell out on the bedspread with the other trash. After Hackberry sorted it all out, he washed his hands in the bathroom. When he came out, Pam was standing over the writing desk, studying the cover of a
Time
magazine she had positioned under the desk lamp.

“This was stuck under the pillow. Take a look,” she said.

The magazine was two months old, and on the mailing label was the name and address of a beauty parlor. At least a half-dozen phone numbers were inked on the cover. Pam tapped her finger on a notation at the bottom of the cover, one that someone had circled twice for emphasis. “‘PJC, Traveler’s Rest two-oh-nine,’” she read aloud.

“Preacher Jack Collins,” Hackberry said.

“The one and only. Maybe we’ve got the sonofabitch,” she said.

She dialed information and asked for both the phone number and the street address of a Traveler’s Rest motel. She wrote both down in her notebook and hung up. “It’s not more than two miles away,” she said.

“Good work, Pam. Let’s go,” he said.

“What about Clawson?”

“What about him?”

“We’re supposed to coordinate, right?”

Hackberry didn’t reply.

“Right, Hack?” she said.

“I’m not totally confident about Clawson.”

“After you get all over my case about this guy, you suddenly have reservations?”

“One of his colleagues told me Clawson works alone. I took that to mean he operates under a black flag. We don’t do business that way.”

“The guy could have ruined my career and sent me to jail on top of it. If you’re going to stiff him now, I won’t be party to it.”

Hackberry opened his cell phone and punched in Clawson’s number. “It’s Sheriff Holland,” he said. “We think we’ve got Jack Collins located. We just got lucky. A bartender knew the woman Eriksson was with at the car-title place. We’re at her hotel now. It looks like she’s blown town.” Hackberry gave Clawson the room number and the address of the motel where he thought Preacher Jack Collins might be staying.

“You’re fairly certain he’s there?” Clawson said.

“No, not at all. We found a notation on a magazine cover. There’s no telling how long ago it was written there.”

“I’m on the River Walk,” Clawson said. “I thought I had a lead on Eriksson, but it didn’t work out. I’ll need to arrange backup. Don’t do anything till I get back to you.”

Hackberry closed the cell phone and looked at Pam.

“
What?
” she said.

“We’re not supposed to do anything until he calls us back.” He stared at her, his eyes not quite focused.

“Finish your thought,” she said.

“Remind me not to take your advice anymore.”

“Anything else?”

“Screw Clawson. We bust Jack Collins,” he said.

ISAAC CLAWSON PARKED his car a half block from the Traveler’s Rest motel, put on a rain hat and coat, covering the butt of his holstered semiautomatic, and walked the rest of the way. It was almost dusk, and the wind was blowing in the streets, scouring dust into the sky. He heard the rumble of thunder just as a solitary raindrop struck his face. The decrease in barometric pressure and the sudden cooling of the day and the raindrop that he wiped on his hand and looked at seemed so unusual and unexpected after a week of triple-digit heat that he wondered if somehow the change in weather signaled a change in his life.

But that was a foolish way to think, he told himself. The great change in his life had come irrevocably in the night when two sheriff’s deputies had appeared at the door of his suburban home, removing their hats, and tried to tell him in euphemistic language that a young woman thought to be his daughter had been left locked with her fiancé inside the trunk of a burning automobile. From that moment on, Isaac knew the events of his future life might be modifiers of his mood or his worldview or the degree of anger he woke with in the false dawn, but nothing would ever give him back the happiness he had once taken for granted.

In fact, if there was any release from that night back in Tulsa, it came to him only when he canceled the ticket of someone he could associate in his mind with the two degenerates who had murdered his daughter.

He looked at his watch. It was 7:19, and the street lamps had come on in the motel parking lot. A rain shower was sweeping across the city, the clouds pierced with columns of sunlight, the air smelling of wet flowers and trees and the odor that rain makes when it touches warm concrete in summer.

He glanced up at the lavender hue of the heavens and opened his mouth and felt a raindrop hit his tongue. What a foolish thing to do, like a kid discovering spring, he thought, taking himself to task again.

The motel clerk was a rail of a man, dressed like a cowboy, in a black shirt with roses sewn on it and gray trousers with stripes, the cuffs tucked inside Mexican stovepipes stenciled with red and green flower petals. He wore a flesh-colored Band-Aid at the corner of one eye.

Clawson started to reach for his ID and instead rested his hand on the counter. “Got a nonsmoking room for two?” he asked.

“Need a king or a pair of queens?”

“My wife and I would like two-oh-nine if it’s available. We stayed there the night our son graduated from college.”

The adhesive on the clerk’s Band-Aid was loose, and he pressed it back tight against the skin with the back of his wrist. He looked at his computer screen. “That one is occupied. I could put you in two-oh-six.”

“Let me ask my wife. We’re kind of sentimental about our boy’s graduation.”

“I know what you mean,” the clerk said.

“You hurt your eye?”

“Yeah, put a stick in it. Not too smart, I guess.”

After Isaac Clawson went back outside, the clerk looked in the mirror. The Band-Aid on his face had come almost completely loose, exposing a pair of tattooed blue teardrops at the corner of his eye. He flattened the Band-Aid into place once more and picked up the telephone, punching in only three digits.

Clawson picked up a free shopper’s guide from a newspaper box and held it over his head as he walked into the motel parking lot, as though going to his automobile to confer with his wife. Then he cut around the far side of the motel and entered an outdoor breezeway in the center of the building and mounted the stairs. The clouds were purple in the west, the sun like a yellow rose buried inside them, the sky streaked with rain. In weather like this, his father used to say the devil was beating his wife. Why was Isaac having thoughts like these now, about his boyhood, about his family? Why did a great change in his life seem to be at hand?

THERE HAD BEEN an eight-vehicle pileup by an intersection of I-35 and I-10, a chemical tanker jackknifing and sloshing its load across six lanes of traffic. Hackberry had clamped his magnetized portable flasher on the roof of his truck cab and was trying to thread his way along the road’s shoulder to an exit by a shopping center. He handed his cell phone to Pam. “Try Clawson again,” he said.

She got Clawson’s voice mail. She closed the cell phone but kept it in her lap. “Want to call the locals for backup?” she asked.

“For Clawson?”

She thought about it. “No, I guess he wouldn’t appreciate that too much.”

“Hang on,” Hackberry said.

He swung across the swale, bouncing hard through the bottom, spinning grass and dirt off the rear tires as he powered up the far side. He went the wrong way on the road shoulder, then cut across another swale onto an entrance to I-10 that was free of congestion, the truck slamming down on the springs. Pam kept one hand fastened on the dashboard.

“You all right?” Hackberry said.

“What do you think Clawson plans to do if he gets to Collins before we do?” she asked.

“Maybe he already has a team backing him up. See if you can get hold of Ethan Riser. His number is in my contacts.”

“Who?”

“The FBI agent.”

Pam tried Riser’s number, but the call went directly into voice mail. She left a message.

“Sorry for lecturing you about Clawson. I didn’t think he’d try to use us,” Pam said.

“Reach behind the seat and get my pistol, will you?”

It and its holster and its belt with loops for cartridges were wrapped inside a brown paper bag. Pam slipped the bag free of the gun and the belt that was wound around the holster and set them on the carpet by the console. The pistol was a customized remake of a frontier double-action .45 revolver. It was charcoal blue with white handles and a brass trigger guard and a seven-and-a-half-inch barrel. Its balance was perfect, its accuracy and lethality at forty yards not up for debate.

“You’ve never fired it on the job, have you?” she said.

“Who told you that?”

“No one.”

He looked at her.

“I just knew,” she said.

They were on an elevated expressway, roaring past a neighborhood of warehouses and alleyways with clumps of banana trees in them and houses with dirt yards. Against a rainy, sunlit, mauve-colored sky that made Hackberry think of the Orient, he could see a three-story building with a neon sign on the roof that read Traveler’s Rest.

WHEN ISAAC CLAWSON reached the second floor, he realized the numbers on the room doors were going to be a challenge. The numbering was not sequential; some of the rooms were set in an alcove, inside the breezeway, and some of the rooms did not have any numbers at all. Down the walkway, a cleaning cart was parked against the handrail. A Hispanic maid sat on a bench by the cart, humped forward in a cleaning smock of some kind, eating a sandwich, a scarf knotted under her chin, the mist from the rain blowing in her face.

The palm fronds by the pool were thrashing in the wind, twisting against the trunks. Clawson passed room 206, the room that had been offered to him by the clerk, and saw that the next room had no number and the one after that was 213 and the one after that was 215. He realized that for whatever reason, odd numbers were on one side of the breezeway and even numbers on the other.