Rain Gods (27 page)

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.

THREE 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.

THAT NIGHT HACKBERRY 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.

Ten minutes later, she came back out of the swinging doors and sat down across from Hackberry. He could smell her perfume and the hint of bourbon and ice and crushed cherries on her breath. “Join us,” she said.

“Who is ‘us’?” he asked, and wondered if she caught the tinge of resentment in his voice.

“My cousin and me. His wife will be here in a few minutes,” she said, her fingers spreading on the table, her expression not quite able to contain her surprise at his reaction.

“Thanks, I have to get home.”

“Hack?”

“What?”

“Come on.”

“Come on, what?”

He felt her foot touch his under the table. “Ease up,” she said.

“Pam—”

“I mean it. Give yourself a break. People can’t be alone all the time.”

“You’re my chief deputy. Act like it,” he said. He looked sideways to see if anyone had heard him.

“What if I am?” she said, leaning forward now.

“I’d like to finish my dinner.”

“You make me mad. I want to hit you sometimes.”

“I’m going to get some salad.”

“Your chicken-fried steak will get cold.”

Hackberry thought he might have discovered the source of many unexplained brain aneurysms.

THAT NIGHT HE returned home and sat on a folding chair in the yard under a sky that roiled with thunderclouds. It was not a rational act. The hour was late, the wind bending the poplar trees at the foot of his property, the air filled with bits of desiccated matter that stung his face like insects. Overhead, yellow pools of dry lightning flared and pulsed in the clouds but made no sound. Even though he had soaked the lawn that morning, the ground under his feet felt as hard as brick. Five or six deer had clustered down in the trees as though preparing for an impending storm. Then he realized the deer were there for other reasons. On a rise just above his property, he saw the silhouettes of four coyotes slink across the crest. When lightning lit the sky behind them, he saw the yellow-gray of their coats, the peculiar way they hung their heads, the neck bones and jaws loose and not completely connected, a suggestion of slather on the teeth and lips.

Was this what it was all about? he wondered. One creature killing and eating another? Or even worse, the fanged predator with eyes in the front hunting down and tearing apart the gentle grass-eating animal born with eyes on the sides of its head, forever condemned to be food for coyotes and wolves and cougars and, finally, man with his sharpened stick?

What was it that had bothered him about Ethan Riser? The fact that he could drink normally and walk away from it? That he represented an organization with power that had almost global reach? Or Hackberry’s refusal to accept the notion that the Ethan Risers of the world were functional and made the system work and, in spite of all their inadequacies and failures, did an enormous amount of good?

No, that wasn’t it, either. Some people dwelled apart and didn’t fit. It was that simple. Preacher Jack Collins was one of them. In all probability, he was a psychopath who, upon his death, would continue to look upon himself as normal, stepping through a hole in the dimension still convinced it was the world that was wrong and not he. But there were both male and female counterparts to men like Jack Collins. They wore badges or Roman collars or climbed fire ladders into flaming buildings or did triage in battalion aid stations and, like Collins, never discussed their difference or the events in their lives that had sawed them loose from the seminal glue holding the rest of humankind together.

Saint Paul had written that perhaps there were angels living among us. If so, perhaps this was the bunch he was talking about. But before any one of them congratulated himself, he needed to be aware of the dues that went with membership. If an individual, through either his own volition or events over which he had no control, found himself taking up residence in a country undefined by flags or physical borders, he could be assured of one immediate and abiding consequence: He was on his own, and solitude and loneliness would probably be his companions unto the grave.

The greatest irony was that celibacy often went with the residency, less out of spiritual choice than circumstance. And those who called celibacy a gift were usually, in Hackberry’s opinion, those who lived twenty-four hours a day inside the iron maiden, their flesh tormented by the spikes of their unacknowledged desire.

He leaned forward in his folding chair and stretched his lower back, his sciatica like a fire creeping along his spinal cord.

He saw the cruiser turn off the road and come up his driveway. He heard the doorbell ring but did not bother to get up to answer it. When Pam Tibbs came around the side of the house, he saw that she had changed out of her evening clothes into jeans and a departmental khaki shirt. She was wearing her gun belt and cuffs and slapjack and Mace.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

“This month I go on at oh-one-hundred Saturdays,” she replied.

“That doesn’t address the question.”

“You always sit in the yard by yourself at one in the morning?”

“Sometimes my back lights up and I have to wait for it to pass.”

She was standing in front of him, looking down at him, the curly ends of her hair hanging against her cheeks, her eyes bright in the shadows. He could hear her breathing and see her breasts rising and falling under her shirt. “You want me to resign?” she said.

“No, I just want you to accept certain realities.”

“Like what?”

“You’re still a young woman. The world is yours. Don’t mistake sympathy or admiration or friendship for love.”

“Who the hell are you to tell me what to think?”

“Your goddamn boss is what I am.”

“You never swear, Hack. You’re going to start now?”

“I told you, I’m old. You need to let me alone, Pam.”

“Then run me off,” she said. “Until then I’m not going anywhere.”

She was standing closer to his chair, closer than she should have been. He stood up, towering over her. He could smell the heat in her clothes and the warm odor in her hair. She put her hands on both of his hips and pressed the crown of her head into the center of his chest. He could feel his mouth go dry and a thickness growing in his loins.