The Preacher

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  Then I wedged the door shut and got out of there.

  Fun is fun, but the party was over.

  I took the long way back to the motel, puzzling around the country roads until I found my way back to town in order to avoid driving the little skate back past the garage.

  I’d had my look at the hole cards.

  Pretty soon, now, it was going to be time to bet.

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  But there is more to the story than defeat.

  There is hope as well.

  There is love.

  If in the midst of life we are in death, then equally in the midst of death we celebrate life…

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “Hey, there, you tinhorn peckerwood!”

  I stared at the darkened ceiling of the motel room and let the tender cadences of Dee Tee Price’s voice and persona do their soothing work. Sometimes talking to a friend can be better than an hour’s meditation. And it beats little green pills all hollow.

  “Spend half the day doin’ chores for you,” he roared, “and asking questions that could get me kilt if I wasn’t talking to good close personal enemies—and then you don’t stick around in one place long enough so I can let you know what I found out! Goddamn Bible-thumping highbinder!”

  “Thanks, Dee Tee,” I said. “I love you, too.”

  He chuckled. “They treatin’ you okay?”

  “Oh, sure. Only hurts when I laugh.”

  “Well, then, you got nothing to worry about for the next few minutes—especially if you happen to be an investor in the Citizens National Bank of Farewell, New Mexico. You’re not, are you?”

  I was beginning to wonder.

  “I don’t think so,” I told him, squirming my head deeper into the pillow and rolling it sideways to clamp the receiver in place without having to keep my hand on it. “But it’s been a long day, and I am not as sure of things now as I was when it started.”

  He didn’t ask for an explanation and I didn’t offer one. And that was just as well. I had managed a shower after returning to the motel and even forced myself to pick up the phone and have the operator get back to the Houston number that had been leaving call-back messages ever since sundown.

  I pinched the nails of my thumb and forefinger into my thigh to keep the eyes open and the mind in recording mode. “I gather Barlow’s bank is in trouble, then?” I said.

  “Well, yes and no,” Dee Tee replied. “Yes, it’s in trouble. But no, no one knows about it yet—except for you and me and Barlow and whoever he’s got in there helping him lie to the federals.”

  “You’re absolutely sure?”

  Dee Tee’s voice, usually rife with animal spirits, was curiously lifeless as he replied. “No doubt in the world, good buddy. And I got to tell you it hurts a hell of a lot more than I thought it would. I think I told you Barlow and ol’ Dee Tee go back quite a ways…”

  “Sorry, Dee Tee.”

  “Oh, hell.” The tone changed again, and I could feel his generator beginning to pick up speed. “If there is one thing you and me ought to know, it is that even the best can make damn-fool mistakes and still be the best. It’s not like it was the end of the world, and right here and now I think I ought to warn you that I intend to make some money on what I found out. Can’t hardly see any way not to. You got a problem with that?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “Hell, yes! Of course I got a problem with it—but I be damned if I’m going to let it get in the way of what I do or who I am. It’s just that I got to admit I don’t feel quite right about none of it.”

  “Then don’t do it.”

  That got another laugh. “I’d feel even worse if I didn’t. Gets kindly complicated, doesn’t it?”

  I let that pass without comment and he didn’t press. We’d had a lot of time, back in the hospital, to confuse each other discussing the various conundrums of ethics and society. No conclusions reached, but no need to repeat the exercises, either.

  “Anyways,” he said, taking up the slack, “I can give this to you in the short form or the long form. You’re paying for the call, so which’ll you have?”

  I burrowed deeper into the bed. “Short form, please. I got a hunch I wouldn’t understand the long version no matter how clear you made it.”

  “You do sound just a tad bushed, now that I think of it.”

  “You are a perceptive person. For a Texican.”

  He turned the insult almost absentmindedly and launched into exposition, leaving the good ol’ boy accent behind as usual when discussing subjects he considered serious.

  “The Citizens Bank of Farewell,” he said, “looks real good on paper, and the federal examiners are satisfied, and in the general way of things I think it might have gone on that way for a long time. But it’s not going to happen now, and not because you and I started nosing around, either. The sharks are already beginning to circle at a distance.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, I think someone’s already smelled a rat. Not an official someone—this would be a trader, an outside hand like me, who makes his money turning information into leverage.”

  “What would the information be, and where would it come from?”

  “As to what, I can tell you for sure, and it only cost the national debt of Ecuador in long-distance telephone bills to find out: The energy-loan paper Barlow’s bank had to eat, early on. That was plenty bad medicine, but he handled them all right and seemed to come out smelling like a rose when the other bank in town, Ranchers National, I think they called it, got into trouble. You know about that, so we won’t go over it again. But the hell of it is, it looks like Barlow was sitting on more trouble than he let on. There was also some kind of deal with the government of Haiti…”

  That pushed the sleep clouds back a foot or two.

  “When was that?”

  “Just exactly when you’re thinking. Two or three years before Baby Doc got kicked out.”

  “But—”

  “No buts about it, buddy! That’s exactly how it went down. The paper Barlow took was at twenty-five percent. Twenty-five! Lordy, a banker ought to be shot just for thinking of things like that! Why, that kind of interest is for people who break your legs if you miss a payment. No excuse for it. But that’s what the loan was supposed to pay, and that’s by God what it really did pay for about a year and a few months. Until they tossed Duvalier’s pudgy little ass out and got in some new bosses, who naturally promised to pay everyone and then locked up the vault.”

  “Is any money coming out of Haiti at all?”

  “Oh, sure. Some of the bigger boys had the muscle to get things rolling. Rescheduled the loans; fancy way of saying they cut the interest to something sensible and extended the time, and then threw in some money to pick up the slack. Barlow wasn’t big enough to get in on that, and I kindly doubt he found anyone in the new government who would help out of the goodness of his heart, you know? But, glory be to goodness, you will never guess what I found out from a bank examiner who owes me a couple of favors.”

  “Barlow’s books show the loans paying again?”

  “Figure that out all by yourself, did you? Well, ain’t that a caution! I tell you, boy, I always did think you had the makings of a banker. God knows you think crooked enough.” He laughed again, but the sound was sad and hollow.

  “How long has this been going on, Dee Tee?”

  “Can’t say for sure, but it would have to be two years at least, more, maybe, but that long for sure.”

  “In that case—”

  “In that case, as you are about to say, he is going to have to do something right quick. Come up with enough money to square the books and cook the accounting to show that some other bank—in a foreign country or in the Caribbean where the examiners can’t double-check him too close—took over the whole shebang.”

  I thought about that for a minute. “How much money are we talking, Dee Tee?”

  “Oh, hell, just chicken feed,
relatively speaking.”

  “How big are those chickens?”

  “Well, Citizens’ original share of the Haiti consortium—the part of a bigger loan that they contributed—was maybe fifty million. It could be a lot more or a lot less now.”

  “Sorry, you lost me there…”

  “Well, see, all the other banks that had a piece of that particular package have already pulled out. Written the money off and taken their licking from their stockholders. Couple or three of the bank presidents got fired; one had to hold still for a takeover by another bank in California. Fact is, that’s how I was able to find out so much. One of the losers took it kind of hard and told his sad tale to a few people.”

  “Uh-huh. But nothing like that happened to Barlow.”

  “Nope. According to the way his books tell it, he was able to do the same thing the bigger lenders did—reduce and reschedule. Might could take you a month of Sundays to unravel the mess, but I suspect that when you got done you’d find that he even took over some of their bum paper and showed it as a discount item.”

  “Lost me again, Dee Tee.”

  “Nemmine. You don’t have to know all that. Only just that it’s what happened here.”

  “Right.” The receiver was biting into my ear, and I moved a little to ease it. “How much of the money do you think Barlow could have gotten back in payments before things went sour down there?”

  Dee Tee took a moment to answer. Anyone else might have been fiddling with a pocket calculator, but I knew he was just sitting still with his eyes closed. Talent. He’d have made a world-class car salesman.

  “Call it twenty-one million seven hundred twenty-six thousand nine hundred thirty-three dollars. And change. Give or take a million or so for grease along the way. Doing business with Baby Doc was always expensive.”

  “So the net shortage would be…?”

  “Still damn near fifty, Preacher. On the books, anyway. It was a young loan, you know, and now he’s had to come up with the servicing—payments, that is—out of his own pocket for a while.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Couldn’t hardly be any other way, unless some of the money was coming from his partner.”

  “Partner?”

  “Hell, yes, partner. I told you he couldn’t be handling this alone. He needed someone inside—on the board, and with an administrative title, too, just to be safe. You been there in Farewell for a day or two now, so you should have met some of the locals besides just Barlow himself. You ever run into a big fat dude named Edward Watrous? Nickname’s Tiny…”

  For some reason that bothered me more than it should have.

  Suddenly the receiver under my ear was painful again, and I found myself squirming on the bed, unable to find a comfortable position. The temperature of the room was wrong, and the mattress was lumpy, and I wanted to be somewhere else.

  “How sure are you that it’s Watrous?”

  “I guess some of what I was feeling showed in my voice, because Dee Tee waited a minute before he replied, and when he finally spoke I could detect a note of real concern.

  “Preacher,” he said, “you told me once that the most dangerous thing a poker player can do is to get emotionally involved in the game he’s playing. Lets it get to having some kind of meaning outside itself. You remember that?”

  I did, and there was nothing I could say, so I didn’t say anything.

  “About a year ago,” Dee Tee said, “there was a little bit of shuffling among the officers of the Citizens Bank. Someone either died or retired—I don’t know the straight of that and I don’t really care—but Edward Watrous, Tiny, became the bank’s treasurer and chief financial officer. Sort of drifted into the job, really. He’d been a director of the bank for years and he runs a lot of other things in Farewell, and everybody thought it was just a temporary appointment. But they never hired anybody to take the job full-time, and by now I guess nobody thinks much about it one way or the other.”

  “How about the guy who had the job before?”

  “What about him?”

  “Wouldn’t he have to have been in on the scam, too?”

  “Maybe. But maybe not, too, unless he was also the head bookkeeper or something like that, and I guess that wasn’t the case. Ain’t no trouble to cook a set of books. Anyone can do it. Hard part is to get away with it for any length of time.”

  “Well, you’re making it sound pretty easy.”

  He shut up to let me stew for a while. So I did. Jake had brought me to Farewell to see if Pres Prescott had been cheated in the local high-stake contests, and I had come to the conclusion that he probably had not. But the more I found out about the town, the more apparent it became to me that cold decks and the other poker arts arcane just weren’t in the same league with the kind of games these people liked to play. They didn’t need the cards. They had a whole town for their game board: Take a walk on the Boardwalk. Take a ride on the Reading. Win the Irish Sweepstakes. Take a Chance. Go to Jail; go directly to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect fifty million dollars.

  And how the hell long had it been going on?

  And why did I find it easier to like Barlow and Watrous, who were looking more and more like the Black Hats every day, than I did Deke Pemberton—who just might be the only straight hand in the game? But I didn’t have any answers, so I finally had to give up and ask the next question.

  “Okay. So what’s going to happen now?”

  “Oh, it’ll go on this way for a while maybe, if nobody rocks the boat. A few months. A year. More, if they got a lot of luck and a real dumb examiner and enough money to keep up the servicing payments. But finally, if nothing happens to change things for the better, somewhere along the line someone is sure to notice that the emperor is in his skivvies, and then it is going to be raining assholes all over east New Mexico.”

  “The bank will be bust?”

  “That, or get itself swallowed up by something real big and hungry.”

  “What happens to the town? To Farewell?”

  “Into the dumper…”

  I kept waiting for him to add a qualifier, something to soften the edge. But he just let the words sit there, and I knew he was probably right. The loss of one bank had been bad for Farewell, but it was a survivable crash. Two would be complete disaster.

  Poor Jake. If things went the way I thought they might, the church board was going to have some harsh things to say to him about his choice of friends, and about meddling in matters best left alone. Never mind the fact that such meddling comes with the territory in such a job, and never mind a murder—or two—along the way. They would be looking for scapegoats to blame for the sudden drop in local real-estate values, and he would be standing right there with a Kick Me sign pinned to his coattails. And I would be the one who put it there…

  “You can still back out, Preacher,” Dee Tee said quietly.

  He could always read my mind, damn him.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I sure can do that, all right.”

  More silence.

  “Okay, then, good buddy,” Dee Tee said when we’d both done enough thinking and one-handed shadowboxing. “Other things: Messenger from the bank in Amarillo’ll be over there with the cash money you wanted about noon or such a matter, tomorrow. Call you from the lobby of the motel if that’s okay, but best do your business in private. Hellfire, I don’t have to tell you.”

  “Noon’s fine,” I said. “And no. You don’t. And thanks, Dee Tee.”

  “Well, then…”

  There wasn’t any more to say, and I could feel the numb fingers of sleep creeping up my neck again—this thing of staying awake in the daylight takes some getting used to—but Dee Tee wasn’t ready to hang up yet.

  “Listen, you silly bastard,” he said, “I don’t wanta hear about you doin’ any dumb shit, now, you hear? Don’t go winning no medals. You’re used to dealing with fine, genteel, civilized folks like ol’ Dee Tee, and everybody’s not like that. You get careless, they’ll ha
ve you for a midnight snack! I kid you not, buddy, they purely play for keeps around that part of the world.”

  “I heard.”

  “Don’t suppose I could get you to let me send an old friend of mine in there with the bank messenger tomorrow—ex-cop, lives over that way? Got him a private detective license and a bodyguard permit, all nice and legal, and he owes me. Big.”

  I had to smile. “I don’t suppose,” I said. “But thanks, Dee Tee.”

  “Yeah. Well…y’all take care, then. Goddamn Bible-thumper.”

  “You, too, bandit.”

  My eyes were closed and the lights were going out before I could get the receiver back into its cradle.

  It was an old dream. Stale from the vault…

  We were moving single file along the side of a hill, flankers out and a specialist sweeping the top of the ridge. Silence in the rain forest except for the sound of our boots and the inevitable wire-thin whine of insect life that becomes so much a part of existence that it ceases to be audible, except in dreams.

  The first Charlie was a tree. It had been standing right there for a century, and it was as real as anything else in the world around us, except now it was a little brown guy in black pajamas, and he was going to kill someone for sure if I didn’t stop him. The trouble was, I had never killed anybody before and I didn’t know if I could do it and I really didn’t want to find out and what the hell was I doing here anyway? My movements were too slow, like being underwater or trying to stir thick syrup—it was that kind of dream, the everyone-moves-fast-except-me thing; I knew it was a dream, except that I couldn’t seem to get myself out of it. But before I had time to deal with that idea, things began to change around me and the M16 in my hands went off—silently, not much of a sound track in this one—and I could feel the heat and the bucking of the weapon as the little man in black fell down. Only now it wasn’t a man anymore.

  It was Sara. My Sara was there in the jungle, and she was wearing the yellow jumpsuit I had bought for her the day before I shipped out. She had seen it in a window and wanted it, but wouldn’t say so because the money was getting pretty short. But I had saved a couple of dollars back for just such an occasion, and I slipped out of the motel where we were staying and bought it and had it laid out on the bed with a bow and a card when she got out of her bath, and now she was wearing it and screaming and hugging herself where my bullets had ripped a bright red path across her stomach.