The Preacher

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  Sheriff Frank Ybarra had “requested” that Pemberton, Dr. Woodbury, the Amarillo loser (whose real name, it seemed, was Thomas Alford Phipps, M.D.), and I join him at his headquarters for purposes of an “informal inquiry” into the evening’s events. He provided a brace of patrol cars to make sure we got there with all deliberate speed, promising to bring all the personal cars and my rented one as soon as the roadblock was cleared. Pemberton and Woodbury bristled a bit; they were unused to taking orders from sheriffs or anyone else. But they complied—and it was just as well, as we discovered on arrival at the courthouse.

  The word seemed to have gotten around pretty quickly.

  Radio reporters from Tucumcari and Portales, a newspaper reporter and photographer from Farewell, and a television crew complete with live remote cameras and an on-air reporter from the station in Clovis were all waiting in the sheriff’s parking compound to shout questions and demand a formal press conference as we filed into the building.

  Ybarra stayed behind to block the way, promise information as available, and hold out the hope of an opportunity to interview the principals as “as soon as we are done with them.”

  I saw some of it on the air later, and it was a competent, nerve-soothing performance by someone who had done that sort of thing before. Ybarra’s big-city experience came in handy in dozens of ways, and the smiling, low-key figure who appeared on those news reports was one who could have played the press like a cello anywhere in the country.

  But the smiles disappeared once we were all inside, with no cameras turned in his direction.

  “Will this take long, Frank?” Dr. Woodbury asked when we were all crowded into the elevator for the trip to the top floor.

  Ybarra ignored the question.

  I could feel his wa, and it was on fire.

  “My questions will come last,” he said. “There are a few other people who want a word with all of you before I begin.”

  This was true.

  The elevator door opened to disclose a reception-booking area as crowded as the lot downstairs, and with far more pertinent questions waiting to be asked.

  The coroner’s office demanded precedence, citing the undeniable fact that both men had died suddenly of causes not yet determined. But Ybarra ruled in favor of a tall man from the district attorney’s office, and Deke Pemberton followed him meekly into one of the two windowless interrogation rooms while Ybarra exercised a certain bleak tact in arranging the rest of us through the room so as to prevent a sub-rosa conference.

  He wanted to compare the stories without pre-editing.

  I waited it out with some show of patience. Poker is good training in that respect. It might even, I suppose, have been a good time for meditation and mantra, but some emotions must be experienced to the full if life is to be lived rather than merely observed, and the ones elbowing and jostling inside me were not to be put aside.

  First, the guilt.

  I had killed both of them as surely as if I had used a gun. No one had forced them to put themselves in a position where their lives might depend on a few real-estate fan-tans, and no one had forced them to buy cards in that poker game. It could even be argued, though less effectively, that the price they had put on their own lives was the same one they had put on Prescott’s. But it made no difference. They had started the night alive and hopeful and seen life and hope evaporate before dawn, and it had happened because of me and because this was the only way that I could salvage something for the widow and children of a man who had died by their greed and arrogance.

  I could live with that. But I didn’t have to like it and I didn’t have to like myself for having made the decision. The hell of it was, I guess, that Barlow and Watrous were basically decent men who had simply made a mistake and then compounded it in a way that fed upon itself, getting bigger and bigger until it had to consume them both. If they had acted in the beginning from greed, the things they had done in the end had been in an effort to make up for it, to save their town. The story was easy to understand because it is so familiar; each of us plays it out on his own scale sooner or later.

  I had known Barlow and Watrous for less than a week, but I had liked them well enough to feel a personal loss.

  If heightened awareness and a shortcut road to understanding of other people are the upside of poker, they are the downside, too.

  And it hurts.

  “Now you.”

  Ybarra’s eyes were back to being the polished obsidian marbles I had seen at our first meeting, and his face said less than nothing as he motioned for me to follow him to one of the rooms located off the main bull pen, where two equally unreadable men waited. In that brief moment, I ventured a tentative probe in the direction of the sheriff’s wa, but it touched only the cold solidity of a stone wall, and there was no time to search for an opening.

  He ushered me into the room, stepped back, and closed the door.

  “My name is Hince,” the taller man said. “Jack Hince. I’m from the district attorney’s office. This is Joe Cheli. He works for the coroner.”

  A thickset man whose eyes seemed permanently shadowed by heavy black brows nodded toward the only empty chair in the room, and I sat down in it.

  Nobody offered to shake hands.

  “Your full name?” Hince said.

  I told him, directing the words toward Cheli, who appeared to be taking notes on a ruled yellow legal pad. Cheli spelled it back to me—incorrectly—and there was a moment of misunderstanding while we got it wrong a second time, and then got it right.

  “But they call you Preacher,” Hince said.

  I said that was true, and they began a cross-tag game of interrogation about the events of the night and early morning, ranging backward and forward in time in a way that would have been impossibly confusing if I had been telling anything but the truth.

  They were good at it; this was obviously an act they’d polished over a period of time, and under other circumstances I might actually have enjoyed the performance.

  But it was late and I was tired and the words, “I want a lawyer,” which would have brought the whole thing to a sudden halt, were almost out of my mouth before I realized that there had been a curious omission—a subject avoided—in the barrage of questioning.

  At no time had either man mentioned the actual amounts of money that changed hands during the game.

  I changed my mind and stifled my rising irritation and began paying closer attention to the world around me. Thinking back, I realized that the inquiries had actually covered the poker game. But lightly. The two interrogators had asked what time it was when the game started and when it ended, and they had wanted to know who had won and who had lost. But they simply hadn’t seemed interested in the sums involved.

  Hince and Cheli were no fools. Poker might be illegal in the state of New Mexico, and the deaths of two players—one of them during the forbidden event and the other immediately afterward—might form the technical basis for manslaughter charges against all participants. But they must certainly know better than to imagine that any such charges would ever be filed. The main effort, therefore, would be to establish the causes of death: Did the merchant die of shock because of the amount he had lost? Or won? Were the banker’s losses sufficient to drive him to suicide?

  And had the black-suited tinhorn cheated them?

  But no such questions had been asked, which left only two possibilities: Either they had been told to avoid the subject, or it had never occurred to them because they knew the kind of stakes that were usual for the country-club game and simply assumed that this session had been the same.

  I wondered which was true. But it didn’t seem the time to ask.

  The questioning continued, moving relentlessly back and forth across the same tired ground, with Cheli scribbling furiously on his tablet and Hince, I discovered through some not-too-careful observation, surreptitiously turning a hidden tape recorder off and on by tapping a floor button with his toe. The machine was either an expensi
ve model or in poor repair: It had a low-frequency whirr that was clearly audible in the confined space. More than two hours passed in this minor mental exercise before Hince gave his recorder button a final tap and said, “Thank you very much. That will be all for now.”

  I stood up to leave.

  “Oh, by the way,” Hince said, “we’d like you to stay in town for a while.”

  “For how long a while?” I asked.

  “We’ll let you know.”

  Someone had been watching too many cut-rate television movies. Until now I had assumed I was dealing with competent adults doing their jobs. Perhaps I had been wrong. I turned back to face Hince and his beetle-browed teammate, being careful to keep my face in neutral and my diction clear.

  “I assume, then,” I said, “that I am under suspicion of having committed a crime here?”

  “Uh…no…”

  “Then I’ll leave when it suits me.”

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  I took a deep breath and was about to suggest that Hince pick up the telephone from the table where we had been sitting and call his boss, when the door opened behind me and Ybarra’s voice cut me off.

  “That’s enough, Preacher,” he said. “Leave ’em be.”

  I swiveled and sent a grin at him.

  “Why, hello there, sheriff,” I said. “Welcome to Sesame Street. I was wondering if you might be listening on the room tap.”

  Ybarra didn’t seem to see the joke.

  “All I said,” Hince began, “was for him to—”

  “You shut up,” Ybarra amputated the rest of the complaint with a single earth-scorching glare.

  “And you,” he said, turning the glare in my direction, “come with me.”

  The money and real-estate documents from the poker game were spread out neatly on Ybarra’s desk beside the bank attaché case when we entered his office.

  I made a quick eyeball count of the various piles while he closed the door and moved to his usual station by the window.

  It all seemed to be there.

  “Satisfied?” the sheriff asked.

  “Looks right,” I told him. “But I don’t know any exact numbers for the money. Didn’t have time to do much besides a snaptally. And we left a lot of gray chips behind.”

  “If you left them at the club,” Ybarra said, “they stay there. And I wasn’t asking if you were satisfied that you hadn’t been robbed. And you damn well know I wasn’t.”

  True.

  “In that case,” I said, “I suppose the answer is yes and no.”

  The obsidian eyes hated me and wanted to do something about it, but all he did was sit still and wait for me to go on.

  “I’m satisfied that Marilyn Prescott and her children will be financially secure now,” I said. “What she chooses to do about the land deal Barlow and Watrous were putting together is her own decision to make. I wouldn’t influence it if I could. Either way, they’ll be protected. So as far as that goes, I guess the answer is yes.”

  “And the no part?”

  “That’s for Pres Prescott himself. He’s still dead, and the man who killed him is alive.”

  Ybarra sat still for a while as though waiting for me to say something more. So we stared at each other for a minute or two, and then he got up and motioned for me to come around to his side of the desk.

  “Pack it up,” he said.

  I opened the attaché case, flattened it on the desktop, and began piling the money inside while the sheriff spoke his mind.

  “There’s something missing from there,” he said. “I took it. And I’m going to keep it. Before he died, J. J. Barlow signed over all those deeds and options to Mrs. Prescott, not to you, so I suppose he knew what you were doing and who you were doing it for. But he didn’t stop with that. When he was done signing, he wrote a little note.”

  I remembered the small, flat envelope snapped inside the rubber band with the real-estate papers.

  “It would make nice reading for that pack of yahoos downstairs,” Ybarra went on. “The TV reporters and the newspaper gossips. But they are never going to see it unless I have to produce it in court sometime. So if you want to know what it said, I think I better tell you now. It was addressed to you.”

  I finished packing the little satchel and snapped the locks and looked up at him. “Do I have to know what it said?”

  “No.”

  “Should I know?”

  “No.”

  “Does it have anything to do with who killed Pres Prescott?”

  “No. And I wouldn’t tell you about if it it did.”

  That was the single bit of business remaining between us, of course, and this seemed like as good a time as any to bring it up. “You know who it was?”

  “If I do, it’s none of your goddamn business. I told you that before, and nothing’s changed.”

  “Your man still tailing Vollie Manion?”

  Ybarra’s close-pent rage nearly spilled over then, and the wa, no longer concealed, was like a tiny sun burning in the center of him.

  “You meddling son of a bitch,” he said. “Two of the best men I ever knew are dead because of you, and a lot of people in this town are going to wind up pickin’ shit with the chickens because of you, and a situation that was bad is now worse because of you, and you stand there with your little bag of money and you don’t feel a thing.”

  It wasn’t true—not exactly—and a part of me wanted to tell him so because he was a good enough man, and I do not need the disapproval of good enough men.

  But there was nothing I could say.

  “I got you out of that room because Hince and Cheli were talking like the assholes they are and always have been, and because they were telling you to do something that is just the exact opposite of what I want. And for right now, by God, what I want is what is going to happen!”

  He paused for breath and to recover control.

  I waited.

  “What you are going to do,” he said after a moment, “is to take your bag and go downstairs and get into that little red car that my boys parked out back and drive it to the motel and get your things together and get the hell out of Farewell before dawn. What you did for the Prescotts may be right and it may be wrong, but it’s done now and so’s your business here.

  “I don’t want to see you in Farewell County again, Preacher. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Not next year. Not ever.”

  I finally got back to the motel about an hour before dawn and considered getting the bank messenger up to take care of Dee Tee’s end of the cash. But it had been a long night and not the most pleasant I’d ever spent, and I didn’t want to make it any longer, so I decided on a compromise: Get a little sleep, leave a wake-up call, turn over the money to him then…and spend tomorrow afternoon in Amarillo.

  It seemed like a good plan.

  I was actually feeling quite proud of it as I unlocked the door to my room and stepped inside to find Dana sitting in the arm chair, her eyes wide and something wrong with the corner of her mouth. It was bleeding. But I never got a chance to ask her what had happened.

  Haragi, tardy with fatigue, warned of a presence—not necessarily human—just behind the door.

  But not in time to avoid the sudden blow just behind the ear that sent me spinning, helpless and mortified, into a well of blackness laced with lightning.

  It had no bottom.

  A BENEDICTION

  (CONTINUED)

  And the Blessing of God Almighty…

  THIRTY-THREE

  Consciousness returned in fragments. I was in a darkness relieved by occasional flashes of light, but it took a while for me to realize that the flashes were made of real sunlight and not neural explosions.

  I kept drifting.

  Movie heroes and television policemen and other indestructibles get their skulls hammered with alarming regularity and seldom seem to suffer even the minor annoyance of a headache. Real life is different. The brain is not itself sensitive to pain because its sectio
n of the nervous system contains only receptors, not sensors. But it is a tender bit of Jell-O, sloshing around in the enveloping dura mater and protected only by the very thinnest of bone siding. It is all too susceptible to bruising and has absolutely no powers of regeneration.

  A rap on the rock that seems little more than a love tap can put you in a wheelchair for life; a hard right cross can deprive you of the ability to speak. And a thug’s blackjack can kill you as readily as a knife or gun.

  My own skull was already in a state of reduced resiliency as a result of its introduction to the towel-clad power of Vollie Manion’s nightstick, and it took a minute or two for me to gather the various parts of myself that had been scattered by its most recent encounter with something harder than itself.

  At first I thought I had gone blind. Monocularity is not a normal human condition; the body is made to see with two eyes, you get used to it early, and the person who loses one of his eyes never really becomes accustomed to the altered state of the world. He merely learns to live with it. So on awakening I spent several minutes in a frustrating and unprofitable endeavor to examine my surroundings with an eye that was not only sightless but in fact no longer in my head.

  Bits and shards of memory finally put a stop to that, but I drifted away again on a sea of blackness before I was able to put the information to any good use, and when I drifted back again I had those light flashes to worry about.

  I finally nailed them down as real light, breaking up real darkness, in a real world that was in real motion.

  But it was a smaller world than I wanted. The world I had left behind was largely vertical and I could move around in it at will. This one was horizontal and I found my movements severely restricted. My hands, for instance, seemed to be secured behind me by something that was hard and bit into the wrists when I tried to touch my face. Moving my head presented a problem, too. It was heavier than I remembered and had a tendency to loll against my right shoulder.

  I was lying on my side, I concluded, in a small space with my face pressed against something bulky but relatively soft, and my back was being jostled from time to time against something hard and unyielding. The occasional flashes were sunlight coming in through small gaps in the trunk’s sealing grommet, and the fact that they came from above reminded me of mortality, and I discovered that my mind, once distracted, was difficult to steer.