Rain Gods

by James Lee Burke

  NICK HAD HOPED he would never see the girl named Vikki Gaddis again. His nonnegotiable rules for himself as the operator of a skin joint and as the geographically removed owner of escort services in Dallas and Houston had always remained the same: You paid your taxes, and you protected your girls and never personally exploited them.

  Nick’s rules had preempted conflicts with the IRS and purchased for him an appreciable degree of respect from his employees. About eighteen months back, he had run a want ad in the San Antonio newspapers for musicians to play in the Mexican restaurant he had just built next to his strip club. Five days later, when he was out in the parking lot on a scalding afternoon, Vikki Gaddis had driven off the highway in a shitbox leaking smoke from every rusted crack in the car body. At first he thought she was looking for a job up on the pole, then he realized she hadn’t seen the ad but had been told he needed a folksinger.

  “You’re confused,” Nick said. “I’m opening a Mexican restaurant. I need some entertainment for people while they’re eating dinner. Mexican stuff.”

  He saw the disappointment in her eyes, a vague hint of desperation around her mouth. Her face was damp and shiny in the heat. Heavy trucks, their engines hammering, were passing on the highway, their air brakes hissing. Nick touched at his nose with the back of his wrist. “Why don’t you come on in the restaurant and let’s talk a minute?” he said.

  Nick had already hired a five-piece mariachi band, one complete with sombreros and brocaded vaquero costumes, beer-bellied, mustached guys with brass horns that could crack the tiles on the roof, and he had no need of an Anglo folksinger. As he and the girl walked out of the sun’s glare into the air-conditioned coolness of the restaurant, the girl swinging her guitar case against her hip, he knew that an adulterer had always lived inside him.

  She wore white shorts and a pale blue blouse and sandals, and when she sat down in front of his desk, she leaned over a little too far and he wondered if he wasn’t being played.

  “You sing Spanish songs?” he said.

  “No, I do a lot of the Carter Family pieces. Their music made a comeback when Johnny Cash married June. Then the interest died again. They created a style of picking that’s called ‘hammering on and pulling off.’”

  Nick was clueless, his mouth hanging open in a half-smile. “You sing like Johnny Cash?”

  “No, the Carters were a big influence on other people, like Woody Guthrie. Here, I’ll show you,” she said. She unsnapped her guitar case and removed a sunburst Gibson from it. The case was lined with purplish-pink velvet, and it glowed with a virginal light that only added to Nick’s confused thoughts about both the girl and the web of desire and need he was walking into.

  She fitted a pick on her thumb and began singing a song about flowers covered with emerald dew and a lover betrayed and left to pine in a place that was older than time. When she chorded the guitar, the whiteness of her palm curved around the neck, and she depressed a bass string just before striking it, then released it, creating a sliding note that resonated inside the sound hole. Nick was mesmerized by her voice, the way she lifted her chin when she sang, the muscles working in her throat.

  “That’s beautiful,” he said. “You say these Carter guys were an influence on Woody Herman?”

  “Not exactly,” she replied.

  “I already got a band, but maybe come back in a couple of weeks. If it doesn’t work out with them—”

  “You have an opening for a food server?” she asked, putting away her guitar.

  “I got two more than I need. I had to hire the cook’s sisters, or she was gonna walk on me.”

  The girl snapped the locks on her case and raised her eyes to his. “Thanks, you’ve been real nice,” she said.

  An image was forming in his mind that turned his loins to water. “Look, I got a place next door. Slap my face if you want. The money’s good, the girls working for me don’t have to do anything they don’t want to, I throw drunks and profane guys out. I try to keep it a gentlemen’s club even if some bums get in sometimes. I could use a—”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That I got an opening or two. That maybe you’re in a tight spot and I can help you out till you find a singing job.”

  “I’m not a dancer,” she said.

  “Yeah, I knew that,” he said, his face small and tight and burning. “I was just letting you know my situation. I only got so many resources. I got kids of my own.” He was stuttering, and his hands were shaking under the desk, his words nonsensical even to himself.

  She was getting up, reaching for the handle on her guitar case, the back of one gold thigh streaked with a band of light.

  “Ms. Gaddis—”

  “Just call me Vikki.”

  “I thought maybe I was doing a good deed. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “I think you’re a nice man. I enjoyed meeting you,” she said. She smiled at him, and in that moment, in order to be twenty-five again, Nick would have run his fingers one at a time through a Skilsaw.

  Now, as he sat amid trellises and latticework that were green and thick with grapevine grown by his grandfather, an honest and decent man who had sold shoestrings from door to door, he tried to convince himself the girl in the photo was not Vikki Gaddis. But it was, and he knew it, and he knew her face would live in his sleep the rest of his life if Hugo killed her. And what about the soldier? Nick had recognized the elongated blue and silver combat infantryman badge on his chest. Nick could feel tears welling into his eyes but couldn’t decide if they were for himself or for the Thai women machine-gunned by somebody named Preacher Collins or for Vikki Gaddis and her boyfriend.

  He lay down in the middle of his lawn, his arms and legs spread in the shape of a giant X, a weight as heavy as a blacksmith’s anvil crushing his chest.

  WHEN HACKBERRY LOOKED out his office window and saw a silver car with a mirror wax job coming hard up the street, blowing dust and newspaper into the air, the sun bouncing off the windshield like the brassy flash of a heliograph, he knew that either a drunk or an outsider who couldn’t read speed limit signs or government trouble was about to arrive in the middle of his afternoon, free curbside delivery.

  The man who got out of the car was as tall as Hackberry, his starched white shirt form-fitting on his athletic frame, his shaved and polished head gleaming under an afternoon sun that looked like a yellow flame. A dark-skinned man with a haircut like a nineteenth-century Apache’s sat hunched over in the backseat, both arms pulled down between his legs, as though he were trying to clutch his ankles. The dark-skinned man’s eyes were slits, his lips purple with either snuff or bruises, the back of his neck pocked with acne scars.

  Hackberry put on a straw hat and stepped outside into the shade of the sandstone building that served as his office and the jail. The man with the shaved head held up his ID. The lidless intensity in his eyes and the tautness in his facial muscles made Hackberry think of a banjo string wound tightly on a wood peg, the tension climbing into a tremolo. The man said, “Isaac Clawson, ICE. I’m glad you’re in your office. I don’t like to chase a local official around in his own county.”

  “Why is Danny Boy Lorca on a D-ring?”

  “You know him?” Clawson said.

  “I just used his name to you, sir.”

  “What I mean is, do you know anything about him?”

  “About once a month he walks from the beer joint down to the jail and sleeps it off. He lets himself in and out.”

  “He’s the drinking buddy of Pete Flores. He says he doesn’t know where Flores is.”

  “Let’s have a talk with him,” Hackberry said. He opened the back door of the sedan and leaned inside. The smell of urine welled into his face. There was a skinned place on Danny Boy’s right temple, like a piece of fruit that had been rubbed on a carrot grater. There was a dark area in his wash-faded jeans, as though a wet towel had been pressed into his groin.

  “Have you seen Pete Flores around?” Hackberry said.

  “Maybe two weeks back.”

  “Y’all were drinking a little mescal together
?”

  “He was eating in Junior’s diner on the four-lane. That’s where his girlfriend works at.”

  “We think some guys are trying to hurt him, Danny. You’d be doing Pete a big favor if you helped us find him.”

  “I ain’t seen him since what I just told you.” Danny Boy’s eyes slid off Hackberry’s and fastened on Clawson’s, then came back again.

  Hackberry straightened up and closed the door. “I think he’s telling the truth,” he said.

  “You psychic with these guys?”

  “With him I am. He doesn’t have any reason to lie.”

  Clawson took off his large octagonal glasses and wiped them with a Kleenex, staring down the street, a deep wrinkle between his eyes. “Can we go inside?”

  “It’s full of cigarette smoke. What’d you do to Danny Boy?”

  “I didn’t do anything to him. He’s drunk. He fell down. When I picked him up, he started to swing on me. But I didn’t do anything to him.” Clawson opened the back door and used a handcuff key to free Danny Boy from the D-ring inset in the floor, then wrapped his fingers under Danny Boy’s arm and pulled him from the backseat. “Get going,” he said.

  “You want me to hang around, Sheriff?” Danny Boy said.

  “Did I tell you to get out of here?” Clawson said. He pushed Danny Boy, then kicked him in the butt.

  “Whoa,” Hackberry said.

  “Whoa what?” Clawson said.

  “You need to dial it down, Mr. Clawson.”

  “It’s Agent Clawson.”

  Hackberry was breathing through his nose. He saw Pam Tibbs at the office window. He turned to Danny Boy. “Go down to Grogan’s and put a couple on my tab,” he said. “The operational word is ‘couple,’ Danny.”

  “I don’t need a drink. I’m gonna get something to eat and go back to my place. If I hear anything on Pete, I’ll tell you,” Danny Boy said.

  Hackberry turned and started back toward his office, ignoring Clawson’s presence. He could hear the flag popping in the breeze and the flag chain tinkling against the metal pole.

  “We’re not done,” Clawson said. “Last night somebody made two nine-one-one calls from a pay phone outside San Antonio. I’ll play you part of it.”

  He removed a small recorder from his pants pocket and clicked it on. The voice on the recording sounded like that of a drunk man or someone with a speech defect. “Tell the FBI there’s a whack out on a girl name of Vikki Gaddis. They’re gonna kill her and a soldier. It’s about those Thai women that got murdered.” Clawson clicked off the recorder. “Know the voice?” he said.

  “No,” Hackberry said.

  “I think the caller had a pencil clenched between his teeth and was loaded on top of it. Can you detect an accent?”

  “I’d say he’s not from around here.”

  “Here’s another piece of information: One of our forensic guys went the extra mile on the postmortem of the Thai females. They had China white in their stomachs, balloons full of it, the purest I’ve ever seen. Some of the balloons had ruptured in the women’s stomachs prior to mortality. I wonder if you stumbled into a storage area rather than a graveyard.”

  “Stumbled?”

  “English lit wasn’t my strong suit. You want to be serious here or not?”

  “I don’t buy that the place behind the church was a storage area. That makes no sense.”

  “Then what does?”

  “I’ve been told of your personal loss, sir. I think I can appreciate the level of anger you must have to deal with. But you’re not going to verbally abuse or put your foot on anybody in this county again. We’re done here.”

  “Where do you get off talking about my personal life? Where do you get off talking about my daughter, you sonofabitch?”

  Just then the dispatcher Maydeen stepped outside and lit a cigarette. She wore a deputy’s uniform and had fat arms and big breasts and wide hips, and her lipstick looked like a flattened rose on her mouth. “Hack doesn’t let us smoke in the building,” she said, smiling from ear to ear as she inhaled deep into her lungs.

  PREACHER JACK COLLINS paid the cabdriver the fare from the airstrip to the office-and-condo building that faced Galveston Bay. But rather than go immediately into the building, he paused on his crutches and stared across Seawall Boulevard at the waves folding on the beach, each wave rilling with sand and yellowed vegetation and dead shellfish and seaweed matted with clusters of tiny crabs and Portuguese men-of-war whose tentacles could wrap around a horse’s leg and sting it to its knees.

  There was a storm breaking on the southern horizon like a great cloud of green gas forked with lightning that made no sound. The air had turned the color of tarnished brass as the barometer had dropped, and Preacher could taste the salt in the wind and smell the shrimp that had been caught inside the waves and left stranded on the sand among the ruptured blue air sacs of the jellyfish. The humidity was as bright as spun glass, and within a minute’s time it glazed his forearms and face and was turned into a cool burn by the wind, not unlike a lover’s tongue moving across the skin.

  Preacher entered a glass door painted with the words REDSTONE SECURITY SERVICE. A receptionist looked up from her desk and smiled pleasantly at him. “Tell Mr. Rooney Jack is here to see him,” he said.

  “Do you have an appointment, sir?”

  “What time is it?”

  The receptionist glanced at a large grandfather clock, one whose face was inset with Roman numerals. “It’s four-forty-seven,” she said.

  “That’s the time of my appointment with Mr. Rooney. You can tell him that.”

  Her hand moved toward the phone uncertainly, then stopped.

  “That was just my poor joke. Ma’am, these crutches aren’t getting any more comfortable,” Preacher said.

  “Just a moment.” She lifted the phone receiver and pushed a button. “Mr. Rooney, Jack is here to see you.” There was a beat. “He didn’t give it.” Another beat, this one longer. “Sir, what’s your last name?”

  “My full name is Jack Collins, no middle initial.”

  After the receptionist relayed the information, there was a silence in the room almost as loud as the waves bursting against the beach. Then she replaced the receiver in the cradle. Whatever thoughts she was thinking were locked behind her eyes. “Mr. Rooney says to go on up. The elevator is to your left.”

  “He tell you to call somebody?” Preacher asked.

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean, sir.”

  “You did your job, ma’am. Don’t worry about it. But I’d better not hear that elevator come up behind me with the wrong person in it,” Preacher said.

  The receptionist stared straight ahead for perhaps three seconds, picked up her purse, and went out the front door, her dress switching back and forth across her calves.

  When Preacher stepped out of the elevator, he saw a man in a beige suit and pink western shirt sitting in a swivel chair behind a huge desk, framed against a glass wall that looked out onto the bay. On the desk was a big clear plastic jar of green-and-blue candy sticks, each striped stick wrapped in cellophane. His hips swelled out at the beltline and gave the sense that he was melting in his swivel chair. He had sandy hair and a small Irish mouth that was downturned at the corners. His skin was dusted with liver spots, some of them dark, almost purple around the edges, as though his soul exuded sickness through his pores. “Help you?” he said.

  “Maybe.”

  Down on the beach, swimmers were getting out of the water, dragging their inner tubes with them, a lifeguard standing in his elevated chair, blowing a whistle, pointing his finger at a triangular fin whizzing through a swell at incredible speed.

  “Can I sit down?” Preacher said.

  “Yes, sir, go right ahead,” Arthur Rooney said.

  “Should I call you Artie or Mr. Rooney?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  “Hugo Cistranos work for you?”

  “He did. When I had an investigative agency in New Orleans. But not now.”

  “I think he does.”

  “Sir?”

  “Do I need to speak louder?”

  “Hugo Cistra
nos is not with me any longer. That’s what I’m saying to you. What’s the issue, Mr. Collins?” Artie Rooney cleared his throat as though the last word had caught in his larynx.

  “You know who I am?”

  “I’ve heard of you. Nickname is Preacher, right?”

  “Yes, sir, some do call me that with regularity, friends and such.”

  “We just moved into this office. How’d you know I was here?”