Rain Gods

by James Lee Burke

  “He didn’t say anything,” Bobby Lee said.

  “Be quiet. What did you say, Mr. Dolan?”

  “I said Esther, the name of my wife, a woman who will never know what happened to her husband, you cocksucker.”

  Nick could hear the tin roof on the farmhouse lift and clatter in the wind.

  “What’s wrong, Jack?” Bobby Lee said.

  “You swear to God that’s your wife’s name?” Preacher said.

  “I wouldn’t cheapen her name by swearing to a man like you about it.”

  “Don’t let him talk to you like that, Jack.”

  Nick could hear Preacher breathing through his nose.

  “Give me his piece. I’ll do it,” Bobby Lee said.

  “Bring the vehicle around,” Preacher said.

  “What are you doing?” Bobby Lee asked. He was taller than Preacher, and his top hat was silhouetted against the moon, giving him the appearance of even greater height.

  “I’m doing nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “We leave this man alone.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Esther told King Xerxes if he killed her people, he’d have to kill her, too. That’s how she became the handmaiden of God. You don’t know that?”

  “No, and I don’t waste my time on that biblical claptrap, either.”

  “That’s because you’re uneducated. Your ignorance isn’t your fault.”

  “Jack, this guy knows too much.”

  “You don’t like what I’m doing?” Preacher said.

  “This is a wrong move, man.”

  Nick could hear the wind and a sound like grasshoppers thudding against the side of the farmhouse. Then Bobby Lee said, “All right, to hell with it.”

  Nick heard Bobby Lee’s footsteps going away, then the voices of Bobby Lee and Hugo merging together by the SUV. Preacher inched forward on his crutches until Nick could smell the grease in his hair.

  “You take care of your wife,” Preacher said. “You take care of your kids. You never come near me again. Understood?”

  But Nick’s mouth was trembling so bad, from either fear or release from it, that he couldn’t speak.

  Preacher threw Nick’s .25 auto into the pond, the rings from the splash spreading outward, rippling through the cattails. As Preacher worked his way back toward the SUV, his shoulders were pushed up by his crutches, close to his neck, as if he were a scarecrow whose sticks had collapsed. Nick stared dumbly at his three abductors as though they were caught forever inside a black-and-white still taken from a 1940s noir movie—the giver of death in silhouette, stumping his way across the baked earth, Hugo and Bobby Lee looking at Nick with faces that seemed aware that a new and dangerously complex presence had just come aborning in their lives.

  9

  JUNIOR VOGEL HAD told his cook he was going to have lunch with his wife. But he did not show up at his house, nor did he come home that evening. Junior was a temperate man, a member of the Kiwanis, a deacon in his church, and was not given to erratic behavior. That night his wife called 911. By dawn his wife was convinced he had been abducted.

  At 7:16 A.M. a trucker carrying a load of baled hay reported what he thought was a wrecked vehicle at the bottom of a steep arroyo, just off a two-lane road eight miles south of Junior’s house. The guardrail on the road shoulder was broken, and the mesquite growing out of the rocks on the other side had been bark-skinned or stripped of leaves by the vehicle’s descent.

  Hackberry Holland and Pam Tibbs parked the cruiser in a turnout and threaded their way down the arroyo, slag and gravel sliding from under their boots, the dust rising into their faces. The wrecked pickup truck looked like it had rolled, crumpling the cab’s roof, blowing out the windshield, coming to rest on a wash bed of dry rocks coated with butterflies trying to find moisture.

  The driver was still behind the wheel. The airbags had not inflated.

  Hackberry worked his way between a boulder and the driver’s door. The driver was round-shouldered and slumped forward, his uncut hair extending over his collar. From the back, he looked as though he had fallen asleep. The morning was still cool, and the pickup was in shadow, but the odor that had collected inside the cab was already eye-watering.

  Pam came around the front of the vehicle from the other side, pulling on polyethylene gloves, staring past the dashboard and the shards of glass that sparkled on top of it. Junior Vogel’s eyes seemed to stare at the dashboard, too, except they contained no expression, and his brow was tilted forward as though he were involved with a final introspective thought. A blowfly crawled across one of his flared sideburns.

  “The airbags are turned off. Junior had grandchildren, didn’t he?” Pam said.

  “Yep.”

  “Think he fell asleep at the wheel?” she said.

  “Could be. But he went missing in the middle of the day.”

  Pam looked up the side of the arroyo at the broken guardrail. “There’s no curve up there, either. Maybe he dropped a tie-rod.”

  “The turnoff to his place is almost ten miles back. What was he doing down here?” Hackberry said.

  Above them, an ambulance pulled to the side of the road. Two paramedics got out and looked down from the guardrail, their faces small and round against a blue sky.

  “The driver is dead. There’re no passengers. Give us a few minutes, will you, fellows?” Hackberry called up.

  “Yes, sir,” one of them said.

  Holding his breath and a wadded-up handkerchief to his mouth, Hackberry reached inside the vehicle to turn off the ignition. Except it was already turned off. A rabbit’s foot dangled from the key chain.

  “Look at this, Hack,” Pam said. She was standing behind the vehicle now. “There’s a big dent in the bumper. There’s no dust on the dent at all. The rest of the bumper is filmed with dried mud.”

  “You think somebody plowed into the back of Junior and put him through the rail?” Hackberry said.

  “Junior was a master at passive-aggressive behavior,” she replied. “Two weeks after he was put in charge of the picnic committee at his church, half the congregation was ready to convert to Islam.”

  “The ignition key is turned off,” Hackberry said. He had stepped back from the cab but was still holding the handkerchief to his mouth.

  “It looks to me like he probably died of a broken neck,” Pam said. “He could have stayed conscious long enough to turn off the key to prevent a fire. I would if I was in his situation.”

  “No, this one is hinky,” Hackberry said. He took a breath of clean air, then opened the door. “There’re glass splinters all over his shirtfront but almost none on the seat belt.” He used his index finger to feel inside the mechanism that automatically rolled up the safety belt when the driver released the latch on the buckle. “There’s glass inside the slit. This belt was released, then pulled back out again.”

  “Somebody took Junior out of the truck and put him back in it?”

  Hackberry went to the rear of the pickup and looked at the damaged bumper. He cleared his throat, spat to one side, and waited for the breeze to clear the air around him. “We thought Junior might know where Vikki Gaddis is,” he said. “Maybe somebody else came to the same conclusion.”

  “Somebody ran him off the road and beat it out of him and then broke his neck?” Pam said.

  “Maybe that’s why Junior went by his house without turning off. He didn’t want to put his wife in danger.”

  A skein of small rocks trickled down the arroyo. Pam looked up at the empty space in the guardrail. “There’s R.C. and Felix and the coroner. What do you want to do?”

  “We treat it as a homicide.”

  Hackberry walked to the far side of the pickup, opened the passenger door, looked inside, and searched behind the seat. The glove box hung open, but nothing inside it seemed disturbed. Then he saw the bright rectangular wedge mark where a screwdriver had been inserted to snap the tongue on the lock.

  Why would someone need a screwdriver to open a glove box if the key was hanging in the ignition?

  Hackberry tried the ignition key on the
glove box, but it wouldn’t turn in the lock.

  He walked farther up the arroyo and mounted a flat rock that gave him an overview of the truck and the path of its descent from the guardrail. The two deputies who had just arrived, R. C. Bevins and Felix Chavez, were helping the coroner climb down the incline. Hackberry squatted on his haunches and pushed his hat back on his head, his knees popping, the butt of his holstered .45 revolver cutting into his rib cage. A breeze puffed through the bottom of the arroyo, and a cloud of black butterflies lifted off the wash bed. The sun was already a red ball rising over the hills, but the arroyo was still in shadow, the stone cool to the touch, the riparian desert ambience almost beautiful.

  Maybe that was the history of the earth, he thought. Its surface was traversed by pain, inhumanity, and mass murder, but the scars were as transient and meaningless to the eye as blowing sand. The most poignant expression of our suffering—the voices of the dying—had no more longevity than an echo disappearing over the edge of an infinite plain. How could millions of years trail off into both silence and invisibility?

  He stood up and thumbed his shirt tight inside his trousers. Down below, not twenty feet away, a beige envelope lay in a tangle of driftwood that reminded him of elk horns piled on the edge of a hunter’s camp. He climbed down from the rock he was standing on and picked up the envelope. It had a cellophane window in it and had been torn open raggedly on one side, destroying most of the return address. It was empty, but enough of the printing remained in the upper-left-hand corner to identify its origins.

  “What’d you find?” Pam asked.

  “An envelope from the Department of Veterans Affairs.”

  “You think it’s from Junior’s glove box?”

  “That’s my guess. The valet key was in the ignition, but the key to the glove box wasn’t.”

  Pam inserted her thumbs in her gun belt, her elbows sticking straight out from her sides. Then she scratched her forearm, her eyes gazing back at the wrecked pickup. “Junior went out to Pete and Vikki’s place and got Pete’s disability check for him. But he didn’t forward it,” she said, more to herself than the sheriff. “Why not?”

  “Probably cold feet.”

  “Or the fact he could be a mean-spirited, self-righteous bastard when he wanted to,” she said.

  “How about it, Sheriff?” one of the paramedics shouted from above.

  “Come on down,” he replied, just as the sun broke above the rim of the arroyo and lit its sharp surfaces with a glare that burned the shade away within seconds.

  FIVE HOURS LATER, Darl Wingate, the coroner, came into Hackberry’s office. He had been a career forensic pathologist with the army before retiring. Regardless of the skill or knowledge he had acquired in his own field, he seemed to apply none of it to his own life. He smoked, ate poorly, drank too much, had terrible relationships with women, and appeared to make a religion out of cynicism and callousness. Hackberry often wondered if Darl’s profligate attitude toward both morality and his own health was manufactured, or if indeed he wasn’t one of those whose experience in the world had caused him to believe in nothing.

  “Did y’all find a tooth in the vehicle?” Darl said.

  “No, we didn’t.”

  Darl had pulled up a chair and was sitting on the far side of the desk. He had a face like a parody of a stage character’s, with a cleft in the chin and a tiny mustache, the cheeks slightly hollowed by either age or a sickness he disclosed to no one. Hackberry smelled a mint on his breath and wondered what time that morning Darl had poured his first drink.

  “Vogel had a gaping hole where a molar should have been. It wasn’t broken off. There were deep bruises inside the lips,” Darl said.

  “He was tortured?”

  “Have you eaten lunch?”

  “No.”

  “How much do you want to hear before you eat?”

  “Get to it, will you, Darl?”

  “There was a lot of penile and testicular damage. It was probably done with a metal instrument. Probably the same pliers somebody used on his mouth. Cause of death was a coronary.”

  “His neck wasn’t broken?”

  “It was broken, all right, but he was already dead when that happened.”

  “You’re sure about all this?”

  Darl fitted a cigarette into a gold holder, then put it and the holder away, as though remembering Hackberry’s proscription against smoking in the building. “Maybe he pulled his own tooth,” he said. “Or maybe the steering wheel hit him in the face and cut him inside the mouth but not outside. Or maybe his genitals were remodeled by the airbag that didn’t inflate. You want to know what I really think?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “That whatever information this poor guy had, he begged to give it up unless his wick went out first. I hope that’s what happened. I hope he sank down in a big well of blackness. I got to have a smoke. I’ll be outside.”

  “I need to make a phone call. Go to lunch with me.”

  “I already ate.”

  “Go to lunch with me anyway,” Hackberry said.

  After Darl had gone outside, Hackberry called the FBI agent Ethan Riser. “I’ve got a problem of conscience here. I’m going to lay it off on you, and you can do whatever you want with it,” he said.

  “What’s this big problem?” Riser said.

  “Junior Vogel was probably run off the road yesterday and tortured to death. Your man from ICE, this character Clawson, wanted to put him in custody, but I talked him out of it.”

  “Clawson was talking with Vogel?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “I don’t always have an opportunity to talk with Clawson directly.”

  Hackberry wondered at the amazing amount of latitude bureaucratic language could create for its practitioners. “I think Junior had Pete Flores’s disability check in his possession,” he said. “I think he was probably going to forward it to Pete. We should have been on top of that check, you guys as well as me and my department.”

  “We were.”

  “Sir?”

  “Clawson had another agent on it. They messed up.”

  “You sure that’s all there is to it?” Hackberry said.

  “Want to explain that?”

  “I think your man Clawson has serious psychiatric problems. I don’t think he should have a badge.”

  “He’s not our man.”

  “Nice talking to you, sir,” Hackberry said, and eased the receiver back into the phone cradle.

  PREACHER JACK COLLINS had once read that the neurological and optical wiring of horses created two screens inside their heads and allowed them to simultaneously monitor two broad and separate visions of their surroundings. To Preacher, this did not seem a remarkable step in the evolution of a species.

  For him, there had always been two screens inside his head: one that people walked onto and off of and that he looked at or ignored as he chose; on the other, the one on which he was a participant, there were dials and buttons that allowed him to reverse or change the flow of traffic, or to distort or smudge out images that didn’t belong there.

  He had a dark gift, but it was a gift nonetheless, and he had been convinced since adolescence that his role in the world was preordained and it was not his province to question the unseen hand that had shaped his soul before he was conceived.

  A floor fan in the back of the saloon fluttered his trouser cuff and cooled the skin around the edges of his cast. From where he sat with a white mug of black coffee hooked on his index finger, the long boxcar-like structure of the saloon was almost like a study in man’s journey from the womb to the last page on his calendar. The early sunlight shone on the outside windows with the kind of delivery-room electric glare that blinded the newborn. The saloon had been a dance hall once, and the checkerboard floor was still in place, walked upon by hundreds if not thousands of people who never looked down at their feet and saw the mathematical design in their lives.

  The only light source in the building that never changed shape was the brilliant yellow cone created by the tin-shaded bulb over the pool table. It lit the mahog
any rails and leather pockets and green felt of the table and swallowed the arms and necks and shoulders of the players who bent over it. Preacher wondered if any of them, their buttocks arched tightly against their jeans, their genitalia touching the wood, the right arm tensed to drive the cue like a spear into a white ball, ever saw themselves as fools leaning into their own coffins.

  The waiter brought Preacher his refill in a metal pot painted blue and flecked with white specks. The waiter left the pot on the table alongside a saucer with six sugar cubes on it. The two screens in Preacher’s head were muted now, as they often were at sunrise, and in moments like these, he wondered if the silence was part of a larger design or an indication of divine abandonment.