Rain Gods

by James Lee Burke

  In Elijah’s search to hear the voice of God, he had awakened to find that during the night an angel had provided him a jug of water and a cake cooked on a hot stone. But the voice of Yahweh was not to be found in an earthquake or the wind or even inside a fire. That’s what the scripture said. The voice would speak in a whisper at the entrance to a cave, one that Preacher would enter when it was time.

  But how would he recognize it? How would he know it was not just the wind blowing through a hole in the earth?

  The fire-exit door opened suddenly, causing Preacher’s hand to jerk, spilling his coffee. Bobby Lee stood framed against the sunlight in the alleyway, wearing bradded orange work pants and a white T-shirt and a top hat, his wideband suspenders notched into his deltoids, his jaw unshaved.

  “Didn’t mean to give you a start,” Bobby Lee said, wiping his nose with the heel of his hand, surveying the saloon’s interior. “What a dump. You actually eat in this place?”

  “Don’t you ever come up behind me like that again,” Preacher said.

  “Little touchy this morning?”

  Preacher cleaned the coffee off his hand with a paper napkin. “Put some money in the jukebox,” he said.

  “What do you want to hear?”

  “I look like I care what’s on that jukebox?”

  Bobby Lee got change from the bartender and fed the jukebox with eight quarters, then sat down across from Preacher.

  “Tell me,” Preacher said.

  “It got messy. We had to chase the guy and run him off the road.”

  “Go on.”

  Bobby Lee shrugged. “The guy didn’t want to give it up. Liam explained the choices the guy had. I guess the guy didn’t believe what Liam told him.”

  “Can you take the crackers out of your mouth?”

  “The guy died. I think he had a heart attack.” Bobby Lee saw Preacher’s eyes narrow. “It’s on him, Jack. He wouldn’t cooperate.”

  Preacher picked up a sugar cube and plunked it into his coffee, his eyes never leaving Bobby Lee’s.

  “I thought you were diabetic,” Bobby Lee said.

  “You thought wrong. Finish what you were saying.”

  Bobby Lee’s gaze seemed to turn inward, as though he were searching his memory, wondering if he was mistaken or if Preacher was lying to him. Then his gaze came into focus again. “The guy said something about a Siesta motel in a town by the border. It was hard to understand what he was saying.”

  “He didn’t speak the same language as you and Liam?” Preacher said.

  “You know, what Liam was doing.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Jack, you sent us to get information. We pushed the guy’s truck through a guardrail in broad daylight. We had to park the car up the road and climb down into a canyon. We had a few minutes to work the situation and cover our ass and extract ourselves.”

  “Extract yourself?”

  “Is there an echo in here? The problem is not me and Liam.”

  There was a beat. “Then who’s the problem?” Preacher said.

  “You’re worried about this girl identifying you, but you let the Jewish guy slide. In the meantime, none of us have got paid. Not me, not Liam, not Hugo, and not you. Does that make sense to you?”

  “Tell me, why would the Jewish man want all those women killed? He’s a procurer. Procurers don’t kill their women,” Preacher said.

  The first song ended on the jukebox. Bobby Lee waited for the next song to begin before he spoke again. “I didn’t know what you and Hugo were gonna do behind the church. I think you made a mistake, Jack. But don’t blame me for it. I just want to get paid. I think I’m gonna go back to Florida and take some more interior design courses at Miami-Dade. With one more semester, I can get an associate of arts degree.”

  Preacher’s eyes roved over Bobby Lee’s face and seemed to reach inside his head and search his thoughts.

  “Why you staring at me like that?” Bobby Lee asked.

  “No reason.”

  “I’m gonna be frank here. Hugo and I think you’re slipping, like maybe you should get some counseling or something.”

  “What did you do with the restaurant owner?”

  “Before or after?” Bobby Lee saw the heat rising in Preacher’s face. “Liam broke his neck, and we strapped him back in his truck. Nobody saw us. It’ll go down as an accident.”

  “Did you take anything from the truck?”

  “No,” Bobby Lee said, shaking his head, his eyes flat.

  “You don’t think a coroner will know the man’s neck was broken after he was dead, that his body was moved?”

  Bobby Lee put a matchstick in his mouth, then removed it and looked back at the jukebox. He folded his hands on top of the table and studied his fingers. His facial skin had the texture of boiled pig hide.

  “You wanted to tell me something else?” Preacher asked.

  “Yeah, when we gonna get paid?” Bobby Lee replied.

  “What did you take from that man’s vehicle?”

  “What?”

  Preacher removed his hand from his coffee cup and lifted one finger. “I’ve been your friend, Bobby Lee, but I cain’t abide a liar. Give careful thought to your next statement.”

  The side of Bobby Lee’s face twitched as though a doodlebug were crawling across it.

  SATURDAY MORNING, HACKBERRY was planting rosebushes in the shade of his house, setting the root balls in deep holes he had dug out of coffee grounds and compost and black dirt, when he saw Pam Tibbs’s car turn off the state road and come through the wood arch that spanned his driveway. She had been on duty all night and was still in uniform, and he assumed she was on her way to her house, where she lived with three cats, a twenty-year-old quarter horse, and a screened-in aviary full of injured birds.

  When she got out of her car, she had a bag of charcoal in one hand and a plastic bag packed with picnic food hanging from the other. “It’s late for planting roses, isn’t it?” she said.

  “At my age, everything is late,” Hackberry said.

  “I’ve got some sausage links and potato salad and beans and slaw and buns, if you’d like to have an early lunch,” she replied.

  He stood up and took off his straw hat and blotted his forehead on his sleeve. “Something happen last night I should know about?”

  “We busted a Mexican with tar and three grand in cash on him. I think he might be a mule working for Ouzel Flagler. That’s the third one we arrested this month.”

  At the rear of the house was a paintless picnic table with an umbrella set in the center of it. She put the charcoal and the food on the table and slipped the flats of her hands in her back pockets and looked at Hackberry’s barn and poplar trees and vegetable garden bursting with Big Boy tomatoes. Her handcuffs were drawn through the back of her belt, the tip of a braided blackjack protruding from her side pocket. He waited for her to continue, but she didn’t.

  “Let’s have it, Pam,” he said.

  “Isaac Clawson was at the office an hour ago. He wants to track as much pig flop into your life as he can, Hack.”

  “Who cares?”

  “You’re too nice. People blindside you.”

  “You’re going to protect me?”

  She turned around and fixed her eyes on him. “Maybe somebody should.”

  He pressed a dent out of the crown of his hat with his thumb and replaced it on his head, a smile at the corner of his mouth, one eye a little more narrow than the other. “You got a cold drink in that bag?”

  “Yes, sir,” she replied.

  He cracked open the Coca-Cola she’d brought and took a long swallow. It was ice-cold and hurt his throat, but he continued to swallow, his gaze directed at two blue jays in his mulberry tree. He could feel Pam’s eyes on the side of his face. He lowered the bottle from his mouth. “You’re a good lady,” he said.

  Her face seemed to go soft in the shade, like a flower in late afternoon. Then he heard a voice, one as clear as the sound of the birds in the trees: Don’t say any more.

  She folded her arms across her breasts. “You got any charcoal lighter?” she said.

  “Insid
e the toolshed,” he replied.

  The moment had passed, the way a kitchen match can flare and burn and die inside one’s chest. He went back to work in his garden, and Pam started a fire in his grill and covered the picnic table with a cloth and began laying out sausage links and buns and paper plates and plastic forks.

  Twenty minutes later, Isaac Clawson’s government car came up the driveway. Hackberry walked to the gate, rolling up the cuff on one sleeve, touching his sunglasses in his pocket, not looking directly at Clawson, his expression neutral, his back turned to Pam. Clawson’s rimless octagonal glasses were wobbling with light, his shaved head polished and gleaming, the cranial indentations ridged with bone. His eyes shifted off Hackberry’s face and focused on Pam, who was turning sausages on the grill inside a patch of shade.

  “You work at home sometimes?” he said to Hackberry.

  “What’s the nature of your errand, sir?” Hackberry said.

  “Errand?”

  “Want to join us in a hot dog?”

  “No, I want a man in custody for the murder of Junior Vogel.” With two fingers, Clawson pulled a color photo out of his shirt pocket. “You know this guy?”

  The photo had not been taken in a booking room and looked like one used for employee identification. The man in the photo had wide-set eyes, an upper lip that was too close to the nose, and a full orange beard, one that a nautical man might wear.

  “Who is he?” Hackberry asked.

  “His name is Liam Eriksson. Yesterday he and a woman tried to cash Pete Flores’s disability check at an auto-title loan place in San Antonio. They’d both been drinking. When the clerk went in back with the check, they took off. The surveillance camera got them both on tape. We got Eriksson’s thumbprint off the counter. Eriksson had gotten a library card with Flores’s name on it.”

  “How much was the check for?”

  “Three hundred and fifty-six bucks.”

  “He linked himself to incriminating evidence from a homicide scene for three hundred and fifty-six dollars?”

  “Who said any of these guys are smart? There’re just more of them than there are of us. You haven’t made a press release indicating Vogel’s death was a homicide?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What does his family know?”

  “That others ‘may’ have been involved in his death.”

  “Let’s keep it that way. Eriksson is a frequenter of prostitutes. Maybe he’s still with the woman who was on the surveillance tape. If we can find the woman, we’ll probably find him, unless he knows he’s been ID’d in a homicide investigation.”

  “Who’s the woman?”

  “The clerk said he didn’t know her. The surveillance camera only got the back of her head.”

  “Where’d you get the photo of Eriksson?”

  “He worked as a contract security man in Iraq. He was suspected of firing arbitrarily into the automobiles of civilians. There was a video of his work on CNN. Cars were veering out of their lane and crashing into other cars. His company got him out of the country before he was charged.”

  “I’ll have to share some of this with Junior’s wife.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they have a right to know,” Hackberry said.

  “What about the rights and safety of the citizenry?”

  “You know what the Catholic theological definition of a lie is? To deny others access to knowledge to which they’re entitled.”

  “I think this place is an open-air mental asylum.”

  “Can I have the photo of Eriksson? Or at least a copy of it?”

  “Maybe later.”

  “Later?”

  Hackberry heard Pam’s footsteps behind him on the St. Augustine grass.

  “Why don’t you haul your ass down the road?” she said to Clawson.

  “Take it easy,” Hackberry said.

  Clawson removed his glasses, polished them with a Kleenex, and put them back on, crinkling his nose. “Can you tell me why you bear me such animosity?” he asked Pam.

  “When your daughter and her fiancé were abducted and murdered, she was working as a night clerk at a convenience store,” Pam said. “You didn’t know the risk exposure for a woman working nights at a convenience store? You weren’t making enough money to provide a better situation for her? Is everyone else supposed to pay the price for your guilt, Agent Clawson? If that’s the case, it’s a real drag.”

  Clawson’s face had gone white. “Don’t you dare talk about my daughter,” he said.

  “Then you stop hiding behind her, you miserable fuck.”

  “Sheriff, you get this crazy bitch out of my face.”

  “No, you hold on a minute,” Hackberry replied.

  But it was too late. Hackberry saw Pam Tibbs pull her blackjack from her pocket, letting the spring-mounted, leather-weighted end dip away from her wrist, tightening her fingers on the leather-braided wood handle, stepping toward Clawson all in one motion. Before Hackberry could knock her arm down, she whipped the blackjack across the side of Clawson’s head, snapping her wrist into the swing, slashing open his scalp, slinging a red stripe down his white shirt.

  His glasses fell from his face, cracking on a flagstone. His eyes were wide with shock, out of focus, his mouth open in a great round O. He raised his forearm to ward off the second blow, but she caught him on the elbow, then behind the ear. His knees buckled, and he grabbed the gate to keep from going all the way down.

  Hackberry locked his arms around Pam, pinning her hands at her sides, lifting her into the air, carrying her backward deeper into the yard. She fought with him, kicking the heels of her boots into his shins, pulling at his wrists to force him to unclasp his hands, butting her head into his face.

  Clawson propped one hand against the fender of his car and held himself erect, struggling to get a handkerchief out of his pocket to stop the blood that ran in strings down his forehead and into his eyebrows. Hackberry carried Pam to the back of the house, her feet still off the ground, the smell of her hair and body heat rising into his face.

  “You stop it, Pam. I’ll throw you in the horse tank. I swear to God I’ll do it,” he said.

  They were back in the shade, the wind rustling through the mulberry tree, the lawn suddenly cool and smelling of the damp soil he had turned over with a spading fork at sunrise. He felt the stiffness go out of her back and her hands relax on top of his.

  “You finished?” he said.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “I’m done. Let me go,” she said.

  He set her down and put his hands on her shoulders, turning her toward him. “You just dropped both of us in the cook pot,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Go in the house. I’m going to try to square it.”

  “Not on my account.”

  “Pam, this is one time you shut up and do what I say.”

  She closed and opened her eyes as though awakening from a dream. Then she walked to the table and sat down on the bench and propped her hands on her knees and stared into space, her hair tousling in the breeze.

  Hackberry went inside, took a first-aid kit and a handful of dish towels from a kitchen closet, and went back out front. Clawson was sitting in the passenger seat of his car, the door open, his feet on the gravel driveway; he was talking into a cell phone. The handkerchief wadded up in his left hand was almost entirely red. He closed the cell phone and dropped it on the seat.

  “Did you call for the paramedics?” Hackberry said.

  “No, I called my wife. I’m supposed to meet her in Houston tonight.”

  “I’ll take you to emergency receiving.”

  “You were a navy corpsman, Sheriff. Do what you need to do. This didn’t happen. I slipped on the metal stairs at the motel.”

  Hackberry waited for him to go on.

  “You heard me,” Clawson said.

  “That’s the way you want it?”

  “We take down the guys who killed those Asian women and Junior Vogel. Nothing gets in the way of that objective. You tell your deputy what I said.”

  “No, yo
u tell her.”

  “Bring her out here,” Clawson said.

  “You don’t take her to task.”

  Clawson cleared his throat and pressed his handkerchief to a deep cut that was bleeding through his eyebrow. “No problem.”