Rain Gods

by James Lee Burke

  There was a beat. “How’d you make me?”

  “I didn’t. If you hadn’t shot at me, I would have walked past you.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Why would I lie?”

  Eriksson had no answer. Hackberry remembered that originally, a second man had been sitting in Eriksson’s booth, someone who had probably blown Dodge and left Eriksson to take the fall for both of them.

  “Your partner screwed you, bub,” Hackberry said. “Why take his weight? Send the little girl out, and it’ll be taken into consideration. You did security work in Iraq. That’ll be a factor, too. Get a good defense lawyer, and with the right kind of post-traumatic-stress-disorder mambo, you might even skate. It beats eating a two-hundred-and-thirty-grain round from a forty-five.”

  “You’re gonna drive me out of this county. You’re gonna get me into Mexico. Or I waste the girl.”

  “Maybe I can arrange that.”

  “No, you don’t arrange anything. You do it.”

  “How do you want to work that? Want me to bring a vehicle around back and load you and the girl up?”

  “No, you put your piece on the floor, slide it to me with your foot, then you walk in with your fingers laced on the back of your neck.”

  “That doesn’t sound workable, Eriksson.”

  “Maybe you’d like to see her brains floating in the toilet bowl.”

  Hackberry heard the voice of a little girl crying. Or rather, the voice of a child whose fear had gone beyond crying into a series of hiccups and constrictions of air in the nostrils and throat, like someone having a seizure. “Be stand-up. Let her go, partner,” Hackberry said.

  “You want her? No problem. Kick the piece inside and come in after it. Otherwise, all bets are off. Think I’m jerking your johnson? Stick your head in here.”

  Hackberry could hear a dronelike whirring sound in his ears, one he associated with wind blowing out of a blue-black sky across miles of snowy hills and ice splintering under the weight of thousands of advancing Chinese infantry.

  “I’ll make it easy for you,” Eriksson said. He opened the bathroom door slightly, allowing Hackberry a brief view of the restroom’s interior. Eriksson was holding the little girl by the neck of her T-shirt while he screwed the cut-down pump into her shoulder bone. “I got nothing to lose,” he said.

  “I believe you,” Hackberry said. He stepped backward, opened the cylinder to his revolver, and dumped his four spent rounds and two unfired ones into his palm and threw them clattering across the floor. He squatted, placed his revolver on the floor, and shoved it with one foot into the restroom.

  “Walk in behind it,” Eriksson said.

  Then Hackberry was in the enclosure with him, staring into the muzzle of the shotgun.

  “Go on, little girl,” Eriksson said. “I wasn’t gonna hurt you. I just had to say that.”

  “Yes, you were. You hurt me bad,” she said, cupping her hand to one shoulder.

  “Get out of here, you little skank,” Eriksson said. He bolted the door behind her, his attention never leaving Hackberry. “Slickered you, motherfucker.”

  Hackberry let his eyes become dead and unseeing, let them drift off Eriksson’s face to a spot on the wall. Or perhaps to a patch of red sky that should not have been visible inside a women’s restroom.

  “Did you hear me?” Eriksson asked.

  “You’re a smart one,” Hackberry said.

  “You got that right.”

  Then Eriksson seemed to realize something was wrong in his environment, that he had not seen or taken note of something, that in spite of his years of vanquishing his enemies and shaving the odds and orchestrating events so that he always walked away a winner, something had gone terribly wrong. “Get on your cell,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “What do you mean, what for? Tell your people to stay away from the building. Tell them to bring a car to the back.”

  “You’re not getting a car.”

  “I’ll get a car or you’ll catch the bus, whichever you prefer.”

  “You’re leaving here in cuffs.”

  Eriksson took his own cell phone from his pocket and tossed it to Hackberry. It bounced off Hackberry’s chest and fell to the floor. “Pick it up and make the call, Sheriff,” Eriksson said.

  “I said you’re a smart one. A smart man is a listener. Listen to what I say and don’t turn around. No, no, keep your eyes on me. You do not want to turn around.”

  “Are you senile? I’m holding a shotgun in your face.”

  “If you turn around, you’ll lose your head,” Hackberry said. “Look straight ahead. Kneel down and place your weapon on the floor.”

  Eriksson’s lips parted. They were dry, caked slightly with mucus. His hands tightened on the twelve-gauge. He crimped his lips, wetting them before he spoke. “This has got a hair trigger. No matter what happens, you’re gonna have a throat full of bucks.”

  “Believe what I tell you, Eriksson. Don’t move, don’t back away from me, don’t turn around. If you do any of those things, you will die. I give you my word on that. No one wants to see that happen to you. But it’s your choice. You lower your weapon by the barrel with your left hand and place it on the floor and step away from it.”

  “I think you’re a mighty good actor, Sheriff, but I also think you’re full of shit.”

  Eriksson stepped backward, out of Hackberry’s reach, turning his line of vision toward a frosted back window that had been wedged open with a tire tool. For just a moment, the aim of his shotgun angled away from Hackberry’s chest. Outside, a huge cloud of orange dust gusted across the sun.

  Eriksson’s translucent blue eyes were charged with light. His face seemed to twitch just before he saw Pam Tibbs standing slightly beyond the window ledge, her khaki shirt speckled with taco sauce, her chrome-plated revolver aimed in front of her with both hands. That was when she squeezed the trigger, driving a soft-nosed .357 round through one side of his head and out the other.

  15

  PREACHER JACK COLLINS lived at several residences, none of which carried his name on a deed or a rental agreement. One of them was located south of old Highway 90, within sight of the Del Norte Mountains, twenty miles deep into broken desert terrain that looked composed of crushed stone knitted together by the roots of scrub brush and mesquite and cactus that bloomed with bloodred flowers.

  On the mountain behind his one-bedroom stucco house was a series of ancient telegraph poles whose wires hung on the ground like strands of black spaghetti. Behind the poles was the gaping opening of a rock-walled root cellar that had been shored up with wood posts and crossbeams that either had collapsed or that insects had reduced to the weightless density of cork.

  One starlit night, Preacher had sat in the entrance and watched the desert take on the gray and blue and silver illumination that it seemed to draw down into itself from the sky, as though the sky and the earth worked together to both cool the desert and turn it into a pewter artwork. Then he had realized that a breeze was blowing into his face and flowing over his arms and shoulders and into the excavation at his back. The root cellar was not a root cellar after all. Nor was it a mine. It was a cave, deep and spiraling, one that had probably been formed by water millions of years ago, one that led to the other side of the mountain or a cavern far beneath it. Perhaps early settlers had framed up the walls and ceilings with timbered support, but Preacher was convinced no human hand had contributed to its creation.

  He spent many evenings sitting on a metal chair in front of the cave, wondering if the wind echoing inside it spoke to him and if indeed the desert was not an ancient vineyard made sterile by man’s infidelity to Yahweh. Paradoxically, that thought comforted him. The sinfulness of the world somehow gave him a greater connection to it, made him more acceptable in his own eyes and simultaneously reduced the level of his own iniquity. Except Preacher had one problem he could not rid himself of: He had filled the ground with the bodies of Oriental women and watched while Hugo’s bulldozer had scalloped up the earth and pushed the backfill over them. He told himself he had been acting as a
n agent of God, purging the world of an abomination, perhaps even preempting the moral decay and diseases that had awaited them as prostitutes on the streets of a corrupt nation.

  But Preacher was having little success with his rationalization for the mass execution of the helpless and terrified women who waited for him nightly in his sleep. When Bobby Lee Motree arrived at Preacher’s house in the desert, Jack was delighted by the distraction.

  He set up two metal chairs in front of the cave and opened cold bottles of Coca-Cola for the two of them and watched while Bobby Lee drank his empty, his throat pumping, one eye fastened curiously on Preacher. Bobby Lee was wearing a muscle shirt and his top hat and his brown jeans that had yellow canvas squares stitched on the knees. He was full of confidence and cheer at being back in Preacher’s good graces; he unloaded his burden, telling Preacher how Liam got popped by the female deputy sheriff in the restaurant and how that rat bastard Artie Rooney had told Hugo to smoke everybody—the soldier and his girl, the Jewish guy and his wife and maybe even the Jewish guy’s kids, and finally, Preacher himself.

  “If you cain’t trust Artie Rooney, who can you trust? The standards of our profession have seriously declined,” Preacher said.

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Bobby Lee replied.

  “That was a joke.”

  “Yeah, I knew that. I can always tell when you’re joking.”

  Preacher let the subject slide. “Tell me again how this Holland fellow spotted Liam. I didn’t quite get all that.”

  “I guess he recognized him, that’s all.”

  “Even though Liam had shaved off his beard and was sitting in a crowded restaurant and the sheriff had never seen him and had no reason to be looking for Liam there?”

  “Search me. Weird stuff happens.”

  “But the sheriff didn’t make you?”

  “I was in the can, taking a dump.”

  “How’d you get out during all that shooting if you were in the can?”

  “It was a Chinese fire drill. I ran outside with the crowd.”

  “And just strolled on off, a fellow with no car, a fellow everybody saw sitting with Liam just a few minutes earlier?”

  “Most of them were pouring the wee-wee out of their shoes. Why should they worry about me?”

  “Maybe you were just lucky.”

  “I told you the way it was.”

  “Young people believe they’re never going to die. So they’ve got confidence that old men like me don’t have. That’s where your luck comes from, Bobby Lee. Your luck is an illusion produced by an illusion.”

  Bobby Lee’s obvious sense of discomfort was growing. He shifted in his chair and glanced at the stars and the sparkle of the desert and the greenish cast at the bottom of the sky. “Is that hole behind us one of those pioneer storage places where they kept preserves and shit?”

  “Maybe it goes down to the center of the earth. I’m going to find out one day.”

  “Sometimes I just can’t track what you’re saying, Jack.”

  “My uncle was in the South Pacific. He said he dynamited a whole mountain on top of the Japs who wouldn’t surrender and were hiding in caves. He said you could hear them at night, like hundreds of bees buzzing under the ground. I bet if you put your ear to the ground, you might still hear them.”

  “Why do you talk about stuff like that?”

  “Because I’m doubting your truthfulness, and you’re starting to piss me off.”

  “I wouldn’t try to put the glide on you. Give me some credit,” Bobby Lee said, his eyes round, unblinking, the pupils dilated like drops of ink in the dark.

  “Bobby Lee, you either gave up Liam or this fellow Holland is a special kind of lawman, the kind who doesn’t quit till he staples your hide on the barn door. Which is it?”

  “I didn’t give up Liam. He was my friend,” Bobby Lee replied, propping his hands on his knees, tilting his face up at the sky. His unshaved jaw looked as though grains of black pepper and salt had been rubbed into the pores. Preacher looked at him for a long time, until Bobby Lee’s face began to twitch and his eyes glistened. “You want to keep hurting and insulting me, go ahead and do it. I came out here to see you because you’re my friend. But all you do is run me down,” Bobby Lee said.

  “I believe you, boy,” Preacher said.

  Bobby Lee cleared his throat and spat. “Why do you do it?” he asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Our kind of work. We’re button men. We push people’s off button and shut down their motors. A pro does it for money. It’s not supposed to be personal. You’re a pro, Preacher, but with you, it’s not the money. It’s something nobody ever asks you about. Why do you do it?”

  “Why are you asking me?”

  “’Cause you’re the only man I could ever relate to.”

  “You see the glow in the land? It’s the bone in the soil that does that. Inside all that alluvial soil and lava flow and sedimentary rock, there’s millions of dead things letting off energy, lighting the way for the rest of us.”

  “Go on.”

  Preacher picked a mosquito off his neck and squeezed it between his thumb and finger. He wiped the blood on a piece of Kleenex. “That’s all. You asked a question and I answered it.”

  “I don’t get it. Lighting the way, what?”

  “Don’t fret yourself, boy. I need to know everything about this fellow Holland. I want to know why he was down by Big Bend. I want to know how he recognized Liam.”

  “I’m one guy. You got us into all this, Jack. How am I supposed to fix everything?”

  Preacher didn’t respond. In the wind, his face looked as serene and transfixed as though it had been bathed in warm water, his lips parted slightly, his teeth showing. In his eyes was a black reflection that made even Bobby Lee swallow, as though Preacher saw a presence on the horizon that no one else did. “You’re not mad at me, are you?” Bobby Lee said, trying to smile.

  “You? You’re like a son to me, Bobby Lee,” Preacher answered.

  BOBBY LEE DROVE away from the stucco house before first light, and Preacher prepared breakfast for himself on a propane stove and ate from a tin plate on his back steps. As a red glow fingered its way across the plain from the east, Preacher mounted his crutches and worked his way down the incline toward a mesa that was still locked in shadow. He crossed the opening to an arroyo and stumped through a depression of soft baked clay that cracked and sank beneath his weight with each step he took. He thought he could see petroglyphs cut in the layered rock above his head, and he was convinced he was traversing an alluvial flume that probably had irrigated verdant fields when an agrarian society had lived in harmony with the animals and a knife blade hammered out of primitive iron drew no blood from them or the people who had been sent to dwell east of Eden.

  But Preacher Jack’s thoughts about a riparian paradise brought him no peace. When he looked behind him, the funnel-shaped indentations of his crutches in the dried-out riverbed reminded him of coyote tracks. Even the drag of his footprints was serpentine and indistinct, as though his very essence were that of a transient and weightless creature not worthy of full creation.

  He wished to think of himself as a figure emblazoned retroactively on biblical legend, but the truth was otherwise. He had been a burden to his mother the day he was born, as well as a voyeur to her trysts. Now he lusted for the woman who had bested him both physically and intellectually and, in addition, had managed to pump one .38 round into his calf and one through the top of his foot. The memory of her scent, the heat in her skin and hair, the smear of her saliva and lipstick on his skin caused a swelling in his loins that made him ashamed.

  She had not only eluded him but indirectly had gotten Liam Eriksson killed and involved a sheriff named Holland in the case, probably the kind of rural hardhead a pro didn’t mess with or, if necessary, you paid somebody else to pop.

  Preacher turned in a circle and began thudding his way back toward his house. The hills and mesas were pink in the sunrise, the air sweet, the leaves of the mesquite brushing wetly against his trousers and wrists and hands. He wanted to
breathe the morning into his chest and cast out the funk and depression that seemed to screw him into the earth, but it was no use; he had never felt so alone in his life. When he closed his eyes, he thought he saw a boxcar on a rail siding, his mother sitting on a stool inside the open door, cutting carrots and onions into a pot in which she would make a soup that she would heat on an open fire that evening. In the dream, his mother lifted her face into the sunlight and smiled at him.

  Maybe it was time to put aside doubt and self-recrimination. A man could always become captain of his soul if he tried. A man didn’t have to accept the hand fate had dealt him. Moses didn’t. Neither did David. Wasn’t it time to continue his journey into a biblical past and to become a son of whom his mother could be proud, regardless of deeds he had performed on behalf of Artie Rooney, regardless of the nightmares in which a line of Oriental women tried to hold up their palms against the weapon that jerked sideways in his grasp, almost as though it possessed a will stronger than his own?