Rain Gods

by James Lee Burke

  “Why are y’all just finding this out?”

  “Like I told you, Clawson liked to work alone. He didn’t put everything he did in the official file.”

  “But so far you’re not absolutely sure Dolan is the same guy who called me?”

  “Dolan knows Rooney. Dolan has been mixed up with prostitution for the last two years. Clawson had him in his bombsights. Also, Dolan just dissolved his partnership in his escort services and fired all the strippers at his nightclub. Either Clawson scared the shit out of him, or Dolan has developed problems of conscience.”

  “You haven’t interviewed him yet?”

  “No.”

  “You’re putting a tap on him instead?”

  “Did I say that?”

  “I think you’re calling me because you don’t want me to find Dolan on my own.”

  “Some people have a way of putting themselves in the middle of electric storms, Sheriff.”

  “I don’t think the problem is mine. Your colleagues want Collins as a conduit to this Russian out on the West Coast. I think they might want to use Dolan as bait. In the meantime, I’m a hangnail.”

  This time Ethan Riser was silent.

  “You’re telling me I’m bait, too?” Hackberry said.

  “I can’t speak for the actions of others. But I sleep nights. I do so because I treat people as honestly as I can. Watch your ass, Sheriff. Guys like us are old school. But there’s not many of us left.”

  A FEW MINUTES later, Hackberry filled a Styrofoam cup with black coffee, dropped three sugar cubes in it, and removed a folded-up checkerboard and a box of wood checkers from his bottom desk drawer. He walked up the old steel stairs to the second floor and pulled up a chair to Danny Boy Lorca’s cell. He sat down and placed the coffee and the checkerboard inside the bars and unfolded the checkerboard on the concrete floor. “Set ’em up,” he said.

  “I fell off the wagon again,” Danny Boy said, sitting up on the edge of his bunk, rubbing his face. His skin was as dark as smoked leather, his eyes dead, like coals that have been consumed by their own fire.

  “One day you’ll quit. Between now and then, don’t fret yourself about it,” Hackberry said.

  “I dreamed it rained. I saw a dried-out field of corn stand up straight in the rain. I had the same dream for three nights.”

  Hackberry’s eyes crinkled at the corners.

  “You don’t pay no attention to dreams, huh?” Danny Boy said.

  “You bet I do. Your move,” Hackberry said.

  THE THREE BIKERS checked in to a motel next to a truck stop and nightclub, partially because the portable sign in front of the nightclub said LADIES FREE TONIGHT—TWO-FERS 5 TO 8. They showered and changed into fresh clothes and drank Mexican beer at the bar and picked up a woman who said she worked at the dollar store in town. They also picked up her friend, who was sullen and suspicious and claimed she had a ten-year-old boy waiting alone at home.

  But when Tim showed the friend his tin Altoids box packed to the brim with a lovely white granular cake of nose candy, she changed her mind and joined him and her girlfriend and the other two bikers for a couple of lines, some high-octane weed, and an order-in pizza back at the motel.

  Tim had rented a room at the end of the building, and while his companions and their new friends went at it full-throttle on two beds, he drank a soda outside and crushed the can in one hand and threw it in the trash. He sat on a bench under a tree throbbing with cicadas and opened his cell phone. He could hear the bedstead banging against the motel wall and the cacophonous laughter of the two dimwits his friends had picked up, as if their laughter were outside them and not part of anything that was funny. He put an unlit cigarette in his mouth and tried to clear his head. What would the smart money do in a situation like this? You didn’t blow a hit for Josef Sholokoff. You also didn’t mess up when you took on a guy like Jack Collins, at least if he was as good as people said he was.

  The eaves of the motel were lit with pink neon tubing. The light was fading from the sky, and the air was purple and dense and moist, with a smell of dust in it that suggested a drop in the barometer, perhaps even a taste of rain. The fronds on a palm tree by the entrance to the motel straightened and rattled in the wind. He thought about going back inside and trying out one of the dimwits. No, first things first. He dialed a number on his cell phone. While he listened to the ring, he wondered what was keeping the pizza man with their order.

  “Hugo?”

  “Yeah, who’s this?”

  “It’s Tim.”

  “Tim who?”

  “Tim who works for Josef. Lose the charade. You want an update or not?”

  “You got Preacher?”

  “We’re working on it.”

  “Explain that.”

  “We had him boxed, but he disappeared. I don’t know how he did it.”

  “Preacher is onto you but he got away? Do you have any idea what you’re telling me?”

  “It sounds like you overloaded on your Ex-Lax.”

  “You listen, asshole—”

  “No, you listen. The guy has got no wheels and no house to go back to. We’ll find him. In the meantime—”

  “What do you mean, he has no house to—”

  “There was a propane accident in his kitchen. Some vandals blew the tires off his car at about the same time. Everything is under control. Here’s the good news. You said you were looking for a broad.”

  “No, I said Preacher was looking for a broad. He’s got an obsession about her. You said you shot out his tires? What the fuck do you think this is? Halloween?”

  “Man, you just don’t listen, do you?”

  “About what?”

  “The broad and the soldier you’re looking for. She has chestnut hair and green eyes, looks like a fine piece of ass, sings Gomer Pyle spirituals to beer-drinking retards who don’t have a clue? If that sounds right, I know where you can find her.”

  “You found Vikki Gaddis?”

  “No, Michelle Obama. You got a pencil?”

  “There’s one here somewhere. Hang on.”

  “One day you guys have to explain to me how you got into the life.”

  Inside the motel room, the women got up and dressed in the bathroom. The woman from the dollar store came out first, blotting her face with a towel, smoothing her hair out of her face. She was overweight and round-shouldered, her arms big like a farm girl’s; without makeup, her face was as stark as a pie plate. “Where’s the pizza?” she asked.

  “The guy must have got lost,” one biker said.

  The other biker wanted to use the bathroom, but the second woman had locked the door. “What are you doing in there?” he said, shaking the knob.

  “Calling my son. Hold your water,” she said through the door.

  “I love family values,” he said.

  The second woman came out of the bathroom. Unlike her friend, her bone structure looked like it had been created from an Erector Set. Her face was triangular in shape, her skin bad, her eyes filled with a glint that seemed to teeter without cause on malevolence.

  “Your kid okay?” one of the bikers said.

  “You think I’d be here if he wasn’t?” she replied.

  “Not everybody is such a good mother.”

  The two women went out the door. A beaded sky-blue sequined purse hung on a string from the overweight woman’s shoulder. She looked back once, smiling as though to say good night.

  Tim came back into the room and sat down in a chair by the window. He pulled off his metal-sheathed boots and cupped his hands on his thighs, staring at the floor. “We’ve got to clean this up.”

  “You talk to Josef?”

  “To this lamebrain Hugo. He says we spit in the tiger’s mouth.”

  “A guy on crutches with no car or house? I think this guy is some kind of urban legend.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’m hungry. You want me to call the pizza place again or go out?”

  “What I want you to do is let me think a minute.”

  “You should have got laid, Tim.”

  Tim stared at the nicked furniture, the yellowed curt
ains on the windows, the bedclothes piled on the floor. On the chair by the television set was a gray vinyl handbag, the brass zipper pulled tight. “There’s something wrong,” he said.

  “Yeah, we’re wandering around in a giant skillet. Is this whole state like this?”

  “Who ordered the pizza?”

  “The skinny broad.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “‘I want two sausage-and-mushroom pizzas.’”

  “Pick up the receiver and hit redial.”

  “I think you’re losing it, man.”

  “Just do it.”

  “This phone doesn’t have a redial.”

  “Then get the number off the pizza menu on the desk and call it.”

  “Okay, Tim. How about a little serenity here?”

  Someone knocked on the door. The biker who had picked up the phone replaced the receiver in the cradle. He started toward the door.

  “No!” Tim said, holding up his hand. He got up from his chair in his sock feet and clicked off the light. He pulled back the window curtain just far enough to see the walkway.

  “Who is it?” the other biker asked him.

  “I can’t tell,” Tim said. He removed the Glock from his overnight bag. “What do you want?” he said through the door.

  “Pizza delivery,” a voice said.

  “What took you so long?”

  “There was an accident on the highway.”

  “Set it on the walkway.”

  “It’s in the warmer.”

  “If you set it down, it won’t be in the warmer any longer, will it?”

  “It’s thirty-two dollars.”

  Tim put on the night chain and took out his wallet. He eased the door open, the chain links tightening against the brass slot. The delivery man was older than he expected, blade-faced, his nose sunburned, an orange-and-black cloth cap pulled low on his brow.

  “How much did you say?”

  “Thirty-two dollars even.”

  “I’ve only got a hundred.”

  “I have to go back to the car for change.”

  Tim held on to the hundred and closed the door and waited. A moment later, the delivery man returned and knocked again. Tim cracked the door and handed the hundred-dollar bill to him. “Count the change out on the top of the box. Keep five for yourself.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Doug.”

  “Who’s with you in your car, Doug?”

  “My wife. When I get off, we’re going to visit her mother at the hospital.”

  “You take your wife on deliveries so you can go to the hospital together?”

  The delivery man began blinking uncertainly.

  “I was just asking,” Tim said. He shut the door and waited. Then he went to the curtain and peeled it from the corner of the window and watched the pizza man turn his car around and drive back onto the highway. He opened the door and squatted down and lifted the two heavily laden cartons of pizza from the concrete. They were warm in his hand and smelled deliciously of sausage and onions and mushrooms and melted cheese. He watched the taillights of the delivery car disappear down the road, then closed the door and replaced the chain. “What are you guys looking at?” he said to his companions.

  “Hey, you’re just being careful. Come on, let’s scarf.”

  They ordered beer brought over from the nightclub, and for the next hour, they ate and drank and watched television and rolled joints out of Tim’s stash. Tim even became silently amused at his concern over the pizza man. He yawned and lay back on the bed, a pillow behind his head. Then he noticed again the vinyl handbag one of the women had left behind. It had fallen from the chair and was lodged behind the television stand. “Which one of the broads was carrying a gray purse?” he said.

  “The bony one.”

  “Check it out.”

  But before the other biker could pick up the handbag, there was another knock on the door. “We need a turnstile here,” Tim said.

  He got up from the bed and went to the window. This time he pulled the curtain all the way back so he could have a clear view of the walkway and door area. He went to the door and opened it on the chain. “You forgot your purse?” he said.

  “I left it here or in the club. It’s not at the club, so it must be here,” the woman said. “Everything is in it.”

  “Hang on.” He shut the door, his hand floating up to release the chain.

  “Don’t let her in, man. If women can have a hard-on, this one has got a hard-on. I’ll get her purse,” one of the other bikers said.

  Tim slipped the night chain from its slot.

  “Tim, wait.”

  “What?” Tim said, twisting the doorknob.

  “There ain’t a wallet in the purse. Just lipstick and tampons and used Kleenex and hairpins.”

  Tim turned around and looked back at his friend, the door seeming to swing open of its own accord. The woman who had knocked was hurrying across the parking lot toward a waiting automobile. In her place stood a man Tim had never seen. The man was wearing a suit and a white shirt without a tie, and his hair was greased and combed straight back, his body trim, his shoes shined. He looked like a man who was trying to hold on to the ways of an earlier generation. His weight was propped up by a walking cane that he held stiffly with his left hand. In his right hand, snugged against his side, was a Thompson machine gun.

  “How’d you—” Tim began.

  “I get around,” Preacher said.

  The spent casings shuddering from the bolt of his weapon clattered off the doorjamb, rained on the concrete, and bounced and rolled into the grass. The staccato explosions from the muzzle were like the zigzags of an electric arc.

  Preacher limped toward the waiting car, the downturned silhouette of his weapon leaking smoke. Not one room door opened, nor did one face appear at a window. The motel and the neon-pink tubing wrapped around its eaves and the palm tree etched against the sky by the entrance had taken on the emptiness of a movie set. As Preacher drove away, he stared through the big glass window of the front office. The clerk was gone, and so were any guests who might have been waiting to register. From the highway, he glanced back at the motel again. Its insularity, its seeming abandonment by all its inhabitants, the total absence of any detectable humanity within its confines, made him think of a snowy wind blowing outside a boxcar on a desolate siding, a pot of vegetables starting to burn on an untended fire, although he had no way to account for the association.

  18

  VIKKI GADDIS GOT off work at the steak house at ten P.M. and walked to the Fiesta motel with a San Antonio newspaper folded under her arm. When she entered the room, Pete was watching television in his skivvies. His T-shirt looked like cheesecloth against the red scar tissue on his back. She popped open the newspaper and dropped it in his lap. “Those guys were at the restaurant three nights ago,” she said. “They were bikers. They looked road-fried.”

  Pete stared down at the booking-room photographs of three men. They were in their twenties and possessed the rugged good looks of men in their prime. Unlike the subjects of most booking-room photography, none of the men appeared fatigued or under the influence or nonplussed or artificially amused. Two of them had served time in San Quentin, one in Folsom. All three had been arrested for possession with intent to distribute. All three had been suspects in unsolved homicides.

  “You talked to them?” Pete asked.

  “No, they talked to me. I thought they were just hitting on me. I sang four numbers with the band, and they tried to get me to sit down with them. I told them I had to work, I was a waitress and just sang occasion ally with the band. They thought it was funny that I sang ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken.’”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because I thought they were jerks and not worth talking about.”

  Pete began reading the newspaper story again. “They were machine-gunned,” he said. He bit a hangnail. “What’d they say to you?”

  “They wanted to know my name. They wanted to know where I was from.”

  “What’d you tell them?”r />
  “That I had to get back to work. Later, they were asking the bartender about me.”

  “What in particular?”

  “Like how long I’d been working there. Like had I ever been a professional folksinger. Like didn’t I used to live around Langtry or Pumpville? Except these guys had California tags, and why should they know anything about little towns on the border?”