“There’s worse things.”
Preacher watched the countryside sweeping by. He closed his eyes as though temporarily resting them. A moment later, he reopened them and leaned forward, perhaps studying a landmark. He scratched his cheek with one finger and studied Nick again. Then he seemed to make a decision about something and tapped on the back of the driver’s seat. “The road on the left,” he said. “Go through the cattle guard and follow the dirt track. You’ll see a barn and a pond and a clapboard house. The house will be empty. If you see a car or any lights on, turn around.”
“You got it, Jack,” the driver said.
“What’s going on?” Nick said.
“You wanted a sit-down, you got your sit-down,” Hugo said from the front passenger seat.
“Take the pistol out of your pocket with two fingers and put it on the seat,” Preacher said. Half of his right hand remained inside the fold of the newspaper on his lap. His mouth was slightly parted, his eyes unblinking, his nose tilted down.
“I don’t have a gun. But if I did, I wouldn’t give it to you.”
“You’re not a listener?” Preacher said.
“Yeah, I am, or I wouldn’t be here.”
“You were planning to shoot both me and Hugo if you could catch us unawares. You treated me with disrespect. You treated me as though I’m an ignorant man.”
“I never saw you before. How could I disrespect you?” Nick replied, avoiding Preacher’s initial premise.
Preacher sucked on a tooth. “You attached to your family, Mr. Dolan?”
“What do you think?”
“Answer my question.”
“I have a good family. I work hard to provide for them. That’s why I don’t need this kind of shit.”
“You true to your vows?”
“This is nuts.”
“I believe you’re a family man. I believe you planned to take out me and Hugo even if you had to eat a bullet. You’d eat a bullet for your family, wouldn’t you?”
Nick felt he was being led into a trap, but he didn’t know how. Preacher saw the confusion in his face.
“That makes you a dangerous man,” Preacher said. “You’ve put me in a bad spot. You shouldn’t have done that. You shouldn’t have patronized me, either.”
Nick, with his heart sinking, saw the driver’s eyes look at him in the rearview mirror. The tips of his fingers inched away from the outline of the .25 to the edge of his pocket. He glanced at Preacher’s right hand, partially inserted inside the folded newspaper. The paper was turned at an angle, pointed directly at Nick’s rib cage.
The SUV turned off the service road and passed through a break in a row of slash pines and thumped across a cattle guard onto farmland spiked with weeds and cedar fence posts that had no wire on them. Nick could see moonlight glowing on a pond, and beyond the pond, a darkened house with cattle standing in the yard. He folded his arms on his chest, burying his hands in his armpits to stop them from shaking. The driver, Bobby Lee, looked at Nick in the mirror again, a dent in each of his cheeks, as though he were sucking the saliva out of his mouth.
“I knew it’d come to this,” Nick said.
“I don’t follow you,” Preacher said.
“I knew one of you bastards would eventually blindside me. You’re all the same—black pukes from the Desire, Italian punks from Uptown. Now it’s an Irish psychopath who’s a hump for Hugo Cistranos. None of y’all got talent or brains of your own. Every one of you is a pack animal, always figuring out a way to steal what another man has worked for.”
“Do you believe this guy?” the driver said to Hugo.
“I don’t steal, Mr. Dolan,” Preacher said. “But you do. You steal and market the innocence of young women. You create a venue that makes money off the lust of depraved men. You’re a festering sore in the eyes of God, did you know that, Mr. Dolan? For that matter, you’re an abomination in the eyes of your own race.”
“Judaism isn’t a race, it’s a religion. That’s what I’m talking about. All of you are ignorant. That’s your common denominator.”
Bobby Lee had already cut the headlights and was slowing to a stop by the pond. The open end of the newspaper in Preacher’s lap was still pointed at Nick’s side. Nick thought he was going to be sick. Hugo pulled open the back door and ran his hand along Nick’s legs. His face was so close that Nick could feel Hugo’s breath on his skin. Hugo slipped the .25 auto from Nick’s pocket and aimed it at the pond.
“This is a nice piece,” he said. He released the magazine and worked the slide. “Afraid to carry one in the chamber, Nicholas?”
“It wouldn’t have done me any good,” Nick said.
“Want to show him?” Hugo said to Preacher.
“Show me what?” Nick said.
Preacher tossed the newspaper to the floor and got out on the other side of the vehicle, pulling his crutches after him. The newspaper had fallen open on the floor. There was nothing inside it.
“Tough luck, Nicholas,” Hugo said. “How’s it feel to lose to a guy holding a handful of nothing?”
“Bobby Lee, open up the back. Hugo, give me his piece,” Preacher said.
“I can take care of this,” Hugo said.
“Like you did behind that church?”
“Take it easy, Jack,” Hugo said.
“I said give me the piece.”
Nick could feel a wave of nausea permeate the entirety of his metabolism, as though he had been systemically poisoned and all his blood had settled in his stomach and every muscle in him had turned flaccid and pliant. For just a moment he saw himself through the eyes of his tormentors—a small, pitiful fat man whose skin had become as gray as cardboard and whose hair glowed with sweat, a little man whose corpulence gave off the vinegary stink of fear.
“Walk with me,” Preacher said.
“No,” Nick said.
“Yes,” Bobby Lee said, pressing a .45 hard between Nick’s shoulder blades, screwing it into the softness of his muscles.
The cows in the yard of the farmhouse had strung shiny green lines of feces around the pond. In the moonlight Nick could see the cows watching him, their eyes luminous, their heads haloed with gnats. An unmilked cow, its swollen udder straining like a veined balloon, bawled with its discomfort.
“Go toward the house, Mr. Dolan,” Preacher said.
“It ends here, doesn’t it?” Nick said.
But no one spoke in reply. He heard Hugo doing something in the luggage area of the SUV, shaking out a couple of large vinyl garbage bags and spreading them on the carpet.
“My family won’t know what happened to me,” Nick said. “They’ll think I deserted them.”
“Shut up,” Bobby Lee said.
“Don’t talk to him that way,” Preacher said.
“He keeps sassing you, Jack.”
“Mr. Dolan is a brave man. Don’t treat him as less. That’s far enough, Mr. Dolan.”
Nick felt the skin on his face shrink, the backs of his legs begin to tremble uncontrollably, his sphincter start to give way. In the distance he could see a bank of poplars at the edge of an unplowed field, wind flowing through Johnson grass that had turned yellow with drought, the brief tracings of a star falling across the sky. How did he, a kid from New Orleans, end up here, in this remote, godforsaken piece of fallow land in South Texas? He closed his eyes and for just a second saw his wife standing under the colonnade at the corner of St. Charles and Canal, raindrops in her hair, the milky whiteness of her complexion backlit by the old iron green-painted streetcar that stood motionless on the tracks.
“Esther,” he heard himself whisper.
He waited for the gunshot that would ricochet a .25-caliber round back and forth inside his brainpan. Instead, all he heard was the cow bawling in the dark.
“What did you say?” Preacher asked.
“He didn’t say anything,” Bobby Lee said.
“Be quiet. What did you say, Mr. Dolan?”
“I said Esther, the name of my wif
e, 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.
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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?”
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