“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 mahogany 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.
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 b
artender 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.
“Inside 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.”
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