Nick replaced the receiver in the cradle. The back of his hand looked strangely white and soft, cupped around the blackness of the receiver. “Is it money?”
“I say something once, and I don’t repeat it. You’re not deaf, and you’re not lacking in intelligence. If you pretend to be either one, I’m going to leave. Then your family’s fate is on you, not me.”
Nick’s fingers were trembling on top of the desk blotter. “It’s about Artie Rooney and the Asian girls, isn’t it? Were you the shooter? Hugo said the shooter was a religious nutcase. That’s you, right?”
Preacher’s face remained impassive, his greased hair combed back neatly, his forehead shiny in the gloom. “Rooney is going to have you and Mrs. Dolan killed, and maybe your children, too. If the shooter can get in close, he wants your wife shot in the mouth. He also plans to have me killed. That gives us a lot of commonalities. But you say the word, and I’ll be gone.”
Nick felt his mouth drying up, his eyes watering, his rectum constricting with fear and angst.
“Are you going to get emotional on me?” Preacher asked.
“Why should you care about us?”
“I’ve been sent. I am the one who has been sent.” Preacher tilted his face up. He seemed to smile in a self-deprecating manner, in a way that was almost likable.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Nick wiped at his nose with the back of his wrist, not expecting an answer, not wanting to listen any more to a lunatic.
“You watch television shows about witness protection and that kind of thing?”
“Everybody does. That’s all that’s on TV.”
“Want to live in a box in Phoenix in summertime with sand and rocks for a yard and bikers with swastika tats for neighbors? Because outside of cooperating with me, that’s the only shot you’ve got. Artie Rooney has an on-again, off-again business relationship with a Russian by the name of Josef Sholokoff. His people come out of the worst prisons in Russia. Want me to tell you what they did to a Mexican family in Juárez, to the children in particular?”
“No, I don’t want to hear this.”
“Cain’t blame you. You know a man name of Hackberry Holland?”
“No…Who? Holland? No, I don’t know anybody by that name.”
“You recognize the name, though. You’ve seen it in the newspaper. He’s a sheriff. You read about the death of the ICE agent in San Antonio. Holland was there.”
“I told you, I don’t know this Holland guy. I’m a restaurateur. I got into the escort business, but I don’t do that anymore. I’m going broke. I’m not a criminal. Criminals don’t go broke. Criminals don’t file bankruptcy. They don’t see their families put on the street.”
“Were you interviewed by the ICE agent? Has Holland been to see you?”
“Me? No. I mean, maybe the man from Immigration and Customs came to my home. I don’t know anybody named Holland. You say something only once to other people, but other people got to say it ten times to you?”
“I think Sheriff Holland wants to do me injury. If he takes me off the board, you go off the board, too, because I’m the only person standing between you and Artie Rooney and his Russian business partners.”
“I made mistakes, but I’m not a thief. You stop dragging me into your life.”
“You’re telling me I’m a thief?”
“No, sir.”
“You have a pistol in your drawer, a Beretta nine-millimeter. Why don’t you take it out of the drawer and hold it in your hand and point it at me and call me dishonorable again?”
“If you found my gun, you took the bullets out.”
“Could be. Or maybe not. Open the drawer and pick it up. The weight should tell you something.”
“I apologize if I said something I shouldn’t.”
Preacher leaned forward in the chair. He was wearing a brown suit with light stripes in it, and the cast was gone from his leg. “You take Mrs. Dolan and your children out of town for a while. You pay cash everywhere you go. A credit card is an electronic footprint. You don’t call your restaurant or your lawyer or your friends. Artie Rooney may tap your phone lines. I’ll give you a cell phone number where you can contact me. But I’ll be the only person you’ll be talking to.”
“Are you crazy? Nobody is this arrogant.” Nick opened the side drawer to his desk and looked at the gun lying inside it.
“A crazy person is psychotic and has a distorted vision of the world. Which of us is the realist? The one who has survived among the predators or the one who pretends to be a family man while he lives off the earnings of whores and puts his family at mortal risk?”
Nick tried to hold his gaze on Preacher’s.
“You want to say something?” Preacher asked. “Pick up the gun.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
“Did you ever fire it?”
“No.”
“Pick it up and point it at me. Hold it with both hands. That way your fingers will stop trembling.”
“You don’t think I’ll pick it up?”
“Show me.”
Nick rested his hand in the drawer. The steel frame and checkered grips of the nine-millimeter felt solid and hard and reassuring as he curved his fingers around them. He lifted the gun out of the drawer. “It’s light. You took the clip out.”
“It’s called a magazine. It feels light because you’re scared and your adrenaline gives you strength you normally don’t have. The firing mechanism has a butterfly safety. The red dot means you’re on rock and roll. Pull back the hammer.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Do it, little fat man. Do it, little Jewish fat man.”
“What did you call me?”
“It’s not what I call you. It’s what Hugo calls you. He also calls you the Pillsbury Doughboy. Fit your thumb over the hammer and pull it back, then aim the front sight at my face.”
Nick set down the gun on the desk blotter and removed his hand from the grips. He was breathing audibly through his nostrils, his palms clammy, a taste like soured milk climbing into his mouth.
“Why cain’t you do it?” Preacher asked.
“Because it’s empty. Because I’m not here to entertain you.”
“That’s not why at all. Push the button by the trigger guard.”
Nick picked up the gun and squeezed the release on the magazine. The magazine fell from the frame and clunked on the desktop, the loading spring stacked tight with brass-jacketed shells.
“Pull back the slide. You’ll see a round in the chamber. The reason you didn’t point the gun at me is because you’re not a killer. But other men are, and they don’t think two seconds about the deeds they do. Those are the men I’m trying to protect your family from. Some of us are made different in the womb and are not to be underestimated. I’m one of them, but I think I’m different from the others. Is everything I say lost on you? Are you ignorant as well as corrupt?”
“No, you make me want to blow your fucking head off.”
The door to the upstairs opened, and light flooded down the staircase. “Who’s down there?” Esther said. Before anyone could answer her question, she descended the stairs, gripping an empty pot by the handle. She stared down at Preacher. “Who are you?”
“A friend.”
“How’d you get in my house?”
“The side door was open. I’ve explained this. Why don’t you sit down?”
“You’re one of them, aren’t you?”
“One of who?”
“The gangsters who have been plaguing our lives.”
“You’re wrong.”
“He’s about to leave, Esther,” Nick said.
“You’re one of those who abducted my husband,” she said.
“I wouldn’t call it that.”
“Don’t lie.”
“You shouldn’t use that term to me, madam.”
She stepped closer to him. “The Asian women, the prostitutes, the illegals or whatever they were, you’re here about them. You’
re the one who did it.”
“Did what?”
“Killed them. It was you, wasn’t it?”
“Why do you say that?” Preacher’s mouth twitched slightly, his words catching in his throat.
“Your eyes are dead. Only one kind of man has eyes like that. Someone who murders the light behind his own eyes. Someone who has tried to scrub God’s fingerprint off his soul.”
“Don’t you talk to me like that, woman.”
“You call me ‘woman’? A dog turd off the sidewalk calls me ‘woman’ in my own house?”
“I came here to—”
“Shut up, you worthless gangster,” she said.
“By God, you won’t talk to me like—” he began.
She swung the stainless-steel pot, still caked with oatmeal, across his face. The sound reverberated like a brass cymbal inside the room. Before he could recover from the shock, she hit him again, this time on the head. When he tried to raise his arms, she rained down one blow after another on his neck, shoulders, and elbows, gripping the handle with both hands, chopping downward as though attacking a tree stump.
“Esther!” Nick said, coming from behind his desk.
When Preacher lowered his arms, she swung the pot again, catching him right above the ear. He got to his feet and stumbled to the side door, blood leaking out of his hair. He jerked open the door and climbed the short flight of concrete steps into the yard, grabbing the higher steps for support, his palms smearing with bird shit.
Esther picked up his walking canes and followed him into the yard, through the citrus and crepe myrtle trees and windmill palms and hibiscus. He headed for the street, trying to outdistance her, looking back over his shoulder, his hatchet face quivering, his broken movements like a land crab’s. She flung his walking canes at his head. “Just so you don’t have any reason to come back,” she said.
Preacher crashed through the hedge onto the sidewalk and saw Bobby Lee fire up his vehicle down the street, just as a water truck passed and splattered Preacher from head to foot. The eastern sky was the blue of a robin’s egg and ribbed at the bottom with strips of crimson and purple cloud. The colors were majestic, the royal colors of David and Solomon, as though the sky itself had conspired to mock his grandiosity and foolish pride and vain hope that salvation would ever be his.
16
EARLY SATURDAY MORNING, Hackberry walked down to his barn and skimmed the bugs from the secondary tank he kept for his registered Missouri foxtrotters, a chestnut named Missy’s Playboy and a palomino named Love That Santa Fe. Then he turned on the spigot full blast and let the water run until it overflowed the aluminum sides and was clean of insects and dust and cold to the touch and tinted a light green from the pieces of hay floating in it. Both foxtrotters were still colts and gave themselves the liberty of nuzzling him and poking at his pockets for treats, their breath heavy and warm and grassy on the side of his face. Sometimes they pulled a glove from his pocket or grabbed the hat from his head and ran away with it. But this morning they were not playful and instead kept staring down the pasture, motionless, ears back, nostrils dilating in the wind that blew out of the north.
“What’s wrong, boys? A cougar been around?” Hackberry said. “You guys are too big to be bothered by such critters as that.”
He heard his cell phone chime in his khakis. He opened it, looking toward the railed fence at the north end of the pasture, seeing nothing but a solitary oak framed against the sunrise and an abandoned clapboard shack his neighbor kept hay in. He placed the phone against his ear. “You up, Hack?” a voice said.
“What’s going on, Maydeen?”
“I just got a weird call. Some guy says he has to talk with you but won’t give his name.”
“What’s he want?”
“He said you’re in danger. I asked him in danger of what. He said I didn’t want to know. He said he’s using a cell phone he bought off a street person, so I could forget about tracing the call.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“That I’d deliver the message. If he calls again, you want me to give him your number?”
“Yeah, go ahead.”
“There’s something else. I asked him if he’d been drinking. He said, ‘I wish I was just having the DTs. I wish this was all a dream. But those Asian women didn’t shoot themselves.’”
A half hour later, while Hackberry was watering his flower beds, his cell phone chimed in his pocket again. “Hello?” he said. There was no reply. “Is this the same man who called my office earlier?”
“Yes.”
Hackberry leaned over and turned off the water faucet. “You wanted to warn me about something?”
“Yes.”
“Want to tell me what it is?”
“Jack Collins, that’s his name. People call him Preacher.”
“What about him?”
“He thinks you’re after him. He thinks you and me have met.”
“What’s your name?”
“Collins killed the Thai women. He’s hooked up with Hugo Cistranos and Arthur Rooney. He thinks he’s a character out of the Bible.”
“Are you telling me you’re in danger, sir?”
“I don’t care about me.”
“Collins is trying to hurt your family?”
“You’ve got it all wrong. He thinks he’s protecting us. Collins says Arthur Rooney plans to kill us.”
“Let us help you. Meet me someplace.”
“No. I made this call because—”
“Because what?”
“I don’t want your blood on me. I don’t want the Asian women’s blood on me. I don’t want that soldier and his girlfriend hurt, either. I didn’t plan any of this.”
Nobody does, bud, Hackberry thought.
“Did you make a nine-one-one call about this some time ago and try to warn the FBI about Vikki Gaddis and her boyfriend?”
“No.”
“I think you did. I heard your voice on the tape. I think you’re probably a good man. You shouldn’t be afraid of us.”
“Artie Rooney says he wants my wife shot in the mouth. I’m not a good man. I let all this happen. I said what I had to say. You’re never gonna hear from me again.”
The signal went dead.
Hackberry called Maydeen. “Get ahold of Ethan Riser. Tell him I think we’ve got a solid lead on Jack Collins.”
“Ethan who?”
“The FBI agent. Tell him to call me at the house.”
“Is there somebody out to get you, Hack?”
“Why should I be a threat to anybody?”
“Because you’re stubborn as a cinder block and you don’t give up and all the shitbags know it.”
“Maydeen, would you please—” He shook his head and closed his phone.
Throughout the day, Hackberry waited for Ethan Riser to call back. At the office, he cleaned out the paperwork in his in-basket, drove a sick female inmate from the jail to the hospital, ate lunch, shot a game of pool in the saloon, placed an ad for a road-gang guard in the newspaper (eight dollars an hour, no benefits, must not be an ex-felon), and returned home for supper.
Still no call from Ethan Riser.
He washed his dishes and dried them and put them away, then sat on the porch as the evening cooled and plumes of dust rose off the land and a purple haze formed in the sky. Occasionally, he sensed a hint of rain in the air, a touch of ozone, a shift in the breeze that was ten degrees cooler, a ripping sound in a bank of black clouds on the horizon. When he strained his eyes, he thought he saw lightning on a distant hill, like gold wires sparking against the darkness.
From where he sat, he could see both the southern and northern borders of his property, the railed pastures he watered with wheel lines, the machine shed where he parked his tractor and his four-stall barn and his tack room filled with bridles and snaffle bits and saddles and hackamores and head stalls and three-inch-diameter braided rope leads and horsefly spray and worming syringes and hoof clippers and wood rasps, the pop
lar trees he had planted as windbreaks, his pale, closely clipped lawn that looked like a putting green in a desert, his flower beds that he constantly weeded and mulched and fertilized and watered by hand every morning. He could see every inch of the world he had created to compensate for his solitude and to convince himself the world was a grand place and well worth fighting for and, in so doing, had found himself without someone to enjoy it beside in equal measure.
But maybe it was presumptuous of him to conclude that his ownership of the ranch was more than transitory. Tolstoy had said the only piece of earth a person owned was the six feet he claimed with his death. The gospel of Matthew said He makes His sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust. Just across the border was a moral insane asylum where drug dealers did drive-bys in SUVs on entire families, where coyotes stole the life savings of peasants who simply wanted to work in the United States, and where any freshly created hump in the countryside could contain a multiple burial.
Wasn’t the potential for devolvement back into a simian society always extant within? Hackberry had seen American soldiers sell out their own in a prison camp south of the Yalu. The purchase price had been a warm shack to sleep in, an extra ball of rice, and a quilted coat with lice eggs in the seams. A trip into any border town gave one little doubt that hunger was the greatest aphrodisiac. It wouldn’t take much to create the same kind of society here, Hackberry thought. The collapse of the economy, the systemic spread of fear, the threat of imagined foreign adversaries would probably be enough to pull it off. But one way or another, his home and his ranch and the animals on it and he himself would become dust blowing in the wind.
He stood up from his wicker chair and leaned his shoulder against one of the lathe-turned wood posts on the porch. The sun had burned into a red spark between two hills, and again he thought he smelled impending rain in the south. He wondered if all old men secretly searched for nature’s rejuvenation in every tree of lightning pulsing silently inside a storm cloud, in every raindrop that struck a warm surface and reminded one of how good summer could be, of how valuable each day was.
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