Billy Bob and Hackberry Holland Ebook Boxed Set (42 page)

The odor of burned hair on the backs of his hands rose into his face, and in his head he saw an oven in southwest Poland, its iron door yawning open, and inside the oven he saw the barest puff of wind crumble the remains of his daughters into ash.

 

A H
ISPANIC MAN
had called in a 911 on an injured or drunk man stumbling around by the side of the state highway in the dark.

“Is this man a hitchhiker?” the dispatcher asked.

“No, he's by a car. He's falling down.”

“Has he been struck by a vehicle?”

“How do I know? He ain't in good shape, that's for sure. He's trying to get in the car. There he goes again.”

“Goes where?”

“On the ground. I take that back. He's up again and crawling inside, Jesus, a truck just went roaring by. The guy's gonna get mashed.”

“Give me your location again.”

The caller gave the number on a mile marker. But evidently, in the poor light, he read the numerals wrong, and the deputy who was dispatched to the scene found only an empty stretch of highway, tumbleweed bouncing across the center stripe.

 

A
FTER
H
ACKBERRY
H
OLLAND
had gotten the name of Pete Flores from Ouzel Flagler, he'd called the electric cooperative and been told a P. J. Flores was a member of the co-op and could be found up a dirt road fifteen miles from the county seat, living in a house where the electricity was scheduled to be cut off in three days for nonpayment of service.

It was 7:31
A.M
. when Hackberry and Pam Tibbs drove up a pebble road to a grassless parcel of land where a frame house sat in the shadow of a hill, its front door open, the curtains blowing inside the screens. There were no vehicles out back or in the dirt yard. A crow sat on top of the cistern. It flapped its wings and lifted into the sky when Hackberry and Pam Tibbs stepped up on the gallery.

“It's Sheriff Holland,” Hackberry called through the screen. “I need to talk to Pete Flores. Step out on the gallery, please.”

No answer.

Hackberry went through the door first. The wind seemed to fill the inside of the house in a way that reminded him of his own home after his wife had died, as though a terrible theft had just occurred for which there was no redress except silence. He walked deeper into the house, his boots loud on the plank floors. A half-eaten cheese sandwich lay on a plate on top of the kitchen table. Dry crumbs were scattered on the plate. A faucet dripped into an unwashed pan in the sink. A garbage sack, double-bagged and taped, rested on the back screen porch, as though someone had planned to carry it down to the Dumpster on the road or to bury it and had been interrupted.

The medicine cabinet and the bedroom closet were empty, coat hangers strewn on the floor. The toilet paper had been removed from the spindle. Hackberry looked through the front screen and saw a small Hispanic boy on a bicycle in the yard. The boy was not more than ten or
eleven, and he was staring at the pump shotgun affixed to the cruiser's dashboard. The bicycle the boy rode was old and had fat tires and was too big for a boy his size.

“You know where Pete Flores is?” Hackberry asked, stepping out on the gallery.

“He ain't home?” the boy said.

“Afraid not.”

The boy didn't speak. He got back on the bike, his face empty.

“I'm Sheriff Holland. Pete's helping me with a little matter. Do you know where he might be?”

“No, sir. Miss Vikki ain't home, either?”

“No, nobody is here right now.”

“Then how come you're in their house?”

Hackberry sat down on the steps and removed his hat. He straightened the felt in the crown. He lifted his face into the sunlight that was breaking over the hill. “What's your name?”

“Bernabe Segura.”

“Pete might be in some trouble, Bernabe. What's Miss Vikki's last name?”

“Gaddis.”

“Do you know where I could find her?”

The little boy's face was clouded, as though he were looking at an image buried behind his eyes.

“Are you listening, Bernabe?”

“There were some men here last night. They had flashlights. They went inside the house.”

“So you came here to check on Pete?”

“We were gonna hunt for arrowheads today.”

“You shouldn't have come here by yourself. Where's your father?”

“I don't have one.” Bernabe tapped on his handlebars. “Pete give me this bike.”

“Where can I find Miss Vikki, Bernabe?”

 

J
UNIOR
V
OGEL LEANED
on the counter. “I knew it,” he said.

“Knew what?” Hackberry said.

Junior picked up a towel from the counter, wiped his hands with it, and threw it in the direction of a yellow plastic container filled with soiled towels and aprons. “It's that damn kid she's been mixed up with. Pete Flores. What'd he do?”

“Nothing I know of. We just need some information from him.”

“Who you kidding? When that boy isn't drunk, he's hungover. I knew she was in trouble when she left the diner. I should have done something about it.”

“I'm not sure I follow you.”

“She came in for her check. But two or three things were going on at the same time. Like a bad omen or something. I don't know how to put it. A guy wanted to buy milk for his baby. Then a couple of guys in a Trans Am started coming on to her. I didn't sort it out at the time.”

Pam Tibbs looked at the side of Hackberry's face, then at Junior and back at Hackberry. “We don't have any idea what you're talking about, sir. Can you take the pralines out of your mouth?” she said.

“This guy said he was staying at the Super 8 and needed milk for his three-month-old baby girl. I asked him why he didn't go to the convenience store. He said it was after eleven and the store was closed. So I got him a half-gallon out of my refrigerator and told him to give me two bucks for it. But he didn't have the two bucks. How can a guy be out looking for milk and driving across Texas with his family when he doesn't even have two bucks in his pocket?

“While I'm dealing with this guy, these two characters in a Trans Am are hassling Vikki. I don't have trouble in my place, but suddenly, I got it all at one time, you follow me now? Drunks and hard cases don't mess with my employees, Vikki in particular. Everybody knows that. ‘Orchestrated,' that was the word I was looking for. It was like it was all orchestrated.”

“You get a license number on any of these guys?” Hackberry said.

“No.”

Hackberry placed his business card on the glass counter. “Call us if you hear from Vikki or if you see any of these guys again,” he said.

“What's happened to Vikki? You ain't told me squat,” Junior said.

“We don't know where she is. As far as we know, you're the last person to have seen her,” Hackberry said.

Junior Vogel let out his breath, the heel of his hand pressed to his head. “I looked out the window and the guy with the milk was ahead of her. The two creeps in the Trans Am got some gas and followed in the same direction. I watched it happen and didn't do anything.”

 

T
HE SKY WAS
gray with dust as they drove back down the state highway toward town, Pam Tibbs behind the wheel.

“I talked to my cousin Billy Bob Holland,” Hackberry said. “He's a former Texas Ranger and practices law in western Montana. He's known Pete Flores since he was a little boy. He says Pete was the best little boy he ever knew. He also says he was the smartest.”

“These days it's not hard for a good kid to get in trouble.”

“Billy Bob says he'd bet his life this boy is innocent of any wrongdoing, at least of the kind we're talking about.”

“My father was in Vietnam. He was psychotic when he came home. He hanged himself in a jail cell.” Pam's eyes were straight ahead, her hands in the ten-two position on the steering wheel, her expression as empty as a wood carving.

“Pull on the shoulder,” Hackberry said.

“What for?”

“That road bull is waving at us,” he replied.

The inmates were from a contract prison and wore orange jumpsuits. They were strung out in a long line on the swale, picking up litter and stuffing it into vinyl bags they tied and left on the shoulder. A green bus with steel mesh on the windows was parked up ahead. So was a flatbed diesel truck with a horse trailer anchored to the back bumper. One mounted gunbull was at the back and another at the head of the line working along the road. An unarmed man in a gray uniform with red piping on the collar and pockets stood on the swale, waiting for the cruiser. He wore yellow-tinted aviator shades and an elegant white straw cowboy hat. His uniform was flecked with chaff blowing off the hard
pan. His neck and face were deeply lined, like the skin on a turtle. Neither Hackberry nor Pam Tibbs knew him.

“What's going on, Cap?” Hackberry said, getting out of the cruiser.

“See that Hispanic boy over yonder with Gothic-letter tats all over him?” A polished brass tag on the captain's pocket said
RICKER
.

“Yes, sir?” Hack said.

“He killed a bar owner with a knife 'cause the bar owner wouldn't return the money this kid lost in the rubber machine. Guess what he just found back there in the rocks? I almost downloaded in my britches when he handed it to me.”

“What'd he find?” Hackberry said.

The captain removed a stainless-steel revolver from his pants pocket. “It's an Airweight thirty-eight, a five-rounder. Two caps already popped. Don't worry. The hammer is sitting on a spent casing.”

Hackberry removed a ballpoint from his shirt pocket and put it through the trigger guard and removed the revolver from Ricker's hand. Pam Tibbs got a Ziploc bag from the cruiser and placed the revolver inside it.

“I shouldn't have handled it?” Ricker said.

“You did all the right things. I appreciate your waving us down,” Hackberry said.

“That ain't all of it. Better take a look over here,” Ricker said. He walked ahead and pointed at a grassy spot where, during the rainy season, water ran off the road into the swale. “I suspect somebody is a pint or two down right now.”

Over a wide area, the grass was stippled with blood, and in places the blood had pooled and dried on top of the dirt. Pam Tibbs squatted down and looked at the grass and the broken blades and the depressions in it and the areas where the blood smears had taken on the characteristics of a body drag. She stood up and walked back toward the cruiser, in the direction of the truck stop and diner, and squatted down again. “I'd say there were two vehicles here, Sheriff,” she said. “My guess is the victim was shot about here, close to vehicle one, then was dragged, or dragged himself, on up to vehicle two. But why would the shooter throw away the weapon?”

“Maybe it wasn't his. Or rather, it wasn't hers,” Hackberry said.

“You want to print me and that Hispanic boy to exclude us when you dust the gun?” Ricker said.

“Yep. And we need to wrap the crime scene. Some feds will probably be talking to you later.”

“What the hell the feds want with me?”

“You heard about all those Asian women who were murdered?”

“That's what this is about? I got enough grief, Sheriff.”

“That makes two of us. Welcome to the New American Empire, Cap.”

A
S HE LAY
in a bed with a view of a chicken yard, a railed pen with six goats inside it, and a bladeless, rusted slip of a windmill strung with dead brush blown from a field of weeds, the man whose nickname was Preacher could not get the woman out of his mind, nor the scent of her fear and sweat and perfume while he wrestled with her on the ground, nor the expression on her face when she fired the .38 round through the top of his foot, exploding a jet of blood from the sole of his shoe. Her expression hadn't been one of shock or pity, as Preacher would have expected; it had been one of triumph.

No, that wasn't it, either. What he had seen in her face was loathing and disgust. She had fried his eyes with wasp spray, taken his weapon, shot him at close quarters, crushed his cell phone with her tire, and left him to bleed out like a piece of roadkill. She had also taken the time to call him bubba and inform him he had gotten off easy. She had done all this to a man considered by some, in terms of potential, to be one notch below the scourge of God.

The sheaf of bandages and tape on his calf smelled of medicinal salve and dried blood, but the pain pills he had eaten and the veterinarian's injection had numbed the nerves down to the ankle. The plaster cast on
his foot was another matter. It felt like wet cement on his skin, and the heat and sweat and friction it generated turned his wound into an aching misery. Twenty minutes ago, the electric power had failed and the fan on the table by his bed had died. Now he could feel the heat and humidity intensifying in the walls, the tin roof expanding, pinging like a banjo string.

“Put some more ice on my foot,” he said to Jesus, the Hispanic man who owned the house.

“It melted.”

“Did you call the power company?”

“We don't got a phone, boss. When it gets hot like this, we got brownouts. After the day gets cooler, the electricity goes back on.”

Preacher pressed the back of his head into the pillow and stared at the ceiling. The room was sweltering, and he could smell a growing stench from inside the hospital gown he had worn for two days. When he closed his eyes, he saw the girl's face again, and it filled him with both desire and resentment for the sexual passion she excited in him. Hugo had brought him his .45 auto. It was a 1911 model—simple in design, always dependable, effective in ways most people couldn't imagine. Preacher ran his hand along the bottom of his mattress and felt the hardness of the .45's frame. He thought of the girl, her deep-set eyes and her chestnut hair that was curled at the tips, and the way her tongue and teeth looked when she opened her mouth. He held the last image in his mind for a long time. “Tell your wife to get a sponge and wash me,” he said.

“I can bathe you.”

“I look like a
maricón
to you?” Preacher said, grinning.

“I'll ask her, boss.”

“Don't ask. Tell her. Hugo paid you enough money, didn't he? For you and your family and the veterinarian who left me with all this pain? Y'all got paid plenty, didn't you, Jesus? Or do you need more?”

“It's
bastante
.”

“Hugo gave you
bastante
to take care of the gringo. ‘
Bastante
' means ‘enough,' doesn't it? How should I take that? Enough to do what? Sell me out? Maybe tell your priest about me?” Preacher's eyes became hazy and amused.

Jesus's hair was as black and shiny as paint, barbered like a matador's, his skin pale, his hands small and his features frail, like those of a consumptive Spanish poet. He was not over thirty, but his daughter was at least ten and his overweight wife could have been his mother. Go figure, Preacher thought.

 

T
HAT EVENING THE
power was back on, but Preacher could not shake either his funk or his misgivings about his environment and his caretakers. “Your name is a form of irreverence,” he said to Jesus.

“Is a what?”

“Try to speak in complete sentences. Don't leave the subject out of your sentences. ‘Is' is a verb, not a noun. Your parents gave you the Lord's name, but you take money to hide a gringo and break the laws of your country.”

“I got to do what I got to do, boss.”

“Take me outside. Don't put me downwind of those goats, either.”

Jesus set up the collapsible wheelchair by the bedside and worked Preacher into the seat, then wheeled him out the front door into the lee of the house, Preacher's .45 resting on his lap. The view to the south was magnificent. The sky was lavender, the desert wastes bound not by earthy borders but by the arbitrary definitions of light and shadow. Few people would have found such a vista spiritually comforting, but Preacher did. The dry riverbeds were prehistoric, the flumes strewn with rocks the color of wizened apples and plums and apricots. Preacher saw wood that rain and wind and heat had carved and reshaped and hardened into bleached objects that could be mistaken for dinosaur bone. The desert was immutable, as encompassing as a deity, serene in its own magnitude, stretching into the past all the way back to Eden, a testimony to the predictability and design in all creation, a mistress beckoning to those who were unafraid to enter and conquer and use her.

“You ever hear of Herbert Spencer?” Preacher said.

“Who?” Jesus said.

“That's what I thought. Ever hear of Charles Darwin?”

“
Claro que sí.
”

“It was Herbert Spencer who understood how society worked, not
Darwin. Darwin wasn't a sociologist or philosopher. Can you relate to that?”

“Whatever you say, boss.”

“Why are you grinning?”

“I thought you was making a joke.”

“You think I need you to agree with me?”

“No, boss.”

“Because if you did, that would be an insult. But you're not that kind of man, right?”

Jesus lowered his head and folded his arms, his face drawn with fatigue and his inability to deal with Preacher's convoluted rhetoric. A purple haze was settling on the mesas and vast wasteland that lay to the south, the dust rising off the hardpan, the creosote brush darkening inside the gloom. Not far away, Jesus saw a coyote digging hard into a gopher's burrow, flinging the dirt backward with its nails, darting its muzzle into the hole.

“You got any family, people who can help take care of you, boss?” Jesus said.

It was a question he shouldn't have asked. Preacher lifted his head the way a fish might when feeding on the surface of a lake. There was an unexpected and unreadable bead of light in his eyes, like a damp kitchen match flaring on the striker. “I look like a man with no family?”

“I thought maybe there was somebody you wanted me to call.”

“A man inseminates a woman. The woman squeezes the kid out of her womb. So now we've got a father and a mother and a child. That's a family. You're saying I'm different somehow?”

“I didn't mean nothing, boss.”

“Go back inside.”

“When it's cool, the mosquitoes come out. They'll pick you up and carry you off, boss.”

Preacher's expression seemed to go out of joint.

“I got you, boss. When you're ready to eat, my little girl made some soup and tortillas special for you,” Jesus said.

Jesus went through the back door, not speaking until he was well inside the house. Preacher watched the coyote dip a gopher out of the hole and run heavily and stiff-necked across the hardpan, the gopher
flopping from its jaws. Jesus's wife came to the window and stared at Preacher's silhouette, her fist pressed to her mouth. Her husband pulled her away and closed the curtain, even though the house was superheated by the propane cooking stove in the kitchen.

In the morning a windburned man with an orange beard and blue tats on his upper arms delivered a compact car for Preacher's use and then left with a companion in a second vehicle. Jesus's little girl brought Preacher his lunch to him on a tray. She set it on his lap but did not go away.

“My pants are on the chair. Take a half dollar out of the pocket,” he said.

The girl took two quarters from his trousers and closed her palm on them. Her face was oval and brown, like that of her mother, her hair dark brown, a blue ribbon tied in it. “You ain't got no family?” she asked.

“You ask too many questions for a person your age. Somebody should give you a grammar book, too.”

“I'm sorry you was shot.”

Preacher's eyes lifted from the girl's face to the kitchen, where Jesus and his wife were washing dishes in a pan of greasy water, their backs to Preacher. “I was in a car accident. Nobody shot me,” he said.

She touched the cast with the ends of her fingers. “We got ice now. I'll put it on your foot,” she said.

So Jesus had opened his mouth in front of his wife and daughter, Preacher thought. So the little girl could tell all her friends a gringo with two bullet holes in him was paying money to stay at their house.

What to do? he asked himself, staring at the ceiling.

Late that afternoon he had a feverish dream. He was firing a Thompson submachine gun, the stock and cylindrical magazine turned sideways so the recoil would jerk the barrel horizontally rather than upward, directing the angle of fire parallel to the ground rather than above the shapes he saw in the darkness.

He awoke abruptly into the warm yellow glare of the room and wasn't sure where he was. He could hear flies buzzing and a goat's bell tinkling and smell the odor of water that had gone sour in a cattle pond. He picked up a damp cloth from a bowl on his nightstand and wiped his face with it. He sat on the side of the mattress, the blood
draining down into his foot, waiting for the images in his dream to leave his mind.

Through the kitchen doorway he could see Jesus and his wife and little girl eating at their kitchen table. They were eating tortillas they'd rolled pickled vegetables inside, their faces leaning over their bowls, crumbs falling from their mouths. They made him think of Indians from an earlier era eating inside a cave.

Why'd Jesus have to blab in front of the kid? Preacher wondered. Maybe he plans to blab to a much wider audience anyway, maybe to the
jefe
and his khaki-clad half-breed dirtbags down at the jail.

Preacher could feel the coldness of the .45's frame protruding from under the mattress. His crutches were propped against a wood chair in the corner. Through the window he could see the tan compact Hugo had ordered delivered for his use.

The veterinarian was coming back that evening. The veterinarian and Jesus and his wife and the little girl would all be in the house at one time.

This crap was on Hugo Cistranos, not him, Preacher thought. Just like the gig behind the stucco church. It was Hugo who'd blown it. Preacher hadn't invented how the world worked. The coyote's ability to dig the gopher out of its burrow was hardwired into the coyote's brain. A hundred-million-year-old floodplain disappearing into infinity contained only one form of meaningful artifact: the mineralized bones of all the mammals, reptiles, and birds that had done whatever was necessary in order to survive. If anyone doubted that, he needed only to sink the steel bucket on a backhoe into one of those ancient riverbeds that looked like calcified putty in the sunset.

Jesus brought Preacher his supper at dusk.

“What time is the vet going to be here?” Preacher asked.

“No is vet.
Es médico,
boss. He gonna be here soon.”

“Answer the question: When will he be here?”

“Maybe fifteen minutes. You like the food okay?”

“Hand me my crutches.”

“You getting up?”

Preacher's upturned face looked like the edge of a hatchet.

“I'll get them, boss,” Jesus said.

Jesus's wife had hand-washed Preacher's trousers and shirt and socks and underwear, replaced his coins and keys and pocketknife in the pockets, and hung them neatly on the wood chair by the wall. Preacher worked his way to the chair, gathered up his clothes, and sat back down on his mattress. Then he slowly dressed himself, keeping his mind empty of the events that would take place in the house within the next few minutes.

He had not tucked in his shirt, allowing it to hang outside his trousers. Through the front window, he saw the veterinarian's paint-skinned truck clattering over the ruts in the road, churning a cloud of fine white dust in the air. Preacher slid the .45 from under his mattress and pushed it inside the back of his belt, then pulled his shirt over the grips. The veterinarian parked in back and cut the engine, just as the rooster tail of dust from his truck broke across the front of the house and drifted through the screens. Preacher lifted himself onto his crutches and began working his way toward the kitchen, where Jesus and his wife and little girl sat at the table, waiting for the veterinarian, who clutched a sweating six-pack of Coca-Cola.

The veterinarian was unshaved and wore a frayed suit coat that was too tight on him and a tie with stains on it and a white shirt missing a button at the navel. He suffered from myopia, which caused him to squint and to furrow his brow, and as a consequence the villagers looked upon him as a studious and educated man worthy of respect.

“You look very good in your clean clothes, señor. Do you not want me to change your bandages? I brought you more sedatives to help you sleep,” the veterinarian said to Preacher.

The veterinarian was framed against the screen door, the late red sun creating a nimbus around his uncut hair and the stubble on his jowls.

Preacher steadied his weight and eased his right hand from the grip on the crutch. He moved his hand behind him slowly, so as not to lose his balance, his knuckles touching the heaviness of the .45 stuck down in his belt. “I don't think I'll need anything tonight,” he said.

They all stared at him in the silence, the bare lightbulb overhead splintering into yellow needles, reducing the differences in their lives to pools of shadow at their feet.
Now, now, now,
Preacher heard a voice in his head saying.