Billy Bob and Hackberry Holland Ebook Boxed Set (44 page)

Hackberry straightened up and closed the door. “I think he's telling the truth,” he said.

“You psychic with these guys?”

“With him I am. He doesn't have any reason to lie.”

Clawson took off his large octagonal glasses and wiped them with a Kleenex, staring down the street, a deep wrinkle between his eyes. “Can we go inside?”

“It's full of cigarette smoke. What'd you do to Danny Boy?”

“I didn't do anything to him. He's drunk. He fell down. When I picked him up, he started to swing on me. But I didn't do anything to him.” Clawson opened the back door and used a handcuff key to free Danny Boy from the D-ring inset in the floor, then wrapped his fingers under Danny Boy's arm and pulled him from the backseat. “Get going,” he said.

“You want me to hang around, Sheriff?” Danny Boy said.

“Did I tell you to get out of here?” Clawson said. He pushed Danny Boy, then kicked him in the butt.

“Whoa,” Hackberry said.

“Whoa what?” Clawson said.

“You need to dial it down, Mr. Clawson.”

“It's Agent Clawson.”

Hackberry was breathing through his nose. He saw Pam Tibbs at the office window. He turned to Danny Boy. “Go down to Grogan's and put a couple on my tab,” he said. “The operational word is ‘couple,' Danny.”

“I don't need a drink. I'm gonna get something to eat and go back to my place. If I hear anything on Pete, I'll tell you,” Danny Boy said.

Hackberry turned and started back toward his office, ignoring Clawson's presence. He could hear the flag popping in the breeze and the flag chain tinkling against the metal pole.

“We're not done,” Clawson said. “Last night somebody made two nine-one-one calls from a pay phone outside San Antonio. I'll play you part of it.”

He removed a small recorder from his pants pocket and clicked it on. The voice on the recording sounded like that of a drunk man or someone with a speech defect. “Tell the FBI there's a whack out on a girl name of Vikki Gaddis. They're gonna kill her and a soldier. It's about
those Thai women that got murdered.” Clawson clicked off the recorder. “Know the voice?” he said.

“No,” Hackberry said.

“I think the caller had a pencil clenched between his teeth and was loaded on top of it. Can you detect an accent?”

“I'd say he's not from around here.”

“Here's another piece of information: One of our forensic guys went the extra mile on the postmortem of the Thai females. They had China white in their stomachs, balloons full of it, the purest I've ever seen. Some of the balloons had ruptured in the women's stomachs prior to mortality. I wonder if you stumbled into a storage area rather than a graveyard.”

“Stumbled?”

“English lit wasn't my strong suit. You want to be serious here or not?”

“I don't buy that the place behind the church was a storage area. That makes no sense.”

“Then what does?”

“I've been told of your personal loss, sir. I think I can appreciate the level of anger you must have to deal with. But you're not going to verbally abuse or put your foot on anybody in this county again. We're done here.”

“Where do you get off talking about my personal life? Where do you get off talking about my daughter, you sonofabitch?”

Just then the dispatcher Maydeen stepped outside and lit a cigarette. She wore a deputy's uniform and had fat arms and big breasts and wide hips, and her lipstick looked like a flattened rose on her mouth. “Hack doesn't let us smoke in the building,” she said, smiling from ear to ear as she inhaled deep into her lungs.

 

P
REACHER
J
ACK
C
OLLINS
paid the cabdriver the fare from the airstrip to the office-and-condo building that faced Galveston Bay. But rather than go immediately into the building, he paused on his crutches and stared across Seawall Boulevard at the waves folding on the beach, each wave rilling with sand and yellowed vegetation and dead shellfish and
seaweed matted with clusters of tiny crabs and Portuguese men-of-war whose tentacles could wrap around a horse's leg and sting it to its knees.

There was a storm breaking on the southern horizon like a great cloud of green gas forked with lightning that made no sound. The air had turned the color of tarnished brass as the barometer had dropped, and Preacher could taste the salt in the wind and smell the shrimp that had been caught inside the waves and left stranded on the sand among the ruptured blue air sacs of the jellyfish. The humidity was as bright as spun glass, and within a minute's time it glazed his forearms and face and was turned into a cool burn by the wind, not unlike a lover's tongue moving across the skin.

Preacher entered a glass door painted with the words
REDSTONE SECURITY SERVICE
. A receptionist looked up from her desk and smiled pleasantly at him. “Tell Mr. Rooney Jack is here to see him,” he said.

“Do you have an appointment, sir?”

“What time is it?”

The receptionist glanced at a large grandfather clock, one whose face was inset with Roman numerals. “It's four-forty-seven,” she said.

“That's the time of my appointment with Mr. Rooney. You can tell him that.”

Her hand moved toward the phone uncertainly, then stopped.

“That was just my poor joke. Ma'am, these crutches aren't getting any more comfortable,” Preacher said.

“Just a moment.” She lifted the phone receiver and pushed a button. “Mr. Rooney, Jack is here to see you.” There was a beat. “He didn't give it.” Another beat, this one longer. “Sir, what's your last name?”

“My full name is Jack Collins, no middle initial.”

After the receptionist relayed the information, there was a silence in the room almost as loud as the waves bursting against the beach. Then she replaced the receiver in the cradle. Whatever thoughts she was thinking were locked behind her eyes. “Mr. Rooney says to go on up. The elevator is to your left.”

“He tell you to call somebody?” Preacher asked.

“I'm not sure I know what you mean, sir.”

“You did your job, ma'am. Don't worry about it. But I'd better not
hear that elevator come up behind me with the wrong person in it,” Preacher said.

The receptionist stared straight ahead for perhaps three seconds, picked up her purse, and went out the front door, her dress switching back and forth across her calves.

When Preacher stepped out of the elevator, he saw a man in a beige suit and pink western shirt sitting in a swivel chair behind a huge desk, framed against a glass wall that looked out onto the bay. On the desk was a big clear plastic jar of green-and-blue candy sticks, each striped stick wrapped in cellophane. His hips swelled out at the beltline and gave the sense that he was melting in his swivel chair. He had sandy hair and a small Irish mouth that was downturned at the corners. His skin was dusted with liver spots, some of them dark, almost purple around the edges, as though his soul exuded sickness through his pores. “Help you?” he said.

“Maybe.”

Down on the beach, swimmers were getting out of the water, dragging their inner tubes with them, a lifeguard standing in his elevated chair, blowing a whistle, pointing his finger at a triangular fin whizzing through a swell at incredible speed.

“Can I sit down?” Preacher said.

“Yes, sir, go right ahead,” Arthur Rooney said.

“Should I call you Artie or Mr. Rooney?”

“Whatever you want.”

“Hugo Cistranos work for you?”

“He did. When I had an investigative agency in New Orleans. But not now.”

“I think he does.”

“Sir?”

“Do I need to speak louder?”

“Hugo Cistranos is not with me any longer. That's what I'm saying to you. What's the issue, Mr. Collins?” Artie Rooney cleared his throat as though the last word had caught in his larynx.

“You know who I am?”

“I've heard of you. Nickname is Preacher, right?”

“Yes, sir, some do call me that with regularity, friends and such.”

“We just moved into this office. How'd you know I was here?”

“Made a couple of calls. Know that song ‘I Get Around' by the Beach Boys? I get around, albeit on crutches. A woman put a couple of holes in me.”

“Sorry to hear about that.”

“Some other people and I got stuck with a piece of wet work. Supposedly, it was initiated by a little fellow who runs a skin joint for middle-aged titty babies. Supposedly, this little fellow doesn't want to come up with the money to pay his tab. His name is Nick Dolan. Know who I'm talking about?”

“I've known Nick for thirty-five years. He had a floating casino in New Orleans.”

Preacher chewed on a hangnail and removed a piece of skin from his tongue. “I got to thinking about this little fellow, the one with the titty-baby joint about halfway between Austin and San Antone. Why would a fellow like that have a bunch of Asian women shot to death?”

Artie Rooney had crossed one leg over his knee and propped one hand stiffly on the edge of his desk, his stomach swelling over his belt. “You're talking about that big slaughter down by the border? I'm not up on that, Mr. Collins. To be frank, I'm a little lost here.”

“I'm not a mister, so don't call me that again.”

“I didn't mean to be impolite or insult you.”

“What makes you think you have the power to offend me?”

“Pardon?”

“You have a hearing problem? Why is it you think you're so important I care about your opinion of me?”

Rooney's eyes drifted to the elevator door.

“I wouldn't expect the cav'ry if I were you,” Preacher said.

Rooney picked up his phone and pushed a button. After a few seconds, he replaced the receiver without speaking into it and leaned back in his chair. He rested his elbow on the arm of the chair, his chin on his thumb and forefinger, his pulse beating visibly in his throat. There was a bloodless white rim around the edge of his nostrils, as though he were breathing refrigerated air. “What'd you do with my secretary?”

“A little Mexican girl across the river said I might have to go to hell. You want me to tell you what I did?”

“To the girl? You did something to a little girl is what you're telling me?” Rooney's hand seemed to flutter at his mouth, then he lowered it to his lap.

“I think you worked some kind of scam on this Dolan fellow. I'm not sure what it is, exactly, but it's got your shit-prints on it. You owe me a lot of money, Mr. Rooney. If I'm going to hell, if I'm already there, in fact, how much you reckon my soul is worth? Don't put your hand on that phone again. You owe me a half million dollars.”

“I owe you
what
?”

“I've got a gift. I can always tell a coward. I can always tell a liar, too. I think you're both.”

“What are you doing? Stay away from me.”

Out on the beach, a mother up to her hips in the water was scooping her child from a wave, running with it up the incline, her dress ballooning around her, her face filled with panic.

“Don't get up. If you get up, that's going to make it a whole lot worse,” Preacher said.

“What are you doing with that? For God's sakes, man.”

“My soul is going to be in the flames because of you. You invoke God's name now? Put your hand on the blotter and shut your eyes.”

“I'll get you the money.”

“Right now, in your heart, you believe what you're saying. But soon as I'm gone, your words will be ashes in the wind. Spread your fingers and press down real hard. Do it. Do it now. Or I'll rake this across your face and then across your throat.”

With his eyes tightly shut, Artie Rooney obeyed the man who loomed above him on crutches. Then Preacher Jack Collins laid the edge of his barber's razor across Rooney's little finger and mashed down on the back of the razor with both hands.

N
ICK HAD HEARD
of blackouts but was never quite sure what constituted one. How could somebody walk around doing things and have no memory of his deeds? To Nick, the terms “blackout” and “copout” seemed very similar.

But after Hugo Cistranos had left Nick's backyard, telling him he had until three o'clock the next afternoon to sign over 25 percent of his strip joint and restaurant, Nick had gone downstairs to the game room, bolted the door so the children wouldn't see him, and gotten sloshed to the eyes.

When he woke in the morning on the floor, sick and trembling and smelling of his own visceral odors, he remembered watching a cartoon show around midnight and fumbling with a deadbolt. Had he been sleepwalking? He stood at the bottom of the stairwell and stared up the stairs. The door was still locked. Thank God neither his wife nor the children had seen him drunk. Nick didn't believe a father or husband could behave worse than one who was dissolute in front of his wife and children.

Then he saw his car keys on the Ping-Pong table and began to experience flashes of clarity inside his head, like shards of a mirror recon
structing themselves behind his eyes, each one containing an image that grew larger and larger and filled him with terror: Nick driving a car, Nick in a phone booth, Nick talking to an emergency dispatcher, headlights swerving in front of his windshield, car horns blowing angrily.

Had he gone somewhere to make a 911 call? He went upstairs to shower and shave and put on fresh clothes. His wife and children were gone, and in the silence he could hear the wind rattling the dry fronds of his palm trees against the eaves. From the bathroom window, the sunlight trapped inside his swimming pool wobbled and refracted like the blue-white flame of an acetylene torch. The entire exterior world seemed superheated, sharp-edged, a garden of cactuses and thorn bushes, scented not with flowers but with tar pots and diesel fumes.

What had he done last night?

Dropped the dime on Hugo? Dropped the dime on himself?

He sat at his breakfast table, eating aspirin and vitamin B, washing it down with orange juice straight out of the carton, his forehead oily with perspiration. He went into his office, hoping to find relief in the deep, cool ambience and solitude of his bookshelves and mahogany furniture and the dark drapes on the windows and the carpet that sank an inch under his feet. A bright red digital 11 was blinking on his message machine for his dedicated phone-and-fax line. The first message was from his wife, Esther: “We're at the mall. I let you sleep. We have to talk. Did you go out in the middle of the night? What the hell is wrong with you?”

The other messages were from the restaurant and the club:

“Cheyenne says she's not going on the pole the same time as Farina. I can't deal with these bitches, Nick. Are you coming in?”

“Uncle Charley's Meats just delivered us seventy pounds of spoiled chicken. That's the second time this week. They say the problem is ours. They off-loaded on the dock, and we didn't carry it in. I can't put it in the box, and it's smelling up the whole kitchen.”

“Me again. They were pulling each other's hair in the dressing room.”

“The code guy was here. He says we have to put a third sink in. He says he found a dead mouse in the dishwasher drain, too.”

“Nick, there were a couple of guys in here last night I had trouble
with. One guy had navy tats and a beard like a fire alarm. He said he was gonna be working for us. I kicked them out, but they said they'd be back. I thought maybe you needed a heads-up. Who is this asshole?”

“Hey, it's me. There's some flake on top of the toilet tank in the women's can. I had Rabbit clean the shitters spotless early this morning. Farina was in there ten minutes ago. When she came out, she looked like she'd packed dry ice up her nose. Nick, babysitting crazy whores is not in my curriculum vitae. She wants your home number. You want me to give it to her? I can't process these kinds of problems.”

Nick held down the delete button and erased every message on the machine, played and unplayed alike.

It was seventeen minutes to one o'clock. Hugo's driver would be at the house at three
P.M
. to pick up the signed documents that would make Hugo Cistranos his business partner. The 25 percent ownership ceded to Hugo would of course be only the first step in the cannibalization of everything Nick owned. Nick sat in the darkness, his ears filled with a sound like wind blowing in a tunnel.

He had never confessed to anyone the fear he had felt in the schoolyard in the Ninth Ward. The black kids who took his lunch money from him, who shoved him down on the asphalt, seemed to target him and no one else as though they recognized both difference and weakness in him that they exorcised in themselves by degrading and forcing him to go hungry through the lunch hour and the rest of the afternoon, somehow freeing themselves of their own burden.

But why Nick? Because he was a Jew? Because his grandfather had adopted an Irish name? Because his parents took him to temple in a neighborhood full of simpletons who would later believe
The Passion of the Christ
was solid evidence that his people were guilty of deicide?

Maybe.

Or maybe they smelled fear on his skin the way a barracuda smells blood issuing from a wounded grouper.

Fear, the acronym for “fuck everything and run,” he thought sadly. That had been the history of his young life. And still was.

He punched his wife's cell phone number into the console on his desk.

“Nick?” her voice said through the speakerphone.

“Where are you?” he said.

“Still at the mall. We're about to have lunch.”

“Drop the kids at the country club and come home. We'll pick them up later.”

“What is it? Don't lie to me, either.”

“I need to show you where some things are.”

“What things? What are you talking about?”

“Come home, Esther.”

After he hung up, he wondered if his need was as naked as it sounded. He sat in a deep, stuffed leather chair and rested his forehead on his fingertips. It had been raining the night he met Esther twenty-three years ago. She was waiting for the streetcar under the steel colonnade at the corner of Canal and St. Charles Avenue, in front of the Pearl, where she worked as a night cashier after studying all day in the practical nursing program at UNO. There were raindrops in her hair, and in the neon glow of the restaurant's windows, she made him think of a multicolored star in a constellation.

“There's a storm blowing off Lake Pontchartrain. You shouldn't be out here,” he had said to her.

“Who are you?” she replied.

“I'm Nick Dolan. You heard of me?”

“Yeah, you're a gangster.”

“No, I'm not. I'm a gambler. I run a cardroom for Didoni Giacano.”

“That's what I said. You're a gangster.”

“I like ‘white-collar criminal' better. Will you accept a ride from a white-collar criminal?”

She had on too much lipstick, and when she twisted her mouth into a button and fixed her eyes speculatively on Nick's, his heart swelled in a way that made him take a deep breath.

“I live Uptown, just off Prytania, not far from the movie theater,” she said.

“That's what I thought. You are definitely an Uptown lady,” he said. Then he remembered his car was in the shop and he had taken a cab to work. “I don't exactly have my car with me. I'll call a cab. Could I borrow a dime? I don't have any coins.”

It was 1:26
P.M
. when Nick heard Esther pull into the driveway and unlock the front door. “Where are you?” she called.

“In the office.”

“Why are you sitting in the dark?” she said.

“Did you lock the front?”

“I don't remember. Did you go somewhere last night? Did you get into some trouble? I looked at the car. There're no dents in it.”

“Sit down.”

“Is that a gun?” she said, her voice rising.

“I keep it in the desk. Esther, sit down. Please. Just listen to me. Everything we own is in this file case. It's all alphabetized. We have a half-dozen equity accounts at Vanguard, tax-free stuff at Sit Mutuals, and two offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands. All the treasury bonds are short-term. Interest rates are in the dumps right now, but by next year gas prices will drive bonds down and rates up, and there'll be some good buys out there.”

“I think you're having a nervous breakdown.”

He got up from his chair and took both of her hands in his. “Sit down and listen to me like you've never listened before. No, no, don't talk, just listen, Esther.”

She sat on the big square dark red leather footstool by the leather chair and watched his face. He sat back down, leaning forward, his gaze fixed on her shoes, his hands still clasping hers.

“I got involved with some evil men,” he said. “Not just lowlifes but guys that got no parameters.”

“Which guys?”

“One was a button man for the Giacanos. His name is Hugo Cistranos. He used to work for Artie Rooney. He's for hire, on the edge of things. Hugo is kind of like a virus. Money has got germs on it. You do business, sometimes you pick up germs.”

“What's this guy got to do with the restaurant or the nightclub?”

“Hugo did something really bad, something I didn't think even Hugo would do.”

“What does that have to do with you?” she said, cutting him off, maybe too conveniently, maybe still not wanting to know how many pies Nick had a finger in.

“I tell you about it, you become a party to it. Hugo says it's on me. He says I ordered him to do it. He's trying to blackmail us. He might kill me, Esther.”

She was breathing faster, as though his words were using up the oxygen in the room. “This man Hugo is claiming he killed somebody on your orders?”

“More than one.”

“More than—”

“I have to deal with it this afternoon, Esther. By three o'clock.”

“Someone may kill you?”

“Maybe.”

“They'll have to kill me, too.”

“No, this is the wrong way to think. You have to take the children to the river. Hugo has no reason to hurt you or them. We mustn't give him any reason to do that.”

“Why does he want to kill you if he wants to blackmail you?”

“Because I'm not going to pay him anything.”

“What else are you planning, Nick?”

“I'm not sure.”

“I see it in your face. That's why you have the gun.”

“Go to the river with the children.”

“They'll have to walk in my blood to hurt our family. You understand that?” she said.

 

A
T THREE P.M
. sharp, Nick walked out to the curb and waited. His neighborhood was marbled with shadows from the rain clouds that had moved across the sun. A blue Chrysler came around the corner and approached him slowly, the tires clicking with gravel embedded in the treads, like the nails on a feral animal, the driver's face obscured by a dark green reflection of trees on the windshield. The Chrysler pulled to the curb, and the driver, a man with a wild orange beard, put down the passenger window. “Howdy,” he said.

“I tried to call Hugo and save you a trip, but he's not answering his cell,” Nick said. “You got another number for him?”

“I'm supposed to be picking up some signed contracts,” the driver
said, ignoring the question. His teeth were wide-set, his complexion florid, like that of a man with perpetual sunburn, his wrists relaxed on the crosspiece of the steering wheel. He wore shined needle-point boots and a long-sleeve print shirt tucked inside beltless white golf slacks; the hair on his chest grew onto the ironed-back lapels of his shirt. “No signed contracts, huh?”

“No signed contracts,” Nick said.

The driver looked into space, then opened his cell phone and dialed a number. “It's Liam. He wants to talk to you. No, he doesn't have them. He didn't say why. He's standing right here in front of his house. That's where I am now. Hugo, talk to the guy.”

The driver leaned over and handed Nick the cell phone through the window, smiling, as though the two of them were friends and had mutual interests. Nick put the cell phone to his ear and walked into his yard between two lime trees bursting with fruit. He could feel the humidity and heat rising from the St. Augustine grass into his face. He could hear a bumblebee buzzing close to his head. “I haven't said no to your offer, but I need a sit-down before I finalize anything.”

“It's not an offer, Nicholas. ‘Offer' is the wrong word.”

“You used the name of this guy Preacher. He's the guy who's supposed to give me cold sweats, right? If he's a factor, he should be there, too.”

“Be where?”

“At the sit-down. I want to meet him.”

“If you meet Jack Collins, it'll be about two seconds before you become worm food.”

“You're saying you can't control this guy? I'm supposed to give you twenty-five percent of two businesses so I can be safe from a guy you can't control?”

“You're not giving me anything. You owe me over a hundred thou. I owe that to other people. If you don't pay the vig, the vig falls on me. I don't pay other people's vig, Nick.”

“Was your driver at my club last night?”

“How would I know?”

“A guy answering his description got thrown out. He was shooting off his mouth with my manager. He claimed he was going to be working
there. You want the sit-down or not? You called this guy Collins a religious nut. If I get to him first, I'll tell him that.”

There was a long pause. “Maybe your wife gave you a blow job this morning and convinced you you're not a pitiful putz. The truth is otherwise, Nick. You're still a pitiful putz. But I'll call Preacher. And I'll also have those transfers of title rewritten. Forget twenty-five percent. The new partnership will be fifty-fifty. Give me some shit and it will go to sixty-forty. Guess who will get the forty.”