Billy Bob and Hackberry Holland Ebook Boxed Set (69 page)

By ten
A.M
. Hackberry had left two messages with Riser. He opened his desk drawer and removed a thick brown envelope that contained the eight-by-ten crime-scene photos taken behind the church at Chapala Crossing. Besides their morbid subject matter, the photos contained a second kind of peculiarity: None of the uniformed deputies, the paramedics, the federal personnel, or the forensic team from Austin wore any expression. In photo after photo, their faces were empty of emotion, their mouths down-hooked at the corners, as though they were playing roles in a film that was not supposed to make use of sound or any display of feeling. The only photography he could compare it with was the black-and-white news footage taken during the mass burials at the death camps liberated by American forces in early 1945.

He returned the photos to the drawer.

What had happened to Pete Flores and Vikki Gaddis? What was the next move Preacher Jack Collins would make? What kind of cage could contain the evil that had perpetrated the slaughter at Chapala Crossing?

 

A
T TWO-THIRTY THAT
afternoon Danny Boy Lorca was driving his converted army-surplus flatbed truck up the two-lane from the Mexican border, the wind as hot as a blowtorch through the window, the unmuffled roar of the engine shaking the cab, his fuel gauge ticking on empty. He saw the hitchhikers in the distance, standing on the roadside between two low hills whose sides had been scorched by a wildfire. There was no other traffic on the road. The outlines of the two hitchhikers were warping in the heat, the glaze on the road like a pool of tar. As he drew closer, he realized one of the hitchhikers was a woman. A guitar
case rested by her foot. Her denim shirt was pasted to her skin with perspiration. The man next to her wore a coned-up straw hat and a shirt he had sawed off at the armpits. The top of one arm was wrinkled with scar tissue that looked like the material in an overheated lampshade.

Danny Boy pulled to the side of the road, glancing warily in the rearview mirror. “Y'all came back,” he said through the passenger window.

“Will you give us a ride?” the woman asked.

Danny Boy never answered questions whose answer seemed obvious, in the same way he did not say hello or goodbye to people when their actions or presence were obvious.

Pete Flores swung a duffel bag onto the truck bed and placed Vikki's guitar case between it and the cab. He opened the passenger door, blowing on his hand after he did, waiting for Vikki to get inside. “Wow,” he said, looking at his hand. “How long has your truck been in the sun?”

“It's a hunnerd and seven,” Danny Boy said.

“Thank you for stopping,” Vikki said.

Pete climbed inside and shut the door. He started to offer his hand, but Danny Boy was concentrating on the wide-angle mirror.

“You know the cops are looking for you? Federal agents and state people and Sheriff Holland, too. A federal agent got killed.”

“I reckon they found us,” Pete said.

Danny Boy pulled back onto the road, his shirt open on his leathery chest, his neck beaded with dirt rings. “Maybe this ain't the best place for y'all.”

“We don't have any other place to go,” Pete said.

“If it was me, I'd get on a freight and go to Canada and follow the harvest, maybe. A cook on them crews can make good money. I'd find a place that ain't been ruined and settle down.”

Pete stuck his arm out the window, turning his palm into the airflow so it would vane up his arm and inside his shirt. “We're working on it,” he said.

“Them people you got mixed up with? They're out there.”

“Which people? Out where?” Vikki asked.

“They're out there at night. They come up the arroyos. They ain't wets, either. They go past my place. I see them in the field.”

“Those are harmless farmworkers,” Pete said.

“No, they ain't. See the sky. We had one night of hard rain, the way it used to be. But we didn't get no more. Them rain gods were giving us a chance. But they ain't coming back while all these drug dealers and killers are here. There's a hole in the earth, and down inside it is the place where all the corn came from. That's where all power comes from. Don't nobody know where the hole is anymore.”

Vikki looked sideways at Pete.

“Tell her,” Danny Boy said.

“Tell her what?”

“That I ain't drunk.”

“She knows that. Danny Boy is okay, Vikki.” Pete gazed out the window, the wind climbing up his bare arm, puffing inside his shirt. “That's Ouzel Flagler's place. I wish I hadn't been there when some bad hombres came in.”

“That's where you met them guys?”

“Probably. I'm not sure. I was in a blackout most of the day. I know I bought mescal from Ouzel that day. Ouzel's mescal always leaves its mark, like an earth grader has rolled over your head.”

Ouzel Flagler's brick bungalow, cracked down the middle, with a plank bar built on one side of the house, was veiled briefly by a cloud of dust blowing off the hardpan, balls of tumbleweed skipping across its roof. Under a white sun, amid the tangled wire and all the rusted construction equipment Ouzel had hauled onto his property, a cluster of rheumy-eyed longhorns was standing by a recessed pool of rainwater, the sides of the depression strung with green feces.

“Don't look at it,” Vikki said.

“At what?”

“That place. It's not part of your life anymore.”

“What I did that night is on me, not on Ouzel.”

“Will you stop talking about it, Pete? Will you just stop talking about it?”

“I got to get gas up yonder,” Danny Boy said.

“No, not here,” Vikki said.

Danny Boy looked at her, his eyes sleepy, the muscles in his face flaccid. “The needle is below the E. It's three miles to the next station.”

“Why didn't you tell us you were out of gas when we got in?” she said.

Danny Boy shifted down and angled the truck off the road into the filling station, steering with his hands in the ten-two position, bent slightly forward like a student driver beginning his first solo, his face impassive. “You can walk across the highway and maybe catch a ride while I'm inside,” he said. “I got to use the restroom. I forgot to tell you about that when you got in, even though it's my truck. If you don't have a ride by the time I leave, I'll pick y'all up again.”

“We'll wait in the truck. I'm sorry,” Vikki said.

Danny Boy went inside the station and paid for ten dollars' gas in advance.

“Why were you getting on his case?” Pete said.

“Ouzel Flagler's brother owns this station.”

“Who cares?”

“Pete, you never learn. You just never learn.”

“Learn what? About Ouzel? He has Buerger's disease. He's a sad person. He sells a little mescal. What's the big deal? You stood up to that killer. I'm really proud of you. We don't have to be afraid anymore.”

“Please shut up. For God's sake, for once just shut up.” She blotted the humidity out of her eyes with a Kleenex and stared at the highway winding into the sun's white brilliance. The terrain, untouched by shade or shadows, glaring and coarse and rock-strewn, made her think of a dry seabed and huge anthills or a planet that had already gone dead.

Danny Boy pulled the gas spigot out of the tank and clanked it back into place on the pump, then used the outside washroom and climbed back into the cab, his face still wet from a rinse in the lavatory. “On a day like this, ain't nothing like cold water,” he said.

None of them took note of the man on the other side of the black glare on the filling station window. He had just come out of the back of the store and was drinking a soda, upending it, his neck swollen by a chain of tumors. His head seemed recessed into his shoulders, reminiscent of a perched carrion bird's. He finished his soda, dropped the can into the wastebasket, and seemed to think for a long time. Then he picked up the telephone.

P
ETE AND
V
IKKI
had climbed down from Danny Boy Lorca's truck cab, retrieved a duffel bag and guitar case from the truck bed, and entered the building dehydrated, sunburned, and windblown with road grit. Their clothes stiff with salt, they sat down in front of Hackberry's desk as though his air-conditioned office were the end of a long journey out of the Sahara. They told him of their encounter with Preacher Jack Collins and Bobby Lee and the man named T-Bone and the fact that Collins had let them go.

“We got on the bus early this morning, but it broke down after twenty miles. So we hitchhiked,” Pete said.

“Collins just cut you loose? He didn't harm you in any way?” Hackberry let his gaze linger on Vikki Gaddis.

“It happened just like we told you,” Vikki said.

“Where do you think Collins went?” Hackberry asked.

“Collins is y'all's business now. Tell us what you want us to do,” Pete said.

“I haven't quite thought it through,” Hackberry said.

“Repeat that, please?” Vikki said.

“I've got two empty cells. Go up the iron stairs in back and check them out.”

“You're offering us jail cells?” she said.

“The doors would stay unlocked. You can come and go as you like.”

“I don't believe this,” she said.

“You can use the restroom and the shower down here,” Hackberry said.

“Pete, would you say something?” Vikki said.

“Maybe it's not a bad idea,” he replied.

Pam Tibbs came into the office and leaned against the doorjamb. “I'll go with you, honey.”

“With luck, we can probably find an iron staircase by ourselves,” Vikki said. “Excuse me, I forgot to call you ‘honey.'”

“Suit yourself, ma'am,” Pam said. She waited until they were out of earshot before she spoke again. “How do you read all that stuff about Collins and Bobby Lee Motree and this character T-Bone?”

“Who knows? Collins probably has psychotic episodes.”

“Vikki Gaddis has a mouth on her, doesn't she?”

“They're just kids,” Hackberry said.

“That doesn't mean you should put your ass in a sling for them.”

“Wouldn't dream of it.”

Maydeen Stoltz walked into the room. “Ethan Riser is on the phone. Want me to take a message?”

“Where's he calling from?” Hackberry asked.

“He didn't say.”

“Ask him if he's in town.”

“Like that? ‘Are you in town?'”

“Yeah, tell him I want to ask him to dinner. Would you please do it, Maydeen?”

She went back into the dispatcher's office, then returned. “He's in San Antonio.”

“Put him through.”

“I'm going to get a job on a spaceship,” she said.

A moment later, the light on Hackberry's desk phone went on, and he picked up the receiver. “Hey, Ethan. How are you?”

“You called me by my first name.”

“I'm trying to get a perspective on a couple of things. Is there any development with Nick Dolan's situation?”

“Not a lot.”

“Have y'all interviewed him yet?”

“No comment.”

“So he's still bait?”

“I wouldn't use that particular term.”

“Hang on.” Hackberry covered the receiver with his palm. “Keep those kids out of here.”

“I'm kind of busy,” Riser said. “What can I help you with?”

“How valuable is Pete Flores to you?”

“He's the weak sister in the mass killing. He can give us names. It takes just one thread to pull a sweater loose.”

“I don't think ‘weak sister' is a good term for a kid like that.”

“Maybe not. But Flores made his choice when he signed on with the bunch who murdered those women and girls. We can use him to testify against the others. That means he goes into custody as a material witness.”

“Custody? In the can?”

“That's a certainty. Flores has made an art form out of flight.”

“How about witness protection?”

“Maybe down the line. But he cooperates or he takes the weight for the others. Let's be honest. These guys running skag and meth and girls into the country are Mobbed up all the way to Mexico City. Our jails are full of MS-13 and Mexican Mafia hitters. Flores may have his throat cut before he ever sees a grand jury. It's too bad. The kid might be a war hero, but those women and girls who ate the forty-five rounds aren't here to mourn for him.”

Hackberry took the phone from his ear and opened and closed his mouth to clear a sound like cellophane crinkling inside his head. Outside, the flag was popping and straightening in a flume of yellow dust.

“You still with me, Sheriff?” Riser said.

“Yeah, copy that. Listen, isn't Hugo Cistranos the key? Don't tell me y'all don't have dials on this guy. Why aren't you squeezing him instead of chasing Flores and Vikki Gaddis around?”

“I don't get to call all the shots, Sheriff.”

Hackberry could sense the change in Riser's mood. Through his office door, he could see Pam Tibbs escorting Flores and Gaddis to a small room that was used for interviews. “I can appreciate your situation,” he said.

“Sorry I haven't gotten back to you. I had to go back to Washington, and I'll probably have to take off again tomorrow. What's all this about? If I were you, I'd ease up. You're a combat veteran. Sometimes you have to lose a few for the greater good. That might sound Darwinian, but those who believe different belong in monasteries.”

“This is all about nailing Josef Sholokoff, isn't it?”

“Neither of us makes the rules.”

“Have a good trip to Washington.”

“Let me be up-front again. I'll try to keep you in the loop. But the word is ‘try.'”

“You couldn't be more clear, Mr. Riser.” Hackberry replaced the receiver in the cradle. Pam Tibbs stood in the doorway. He looked woodenly at her.

“I hope Bonnie and Clyde appreciate this,” she said.

“Bring a cruiser around to the back door. Bonnie and Clyde were never here. Indicate that to Maydeen on your way out.”

“You got it, boss man.”

“Don't call me that.”

 

T
HE THERMOMETER HAD
just peaked at 119 degrees when Nick Dolan carried his bag out of the Phoenix airport and hailed a cab, one with more dents than it should have had. The driver was from the Mid-east and had festooned the inside of the cab with beadwork and pictures of mosques and words from the Koran and was burning incense on the dashboard and playing Arabian music on a tape deck. “Where to, sir?” he said.

“I'm not sure. Where can you get a blow job in Mecca?”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“The Embassy Suites.”

“In Phoenix?”

“What's your name?”

“Mohammed.”

“I'm shocked. No, I want to go to the Embassy Suites in Istanbul. Do you hand out earplugs with that music?”

“Earplugs? What earplugs, sir?”

“The Embassy Suites off Camelback.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Hang on, sir.” The driver floored the cab, swinging out into traffic, throwing Nick across the seat with his luggage.

“Hey, we're not on a hijack mission here,” Nick said. He knew his histrionic display at the driver's expense was a mask for the fear that once again had taken up residence in his breast and was feeding at his heart. He had gotten the phone number of Josef Sholokoff from his old partner in the escort business and had made an appointment to meet Sholokoff at his house at nine
P.M
. that evening. The fact that Sholokoff had given Nick easy access to his home only increased Nick's sense of insecurity.

“Hey, Mohammed, you ever hear of a guy named Josef Sholokoff?” Nick said. He gazed out the window, waiting for the driver's reply. He watched the palm trees and stucco homes on the boulevard zoom by, the gardens bursting with flowers.

“Hey, you up there in the clouds of incense, you know a guy by the name of—”

The driver's eyes locked on Nick's inside the rearview mirror. “Yes, sir, Embassy Suites,” he said. He turned up the volume, filling the cab with the sounds of flutes and sitars.

Nick checked in to the hotel and undressed down to his boxer shorts and strap undershirt. His suite was on the fifth floor and overlooked the outdoor swimming pool; he could hear children shouting and splashing in the water. He started to go into the bathroom and take a shower but felt so weak he thought he was going to collapse. He fixed a glass of ice and bourbon from the hospitality bar and sat down in a chair and picked up the telephone. He could see his reflection in the mirror on the bathroom door. It was that of a small, puffy, round man in striped underwear, his childlike hand clenching a thick water glass, his pale legs knotted with clumps of varicose veins, his face a white balloon with eyes and a mouth painted on it. He punched his wife's cell phone number into the phone.

“Hello?” she said.

“It's me, Esther.”

“Where the hell are you?”

“In Phoenix.”

“Arizona?”

“Yeah, what are you doing?”

“What am
I
doing? I'm pulling weeds in the flower bed. Which is what you should be doing. You're actually in Arizona? Not just down the street having a nervous breakdown?”

“I didn't tell you because I thought you'd be upset. I got a return flight booked at six-forty-five in the morning. So it's not like I'm really gone.”

“You're over a thousand miles away, but that's not gone?”

“I'm gonna see this guy Josef Sholokoff. I called him up at his house.”

“This guy is worse than Jack Collins.”

“Nothing is gonna happen. I'll be at his house. He's not gonna hurt me in his own house.”

“I think I'm going to faint. Hold on, I got to get in the shade.”

“Did you know Esther was the name of Bugsy Siegel's wife?”

“Who cares? Is my husband totally nuts?”

“I'm saying I'm no Benny Siegel, Esther.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

“You there?” he said. “Esther? What's wrong?”

Then he realized she was crying. “Don't be sad,” he said. “You're brave. I married the bravest, prettiest woman in New Orleans. We're gonna start over again. We got the restaurant. We got each other and the kids. The rest of it doesn't matter. Hello?”

“Come home, Nick,” she said.

Nick showered and, for the next half hour, lay nude on top of his king-size bed, the points of his feet and hands spread in a giant X, like Ixion fastened to his burning wheel. Then he put cold water on his face and neck, and dressed in slacks and loafers and a fresh shirt, and called for a cab. He walked out of the hotel and stood under the porte cochere, his head as light as helium. The city was beautiful in the summer twilight, the palm trees tall and rustling, the mountaintops sharply etched against a magenta sky, the outdoor cafés filled with families and
young people for whom death was an abstraction that happened only to others.

The dented cab that pulled up for him looked altogether too familiar. Nick opened the back door, and a sweet-sick cloud of incense that made him think of perfumed camel flop covered his skin and clothes. “Mohammed,” Nick said.

“Tell me where you want to go, sir,” the driver said.

“To the home of Josef Sholokoff,” Nick replied, getting in the back. He wondered if he was actually trying to get Mohammed to talk him out of his mission. “I got the address on this piece of paper. It's up there in the hills somewhere.”

“Not good, sir.”

“When we get there, I want you to wait for me.”

“Not good at all, sir. No, not good. Very bad, sir.”

“You're my man. You gotta have my back.”

The driver was turned all the way around in the seat, looking aghast at his fare. “I think you have been given very poor advice about your visit, sir. This is not a nice man. Would you like to go to the baseball game? Or I can drive you by the zoo. A very nice zoo here.”

“You people blow yourselves up with bombs. You afraid of some Russian schmuck who probably can't get it up without watching one of his own porn films?”

Mohammed pushed down the flag on his meter. “Hang on, sir,” he said.

The cab snaked its way up a mountain that was just north of a golf resort. From the window Nick could see the great golden bowl of the city, the flow of headlights through its streets, the linear patterns of palm trees along the boulevards, the concrete canals brimming with water, the chains of sun-bladed swimming pools that extended for miles through the neighborhoods of the rich. The west side of town, where the hardscrabble whites and poor Hispanics lived, was another story.

“You watch trash TV, Mohammed?” Nick asked. “
Jerry Springer,
that kind of crap?”

“No, sir.” Mohammed looked in the rearview mirror. “Maybe sometimes.”

“Those people, the guests, they don't get paid for that.”

“They don't?”

“No.”

“Then why do they do it to themselves?”

“They think they'll be immortal. They get inside a movie or a television show, and they think they got the same magic as celebrities. Look down there. That's what it's about. The big score.”

“You are a very smart man. That's why I do not understand you.”

“What don't you understand?”

“Why you are going to the home of a man like Josef Sholokoff.”

Mohammed pulled the cab up to the locked gates of a compound that was sculpted back into the mountain. Inside the walls, the lawn was a deep, cool green in the shadows, the sod soggy from soak hoses, the citrus trees heavy with fruit, the balconies on the upper stories of the house scrolled with Spanish-style ironwork. The gates swung inward electronically, but no security personnel or even gardeners were in sight. Mohammed drove to the carriage house and stopped.