Rain Gods (20 page)

“You finished?” he said.

She didn’t answer.

“Did you hear me?”

“I’m done. Let me go,” she said.

He set her down and put his hands on her shoulders, turning her toward him. “You just dropped both of us in the cook pot,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Go in the house. I’m going to try to square it.”

“Not on my account.”

“Pam, this is one time you shut up and do what I say.”

She closed and opened her eyes as though awakening from a dream. Then she walked to the table and sat down on the bench and propped her hands on her knees and stared into space, her hair tousling in the breeze.

Hackberry went inside, took a first-aid kit and a handful of dish towels from a kitchen closet, and went back out front. Clawson was sitting in the passenger seat of his car, the door open, his feet on the gravel driveway; he was talking into a cell phone. The handkerchief wadded up in his left hand was almost entirely red. He closed the cell phone and dropped it on the seat.

“Did you call for the paramedics?” Hackberry said.

“No, I called my wife. I’m supposed to meet her in Houston tonight.”

“I’ll take you to emergency receiving.”

“You were a navy corpsman, Sheriff. Do what you need to do. This didn’t happen. I slipped on the metal stairs at the motel.”

Hackberry waited for him to go on.

“You heard me,” Clawson said.

“That’s the way you want it?”

“We take down the guys who killed those Asian women and Junior Vogel. Nothing gets in the way of that objective. You tell your deputy what I said.”

“No, you tell her.”

“Bring her out here,” Clawson said.

“You don’t take her to task.”

Clawson cleared his throat and pressed his handkerchief to a deep cut that was bleeding through his eyebrow. “No problem.”

“Let’s take a look at your head, partner,” Hackberry said.

10

N
ICK DOLAN SWALLOWED a tranquilizer and a half glass of water, took Esther into his office, and closed the door behind him. With the dark velvet drapes closed and the air-conditioning set to almost freezing levels, there was an insularity about his office that made Nick feel not only isolated and safe but outside of time and place, as though he could rewind the video and erase all the mistakes he had made in his journey from the schoolyard playground in the Lower Ninth Ward to the day he bought into an escort service and the attendant association with people like Hugo Cistranos.

He told Esther everything that had happened during his abduction—the ride in the SUV down the highway to the empty farmhouse, Preacher Jack Collins sitting next to him, the New Orleans button man Hugo Cistranos and the strange kid in a top hat sitting in front, the moon wobbling under the surface of a pond whose banks glistened with green cow scat. Then he told Esther how the man called Preacher had spared him at the last moment because of her name.

“He thinks I’m somebody out of the Bible?” she said.

“Who knows what crazy people think?” Nick said.

“There’s something you’re leaving out. Something you’re not talking about.”

“No, that’s it. That’s everything that happened.”

“Stop lying. What did these men do in your name?”

“They didn’t do it in my name. I never told them to do what they did.”

“You make me want to hit you, to beat my fists bloody on you.”

“They killed nine women from Thailand. They were prostitutes. They were being smuggled across the border by Artie Rooney. They machine-gunned them and buried them with a bulldozer.”

“My God, Nick,” she said, her voice breaking in her throat.

“I didn’t have anything to do with this, Esther.”

“Yes, you did.” Then she said it again. “Yes, you did.”

“Hugo was supposed to deliver the women to Houston. That’s all it was.”

“All it was? Listen to yourself. What were you doing with people who smuggle prostitutes into the country?”

“We’ve got a half-interest in a couple of escort agencies. It’s legal. They’re hostesses. Maybe some other stuff goes on, but it’s between adults, it’s a free country. It’s just business.”

“You’ve been running escort services?” When he didn’t reply, she said, “Nick, what have you done to us?” She was weeping quietly in the leather chair now, her long hair hanging in her face. Her discomposure and fear and disbelief, and the black skein of her hair separating her from the rest of the world, made him think of the women lined up in front of Preacher’s machine gun, and his lips began to tremble.

“You want me to fix you a drink?” he said.

“Don’t say anything to me. Don’t touch me. Don’t come near me.”

He was standing over her, his fingers extended inches from the crown of her head. “I didn’t want anybody hurt, Esther. I thought maybe I’d get even with Artie for a lot of the things he did to me when I was a kid. It was dumb.”

But she wasn’t hearing him. Her head was bent forward, her face completely obscured, her back shaking inside her blouse. He took a box of Kleenex from his desk and set it on her lap, but it fell from her knees without her ever noticing it was there. He stood in the darkened coldness of his office, the jet of frigid air from the wall duct touching his bald pate, his stomach sagging over his belt, the smell of nicotine rife on his fingers when he rubbed his hand across his mouth. If he had ever felt smaller in his life, he could not remember the instance.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and started to walk away.

“What do these gangsters plan to do now?”

“There was a witness, a soldier who was in Iraq. Him and his girlfriend could be witnesses against Hugo and the kid in the top hat and this guy Preacher.”

“They’re going to kill them?”

“Yeah, if they find them, that’s what they’ll do.”

“That can’t happen, Nick,” she said, raising her head.

“I called the FBI when I was drunk. It didn’t do any good. You want me to go to prison? You think that will stop it? These guys will kill those kids anyway.”

She stared into space, her eyes cavernous. Through the floor, she and Nick could hear the children turning somersaults on the living room carpet, sending a
thud
down through the walls into the foundation of the house. “We can’t have this on our souls,” she said.

THE MOTEL WAS a leftover from the 1950s, a utilitarian structure checkerboarded with huge red and beige plastic squares, the metal-railed upstairs walkways not unlike those in penitentiaries, all of it located in a neighborhood of warehouses and bankrupt businesses and joyless bars that could afford no more than a single neon sign over the door.

The swimming pool stayed covered with a plastic tarp year-round, and the apron of grass around the building was yellow and stiff, the fronds of the palm trees rattling drily in the wind. On the upside of things, hookers did not operate on its premises, nor did drug dealers cook meth in the rooms. The sodium halide lamps in the parking lot protected the cars of the guests from roving bands of thieves. The rates were cheap. Arguably, there were worse rental lodgings in San Antonio. But there was one undeniable characteristic about the motel and the surrounding neighborhood that would not go away: The rectangularity of line and the absence of people gave one the sense that he was stand ing inside a stage set, one that had been created for the professional sojourner.

Preacher sat in a stuffed chair in the dark, staring at the television set. The screen was filled with static, the volume turned up full blast on white noise. But the images on the screen inside Preacher’s head had nothing to do with the television set in his room. Inside Preacher’s head, the year was 1954. A little boy sat in the corner of a boxcar parked permanently on a siding in the middle of the Texas-Oklahoma Panhandle. It was winter, and the wind was gray with grit and dust, and it chapped the cheeks and lips and dried out the hands and caused the skin to split around the thumbnails. A blanket draped over a rope divided the boxcar in half. On the other side of the blanket, Edna Collins was going at it with a dark-skinned gandy dancer while two more waited outside, their hands stuffed in their canvas coat pockets, their slouch hats pulled low over their ears as protection against the wind.

Preacher’s motel windows were hung with red curtains, and the lamps in the parking lot seemed to etch them with fire. He heard footsteps on the steel stairway, then a shadow crossed his window and someone tapped tentatively on the jalousie.

“What do you want?” Preacher said, his eyes still fixed on the television screen.

“My name is Mona Drexel, Preacher. We met once,” a voice replied.

“I don’t remember the name.”

“Liam is like a client of mine.”

He turned his head slowly and looked at her shadow on the frosted glass. “Liam who?”

“Eriksson.”

“Come in,” he said.

He smelled the cigarette odor on her clothes as soon as she entered the room. Against the outside light, her hair possessed the frizzy outline and color of cotton candy. The foundation on her face made Preacher think of an unfinished clay sculpture, the lines collapsing under the jaw, the mouth a bit crooked, the eye shadow and rouge both sad and embarrassing to look at.

“Can I sit down?” she said.

“You’re in, aren’t you?”

“I heard that maybe people are looking for Liam because of this government check he took into one of these car-title loan places. I didn’t want to have my name mixed up in this, because I’m not really involved or a close friend of his. See, we had a few drinks, and he had this check, and he wanted to party some more, so I went along with him, but it kind of hit the fan for some reason, and Liam said we ought to get out of there, and he thought you were gonna be pissed off, but that was all over my head and not really my business. I just wanted to clear this up and make sure nobody has a misunderstanding. Since we’d already met, I didn’t think you’d mind me coming by to answer any questions you might have.”

“Why should I have questions for you?”

“A couple of people told me this is what I should do. I didn’t mean to bother you during your program.”

Then she looked at the empty screen. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, out of breath and holding her hands in her lap, unsure of what she should say next. She placed one foot on the top of the other as a little girl might, chewing her lip.

“I don’t like touching the bedspreads in motels,” she said, half smiling. “There’s every kind of DNA in the world imaginable on them, not that I mean this place is any worse than any other, it’s just the way all motels are, with unclean people using everything and not caring that other people are gonna use it later.”

The side of Preacher’s face was immobile, the eye that she could see like a marble pushed into tallow. “Mona Drexel is my stage name,” she said. “My real name is Margaret, but I started using Mona when I was onstage in Dallas. Believe it or not, it was a club Jack Ruby once owned, but you can call me whatever you want.”

“Where’s Liam now?”

“That’s why I’m here. I don’t know. Maybe I can find out. I just don’t want to hurt anybody or have anybody think I’m working against them. See, I’m
for
people, I’m not
against
anybody. There’s a big difference. I just want everybody to know that.”

“I can see that,” he said.

“Can you turn down the volume on the television?” she said.

“Do you know what I do for a living?”

“No.”

“Who told you I was staying at this motel?”

“Liam said you use it sometimes when you’re in town. That noise is really loud.”

“That’s what Liam told you, did he?”

“Yes,” she said. “I mean, yes, sir, he just mentioned it in passing.”

“Do you know where Liam got the government check?”

“No, he didn’t tell me. I don’t talk with clients about their personal business.”

“That’s a good way to be.”

“It is, isn’t it?” she said, crossing her leg on her knee, her mouth jerking as though she wanted to smile. She watched Preacher’s face in the white glow of the television screen. His eyes never blinked; not one muscle in his face moved. Her own expression went dead.

“I have clients that become friends,” she said. “After they’re friends, they’re not clients again. Then I have friends that are always friends. They never become clients. They’re friends from the first time I meet them, know what I mean?”

“No, I don’t,” he replied.

“I can be a friend to somebody. I have to make a living, but I believe in having friends and helping them out.” She lowered her eyes. “I mean, we could be friends if you want.”

“You remind me of someone,” he said, looking at her directly for the first time.

“Who?” she asked, the word turning to a rusty clot in her throat.

He stared at her in a way no one had ever stared at her in her life. She felt the blood drain from her head and heart into her stomach.