Rain Gods (37 page)

“Not everybody is such a good mother.”

The two women went out the door. A beaded sky-blue sequined purse hung on a string from the overweight woman’s shoulder. She looked back once, smiling as though to say good night.

Tim came back into the room and sat down in a chair by the window. He pulled off his metal-sheathed boots and cupped his hands on his thighs, staring at the floor. “We’ve got to clean this up.”

“You talk to Josef?”

“To this lamebrain Hugo. He says we spit in the tiger’s mouth.”

“A guy on crutches with no car or house? I think this guy is some kind of urban legend.”

“Maybe.”

“I’m hungry. You want me to call the pizza place again or go out?”

“What I want you to do is let me think a minute.”

“You should have got laid, Tim.”

Tim stared at the nicked furniture, the yellowed curtains on the windows, the bedclothes piled on the floor. On the chair by the television set was a gray vinyl handbag, the brass zipper pulled tight. “There’s something wrong,” he said.

“Yeah, we’re wandering around in a giant skillet. Is this whole state like this?”

“Who ordered the pizza?”

“The skinny broad.”

“What’d she say?”

“‘I want two sausage-and-mushroom pizzas.’”

“Pick up the receiver and hit redial.”

“I think you’re losing it, man.”

“Just do it.”

“This phone doesn’t have a redial.”

“Then get the number off the pizza menu on the desk and call it.”

“Okay, Tim. How about a little serenity here?”

Someone knocked on the door. The biker who had picked up the phone replaced the receiver in the cradle. He started toward the door.

“No!” Tim said, holding up his hand. He got up from his chair in his sock feet and clicked off the light. He pulled back the window curtain just far enough to see the walkway.

“Who is it?” the other biker asked him.

“I can’t tell,” Tim said. He removed the Glock from his overnight bag. “What do you want?” he said through the door.

“Pizza delivery,” a voice said.

“What took you so long?”

“There was an accident on the highway.”

“Set it on the walkway.”

“It’s in the warmer.”

“If you set it down, it won’t be in the warmer any longer, will it?”

“It’s thirty-two dollars.”

Tim put on the night chain and took out his wallet. He eased the door open, the chain links tightening against the brass slot. The delivery man was older than he expected, blade-faced, his nose sunburned, an orange-and-black cloth cap pulled low on his brow.

“How much did you say?”

“Thirty-two dollars even.”

“I’ve only got a hundred.”

“I have to go back to the car for change.”

Tim held on to the hundred and closed the door and waited. A moment later, the delivery man returned and knocked again. Tim cracked the door and handed the hundred-dollar bill to him. “Count the change out on the top of the box. Keep five for yourself.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“What’s your name?”

“Doug.”

“Who’s with you in your car, Doug?”

“My wife. When I get off, we’re going to visit her mother at the hospital.”

“You take your wife on deliveries so you can go to the hospital together?”

The delivery man began blinking uncertainly.

“I was just asking,” Tim said. He shut the door and waited. Then he went to the curtain and peeled it from the corner of the window and watched the pizza man turn his car around and drive back onto the highway. He opened the door and squatted down and lifted the two heavily laden cartons of pizza from the concrete. They were warm in his hand and smelled deliciously of sausage and onions and mushrooms and melted cheese. He watched the taillights of the delivery car disappear down the road, then closed the door and replaced the chain. “What are you guys looking at?” he said to his companions.

“Hey, you’re just being careful. Come on, let’s scarf.”

They ordered beer brought over from the nightclub, and for the next hour, they ate and drank and watched television and rolled joints out of Tim’s stash. Tim even became silently amused at his concern over the pizza man. He yawned and lay back on the bed, a pillow behind his head. Then he noticed again the vinyl handbag one of the women had left behind. It had fallen from the chair and was lodged behind the television stand. “Which one of the broads was carrying a gray purse?” he said.

“The bony one.”

“Check it out.”

But before the other biker could pick up the handbag, there was another knock on the door. “We need a turnstile here,” Tim said.

He got up from the bed and went to the window. This time he pulled the curtain all the way back so he could have a clear view of the walkway and door area. He went to the door and opened it on the chain. “You forgot your purse?” he said.

“I left it here or in the club. It’s not at the club, so it must be here,” the woman said. “Everything is in it.”

“Hang on.” He shut the door, his hand floating up to release the chain.

“Don’t let her in, man. If women can have a hard-on, this one has got a hard-on. I’ll get her purse,” one of the other bikers said.

Tim slipped the night chain from its slot.

“Tim, wait.”

“What?” Tim said, twisting the doorknob.

“There ain’t a wallet in the purse. Just lipstick and tampons and used Kleenex and hairpins.”

Tim turned around and looked back at his friend, the door seeming to swing open of its own accord. The woman who had knocked was hurrying across the parking lot toward a waiting automobile. In her place stood a man Tim had never seen. The man was wearing a suit and a white shirt without a tie, and his hair was greased and combed straight back, his body trim, his shoes shined. He looked like a man who was trying to hold on to the ways of an earlier generation. His weight was propped up by a walking cane that he held stiffly with his left hand. In his right hand, snugged against his side, was a Thompson machine gun.

“How’d you—” Tim began.

“I get around,” Preacher said.

The spent casings shuddering from the bolt of his weapon clattered off the doorjamb, rained on the concrete, and bounced and rolled into the grass. The staccato explosions from the muzzle were like the zigzags of an electric arc.

Preacher limped toward the waiting car, the downturned silhouette of his weapon leaking smoke. Not one room door opened, nor did one face appear at a window. The motel and the neon-pink tubing wrapped around its eaves and the palm tree etched against the sky by the entrance had taken on the emptiness of a movie set. As Preacher drove away, he stared through the big glass window of the front office. The clerk was gone, and so were any guests who might have been waiting to register. From the highway, he glanced back at the motel again. Its insularity, its seeming abandonment by all its inhabitants, the total absence of any detectable humanity within its confines, made him think of a snowy wind blowing outside a boxcar on a desolate siding, a pot of vegetables starting to burn on an untended fire, although he had no way to account for the association.

18

V
IKKI GADDIS GOT off work at the steak house at ten P.M. and walked to the Fiesta motel with a San Antonio newspaper folded under her arm. When she entered the room, Pete was watching television in his skivvies. His T-shirt looked like cheesecloth against the red scar tissue on his back. She popped open the newspaper and dropped it in his lap. “Those guys were at the restaurant three nights ago,” she said. “They were bikers. They looked road-fried.”

Pete stared down at the booking-room photographs of three men. They were in their twenties and possessed the rugged good looks of men in their prime. Unlike the subjects of most booking-room photography, none of the men appeared fatigued or under the influence or nonplussed or artificially amused. Two of them had served time in San Quentin, one in Folsom. All three had been arrested for possession with intent to distribute. All three had been suspects in unsolved homicides.

“You talked to them?” Pete asked.

“No, they talked to me. I thought they were just hitting on me. I sang four numbers with the band, and they tried to get me to sit down with them. I told them I had to work, I was a waitress and just sang occasion ally with the band. They thought it was funny that I sang ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken.’”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I thought they were jerks and not worth talking about.”

Pete began reading the newspaper story again. “They were machine-gunned,” he said. He bit a hangnail. “What’d they say to you?”

“They wanted to know my name. They wanted to know where I was from.”

“What’d you tell them?”

“That I had to get back to work. Later, they were asking the bartender about me.”

“What in particular?”

“Like how long I’d been working there. Like had I ever been a professional folksinger. Like didn’t I used to live around Langtry or Pumpville? Except these guys had California tags, and why should they know anything about little towns on the border?”

Pete turned off the television but continued to stare at the screen.

“They’re contract killers, aren’t they?” she said.

“They didn’t follow you after you got off work. They didn’t come around the motel, either. Maybe you were right—they were just jerks trying to pick you up.”

“There’s something else.”

He looked at her and waited.

“I talked with the bartender before I got off tonight. I showed him the newspaper. He said, ‘One of those bikers was talking about calling up some guy named Hugo.’”

“You’re just telling me all this now?” Pete said.

“No, you’re not listening. The bartender—” She gave up and sat down on the bed beside him, not touching him. “I can’t think straight.” She pushed at her forehead with the heel of her hand. “Maybe they did follow me home and I didn’t see them. What if they found out where we’re living and they called up this guy Hugo and told him?”

“I don’t get it, though. Who killed them?” Pete said. “The story doesn’t say what kind of machine gun the shooter used. There’s a lot of illegal stuff available now—AKs, Uzis, semiautos with hell-triggers.”

“What difference does that make?”

“The story says there were shell casings all over the crime scene. If the guy had a Thompson with a drum on it—”

“Pete, will you just spit it out? What are you saying? You talk in hieroglyphics.”

“The guy who killed all the women behind the church used a Thompson. They’re hard to come by. They shoot forty-five-caliber ammunition. The ammo drum will hold fifty rounds. Maybe the guy who killed the women behind the church is the same guy who machine-gunned the bikers.”

“That doesn’t make sense. Why would they be killing each other?”

“Maybe they’re not working together.” Pete read more, running his thumb down to the last paragraph. He set the paper aside and rubbed his palms on his knees.

“Say it,” she said.

“The shooter had a limp. Maybe he uses a walking cane. A trucker saw him from the highway.”

Vikki got up from the bed. Her face was pale, the skin tight against the bone, as though she were staring into a cold wind. “He’s the man I shot, isn’t he?”

Pete began putting on his trousers.

“Where you going?”

“Out.”

“To do what?”

“Not to drink, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Her eyes remained accusatory, locked on his.

“I brought all this on us, Vikki. You don’t have to say it.”

“Don’t leave.”

“More of the same isn’t gonna cut it.”

“I’m not mad at you. I’m just tired.”

“I’ll be back.”

“When?”

“When you see me.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Boost a car. I wasn’t just a crewman in a tank. I was a mechanic. See, there’s an upside to getting french-fried in Baghdad.”

“Damn you, Pete.”

HUGO CISTRANOS WAS sitting on a canvas chair on the beach in his Speedos, the waves capping and sliding in a yellow froth up on the sand. The air smelled like brass and iodine. It smelled of the crusted seaweed around his feet and the ruptured air sacs of the jellyfish that lay in a jagged line at the water’s edge. It smelled of the fear that fouled his heart and pooled in his glands that no amount of suntan lotion could hide.

He tried Preacher’s cell phone again. He had already left six messages, then had listened to a recording tell him Preacher’s mailbox was full. But this time the cell phone not only rang, Preacher picked up. “What do you want?” he said.

“Hey, Jack, where you been?” Hugo said. “I was worried sick, man.”