Rain Gods (46 page)

Bobby Lee was breathing through his nose, his eyes unfocused, strained, as though someone were shining a light into them.

T-Bone closed his eyes, and his voice made a clicking sound, but no words came from his throat. Then he hawked loudly and spat a bloody clot on the ground. “I got ulcers.”

Bobby Lee didn’t speak.

“Don’t shoot me in the face,” T-Bone said.

“Turn around.”

“Bobby Lee.”

“If you look back, if you call Hugo, if you contact anybody about this, I’m gonna do to you what you did to that Mexican you tied up in that house in Zaragoza. Your truck stays here. Don’t ever come in this county again.”

“How do I know you’re not—”

“If you’re still sucking air after about forty yards, you’ll know.”

Bobby Lee rested his forearm on the truck window and watched T-Bone walk away. He slowly turned his gaze on Pete. “What are you looking at?”

“Not a whole lot.”

“You think this is funny? You think you’re cute?”

“What I think is you’re standing up to your bottom lip in your own shit.”

“I’m the best friend you got, boy.”

“Then you’re right. I’m in real trouble. Tell you what. Pop me out of this safety belt, and I’ll accept your surrender.”

Bobby Lee walked around to the other side of the vehicle and opened the door. He pulled a switchblade from his jeans and flicked it open. He sliced the safety strap in half, the nine-millimeter in his right hand, then stepped back. “Get on your face.”

Pete stepped out on the ground, got to his knees, and lay on his chest, the smell of the grass and the earth warm in his face. He twisted his head around.

“Eyes front,” Bobby Lee said, pressing his foot between Pete’s shoulder blades. “Put your hands behind you.”

“Where’s Vikki?”

Bobby Lee didn’t reply. He stooped over and hooked a handcuff on each of Pete’s wrists, squeezing the teeth of the ratchets as deep as he could into the locking mechanism. “Get up.”

“At the A.A. meeting, you said you were in Iraq.”

“What about it?”

“You don’t have to do this stuff.”

“Here’s a news flash for you. Every flag is the same color. The color is black. No quarter, no mercy, it’s ‘burn, motherfucker, burn.’ Tell me I’m full of shit.”

“You were kicked out of the army, weren’t you?”

“Close your mouth, boy.”

“That guy, T-Bone, you saw yourself in him. That’s why you wanted to tear him apart.”

“Maybe I can work you in as a substitute.”

Bobby Lee opened the back door of the SUV and shoved Pete inside. He slammed the door and lifted the cell phone from the cord that hung around his neck, punching the speed dial with his thumb. “I got the package,” he said.

22

V
IKKI DRIED HERSELF and wrapped the towel around her body and began brushing her teeth. The mirror was heavily fogged, the heat and moisture from her shower escaping through the partially opened door into the bedroom. She thought she heard a movement, perhaps a door closing, a half-spoken sentence trailing into nothingness. She squeezed the handle on the faucet, shutting off the water, her toothbrush stationary in her mouth. She set the toothbrush in a water glass. “Pete?” she said.

There was no response. She tucked the towel more securely around her. “Is that you?” she said.

She heard electronic laughter through the wall and realized the people in the next room, a Hispanic couple with two teenage children, had once again turned up the volume on their television to full jet-engine mode.

She opened the door wide and tied a hand towel around her head as she walked into the bedroom. She had left only one light burning, a lamp by the table in the far corner. It created more shadows than it did illumination and softened the neediness of the room—the bedspread that she avoided touching, the sun-faded curtains, the brown water spots on the ceiling, the molding that had cracked away from the window jambs.

She felt his presence before she actually saw him, in the same way one encounters a faceless presence in a dream, a protean figure without origins, from an unknown place, who can walk through walls and locked doors, and in this instance place himself in the cloth-covered chair by the closet, on the far side of the bed, the only telephone in the room two feet from his hand.

He had made himself comfortable, one leg crossed on his knee, his pin-striped suit in need of pressing, his white shirt starched, his shoes buffed, his knit necktie not quite knotted, his shave done without a mirror. Like the dream figure, he was a study in contradiction, his shabby elegance not quite real, his rectangularity that of a grandiose poseur sitting in a soup kitchen.

He kept his eyes on hers and did not lower them to her body, but she could see the flicker of hunger around his mouth, the hollows in his cheeks, his suppressed need to lick his tongue across his bottom lip.

“You,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I hoped I would never see you again.”

“Worse men than I are looking for you, missy.”

“Don’t you talk down to me.”

“You don’t wonder how I got in?”

“I don’t care how you got in. You’re here. Now you need to leave.”

“But that’s not likely, is it?”

“By your foot.”

“What?”

“What’s that by your foot?”

He looked down at the carpet. “This?”

“Yes.”

“A twenty-two derringer. But it’s not for you. If I were a different sort of fellow, it might be. But it’s not.” He cupped his hand to lift his leg gingerly off his knee and set it down. “You did me up proper on the highway.”

“I stopped to help you because I thought you had a flat. You repaid the kindness by trying to abduct me.”

“I don’t ‘abduct’ people, miss. Or Ms.”

“Excuse me. You kill them.”

“I have. When they came after me. When they tried to kill me first. When they were part of a higher plan that I didn’t have control over. Sit down. Do you want your bathrobe?”

“I don’t have one.”

“Sit down anyway.”

She felt as if a hot coal had been placed on her scalp. Moisture was leaking out of the towel she had wrapped on her head. Her face stung, and her eyes burned. She could feel drops of sweat networking down her thighs like lines of ants. His eyes dropped to her loins, then he looked away quickly and pretended to be distracted by the noise the air conditioner made. She sat down at the small table against the wall, her knees close together, her arms folded across her chest. “Where’s Pete?” she asked.

“He was rescued by a friend of mine.”

“Rescued?” She paused and said the word a second time. “
Rescued?
” She could taste the acidity in her saliva when she spoke.

“Do you want me to leave without resolving our problem? Do you want to leave Pete’s situation undecided? He’s out there somewhere on a dark road in the hands of a man who believes he’s a descendant of Robert E. Lee.”

“Who are you a descendant of? Who the fuck are you?”

The fingers of Preacher’s right hand twitched slightly. “People don’t speak to me that way.”

“You think a mass killer deserves respect?”

“You don’t know me. Maybe I have qualities you’re not aware of.”

“Did you ever fight for your country?”

“You might say in my own way I have. But I don’t make claims for myself.”

“Pete was burned in his tank. But the real damage to him happened when he came back home and met you and the other criminals you work with.”

“Your friend is a fool or he wouldn’t be in this trouble. I don’t appreciate the coarseness of your remarks to me.”

Again she could feel a pool of heat building inside her head, as though the sun were burning through her skull, cooking her blood, pushing her out on the edges of a place she had never been. Her towel was starting to slip loose, and she gathered it more tightly around her, pressing its dampness against her skin with her arms.

“I’d like for you to go away with me. I’d like to make up for any harm I did to you. Don’t speak, just listen,” he said. “I have money. I’m fairly well educated for a man without much formal schooling. I have manners, and I know how to care for a fine woman. I have a rented house on a mountaintop outside Guadalajara. You could have anything you want there. There would be no demands on you, sexual or otherwise.”

She thought she heard a train in the distance, the massive weight and power of the locomotive grinding dully on the track, the vibrations spreading through the hardpan like the steady tremors given off by an abscessed wisdom tooth.

“Give Pete back to me. Don’t hurt him,” she said.

“What will you give me in turn?”

“Take my life.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“I put two bullets in you.”

“You don’t know me very well.”

“You know why you’re here. Go ahead and do it. I won’t resist you. Just leave Pete alone.” Her eyes seemed to go in and out of focus, the room shimmering, a dark liquid swelling up from her stomach into her throat.

“You offend me.”

“Your thoughts are an offense, and you don’t hide them well.”

“What thoughts? What are you talking about?” The skin under his left eye wrinkled, like putty drying up.

“The thoughts you don’t want to admit are yours. The secret desires you mask with your cruelty. You make me think of diseased tissue with insects crawling on it. Your glands are filled with rut, but you pretend to be a gentleman wishing to care for and protect a woman. It’s embarrassing to look at the starvation in your face.”

“Starvation? For a woman who insults me? Who thinks she can tongue-lash me after I saved her from a man like Hugo Cistranos? That’s right, Hugo plans to kill you and your boyfriend. You want me to hit the speed dial on my cell phone? I can introduce your friend to an experience neither of you can imagine.”

“I need to get dressed. I don’t want you to watch me.”

“Dressed to go where?”

“Out. Away from you.”

“You think you’re controlling the events that are about to happen around you? Are you that naive?”

“My clothes are in the dresser. I’m going to take them into the bathroom and dress. Don’t come in there. Don’t look at me while I’m removing my clothes from the drawer, either. After I’m dressed, I’ll be going somewhere. I’m not sure where. But it won’t be with you. Maybe I’ll end here, in this room, in this dirty room, in this godforsaken place on the edge of hell. But you won’t be a part of it, you piece of shit.”

His facial expression seemed divided in half, as though his motor controls were shutting down and the muscles on one side of his face were collapsing. His right hand trembled. “You have no right to say these things.”

“Kill me or get out. I can’t stand being around you.”

He stooped over and picked up the blue-black white-handled derringer from the carpet. He was breathing raggedly through his nose, his eyes small and hot under his brow. He approached her slowly, his white shirt catching the pink glow of the neon outside the window, giving his face a rosy hue it didn’t possess on its own. He stood in front of her, his stomach flat behind his shirt and his tightly notched belt, an odor of dried perspiration wafting from his suit. “Say that last part again.”

“I hate being in the presence of a man like you. You’re what every woman dreads. Your physical touch causes nausea.”

He lifted the barrel of the derringer to her mouth. Through the wall, she could hear the electronic laughter from the neighbor’s television set. She could hear the locomotive pulling a mile-long string of gondolas and boxcars between the hills, the reverberations shaking the foundation of the motel. She could hear Preacher’s dry exhalations just above her forehead. He put his left hand under her chin and lifted her line of vision to his. When she tried to turn away, he pinched her jaws and jerked her head straight. “Look into my eyes.”

“No.”

“You’re afraid?”

“No. Yes.”

“Of what?”

“Of what I’ll see there. You’re evil. I think you carry the abyss inside you.”

“That’s a lie.”

“In your sleep, you hear a howling wind, don’t you? It’s like the sound the wind makes at night on the ocean. Except the wind is inside you. I read a poem once by William Blake. It was about the worm that flies at night in the howling storm. I think he was writing about you.”

He released her, almost flinging her face from his hand. “I couldn’t care less about your literary experience. It’s you who’s the agent of the devil. It’s inherent in your gender. From Eden to the present.”

Her head was lowered, her arms still folded across her bosom, her back starting to tremble. He reached in his pocket with his left hand. She felt something touch her cheek. “Take it,” he said.

She showed no response other than to wrap herself more tightly in her own skin, and curl her shoulders and spine into a tighter ball, and keep her eyes fixed on the tops of her folded arms.