Anton Ling called in the report on Noie Barnum and Jack Collins’s visit to her property five minutes after the two men had left. Maydeen Stoltz immediately called Hackberry at his home.
“Which way did they head?” he said.
“South, toward the four-lane.”
“Get out traffic stops ten miles on either side of where they would enter the four-lane. Then call the FBI and the Border Patrol. Did Noie Barnum seem coerced?”
“Not according to Ms. Ling. She says Barnum heard her accuse Collins of murdering Ethan Riser and the Thai women, and Barnum left with him voluntarily. You think this is Stockholm syndrome or whatever they call it?”
“I doubt it.”
“No matter how you cut it, Barnum isn’t a victim?” Maydeen said.
“Not to us, he isn’t,” Hackberry replied.
“Ms. Ling says she beat the shit out of Collins with a broom handle. You want me to check the hospitals?”
“Waste of time,” Hackberry said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“What do you think his next move is, Hack?”
“He’s going to call either the department or my house.”
“What for?”
“He made a public fool of himself at Anton Ling’s,” Hackberry replied.
“I don’t get it.”
“We’re the only family he has.”
“Yuck,” she said.
The next morning Hackberry went to his office early and dug out the three-inch-thick file on Jack Collins and began thumbing through only a small indicator of the paperwork that one man had been able to string across an entire continent. The paperwork on Collins, who had never spent one day in jail, included faxes from Interpol and Mexico City, NCIC printouts, FBI transmissions, analytical speculations made by a forensic psychologist at Quantico, crime-scene photos that no competent defense attorney would allow a jury to see, autopsy summations written by coroners who were barely able to deal with the magnitude of the job Collins had dropped on them, witness interviews, crime-lab ballistic matches from Matamoros to San Antonio, and the most fitting inclusion in the file, a handwritten memo by a retired Texas Ranger in Presidio County who wrote, “This man seems about as complex as a derelict begging food at your back door and I suspect he smells about the same. I think the trick is to make him hold still long enough to put a bullet in him. But we’ve yet to figure out a way to do it.”
What did it all mean? For Hackberry, the answer was simple. The system couldn’t handle Jack Collins because he didn’t follow the rules or conform to patterns that are associated with criminal behavior. He wasn’t addicted to drugs or alcohol, didn’t frequent prostitutes, and showed little or no interest in money. There was no way to estimate the number of people he had murdered, since many of his homicides were committed across the border, but he was not a serial killer. Nor could he be shoved easily into that great catchall category known as psychopaths, since he obviously had attachments, even though the figures to whom he was attached lived in his imagination.
Preacher Jack was every psychiatrist’s nightmare. His level of intelligence and his wide reading experience allowed him to create a construct in which he shared dominion with the Olympians. His narcissism was so deeply rooted in his soul that he did not fear death because he thought the universe could not continue without his presence. He was messianic and believed he could see through a hole in the dimension and watch events play out in the lives of people who were not yet born.
With gifts like these, why should Preacher Jack fear a law enforcement agency? Like the cockroach and the common cold, he was in the fight for the long haul.
The irony was that in spite of his success in eluding the law for almost two decades, Collins shared a common denominator with his fellow miscreants: He needed law enforcement to validate who he was. Intuitively, he knew his own kind were by and large worthless and would sell him out for a pack of cigarettes if they thought they could get away with it. All career criminals wanted the respect of the cops, jailers, social workers, correctional officers, and prison psychologists whose attention gave them the dimensions they possessed in no other environment.
There was another consideration in regard to what went on in the mind of a man like Preacher Jack. His visit last night at Anton Ling’s home reminded Hackberry of a similar event that had taken place in Jack’s life the previous year, in San Antonio. Jack had become obsessed with a Jewish woman by the name of Esther Dolan and had invaded her home and indicated to her that he had chosen her as his queen. When she had recovered from the shock of his presumption, she called him a dog turd off the sidewalk and picked up a stainless-steel oatmeal pot and almost beat him to death with it.
Pam Tibbs leaned inside his door. “Guess who’s on the phone,” she said.
“Texas’s answer to B.O. Plenty.”
“Who?” she said.
“Collins?”
“I’ve already started the trace,” she said.
“Have the feds called back this morning?”
“Nope.”
Hackberry gazed at the blinking light on his telephone, then picked up the receiver. “What’s the haps, Jack?” he said.
“I thought I’d check in.”
“We figured we’d be hearing from you.”
“You omniscient, Mr. Holland?”
“It’s Sheriff Holland to you.”
“I like to keep abreast of your activities, since you seem intent on doing me harm and forgetting I saved the life of your young deputy, what’s-his-name, Bevins.”
“No, I think you’re calling because you became a human pinata out at Anton Ling’s place, in front of dozens of poor Mexicans who are now convinced there’s a serious problem in the Anglo gene pool. Just before you called, I was thinking about a pattern that seems to follow you around, Jack. Remember Esther Dolan in San Antone? She’s the lady who drove you from her house with knots all over your head. Then there was that good-looking gal, the country singer, Vikki Gaddis. She sprayed wasp killer in your eyes and took your pistol away from you and shot you through the foot. Why is it you keep getting into it with women who kick your ass? Do they remind you of your mother?”
“Good try, Sheriff. But I’m afraid you don’t know much about my upbringing.”
“You like to read novels. I’ve got a story for you, better than any fiction. Did you know that when Ma Barker and her son Fred were surrounded by the FBI, they executed each other with submachine guns? They sat across from each other in straight-back chairs down by the Everglades and blew each other all over the walls. How about that for a tight mother-son relationship? They were even buried in the same casket.”
“You fear a woman’s wrath, Sheriff Holland? The man who does will surround himself with manipulators and prostitutes and will never have a real woman in his life. The level of his anger hides the degree of his need. I thought you were wise in the ways of the world, but I’m starting to have my doubts.”
“Ethan Riser was my friend, you arrogant son of a bitch.”
“Ah, now we get down to the real issue.”
“You emptied your magazine into him after he was dead. His face was unidentifiable. He said something to you before he died, something you couldn’t abide, didn’t he? What was it, Collins? That you were despised inside the womb?”
“To be honest, I couldn’t quite make out Agent Riser’s words in all that shooting. The Thompson makes a heck of a racket.”
Hackberry could feel his hand gripping the phone receiver tighter and tighter, a bilious taste welling up in his throat. “No, it wasn’t about your mother. It wasn’t about your pathetic sex life, either. It had something to do with your vision of yourself, the Orkin man posing as Jesus. Ethan was a student of both history and Shakespeare. He reached back into his own reference and used it on you, didn’t he? What made it doubly injurious was the fact that you acquired your literary background the hard way, and he used it to make you look like a fool. He called you a clown, didn’t he? A collection of tattered rags flapping in the wind, a stick figure with a carved pumpkin for a head. That’s you, Collins. Everyone knows it except you, you moron. Even the dead people who follow you around know it. You’re an object of pity. You think women like Gaddis and Dolan and Ling would be in a room with you unless you were holding a gun on them? Don’t call here again, even to surrender yourself. A phone conversation with you is like someone putting spittle in my ear. I don’t know how else to describe it. You have that effect on people.”
Hackberry replaced the receiver in the phone cradle and stared at it, his hand shaking on the desk blotter.
“That was a beaut,” Pam said from the doorway. “Think you got to him?”
Hackberry shook his head. “There’re no handles on Collins. I had no design in mind.”
“You could have fooled me.”
He looked at her for a long time. “Be careful,” he said.
“Of Collins?”
“Of everything. We can’t lose our good people.”
“Nothing is going to happen to me,” she said.
“Don’t say that. It’s bad luck.”
She came into his office and closed the door behind her. “The minister from my church dropped by. He said he wanted to warn me about a rumor he’d heard.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That whatever it was, it was probably true, and I wasn’t interested in hearing it.”
He folded his hands behind his head and put one boot on the corner of the desk. “You’re heck on wheels, kiddo.”
“Call me that after quitting time and I’ll hit you.”
“I believe it,” he replied.
In the darkness the game ranch was a surreal place that seemed more like African dry land drenched in moonlight and shadowed by an enormous mountain that was over six thousand feet in elevation. The sand in the streambeds was white, the rocky sides of the declivities as sharp as knives, the land rustling with desert greenery and tabled with slabs of sedimentary rock that looked like the marbled backs of albino whales. The steel fence that enclosed the ranch seemed to roll for miles across the countryside, and the mesh was so thick that it took Krill’s men twenty minutes to scissor an opening in it with the bolt cutters. Out in the darkness, they could hear large animals banging around in the brush, hooves clattering on rocks, and they wondered if the noise would give warning to Josef Sholokoff and his entourage at the big stone house in the valley.
Krill led his men single-file through the slit in the fence, his M16 now equipped with a bipod and slung on his right shoulder, his eyes locked on the lighted compound down below. The wind was up, bending the trees and the tall grasses, which was not good for men threading their way through trees and foliage. When the wind blew, everything in the environment moved, even the shadows, everything except Krill and his men. But bad luck was an element to which a man adjusted and did not allow himself to be overcome by. Negrito was another matter. Suddenly, he had become an expert on all matters of importance and would not shut up: “This place has got rattlesnakes and Gila monsters in it… Those big animals you hear snuffing, that’s rhinos. One wrong step and squish… A puta for one of the Russian’s men told you where he was at? How dependable is that? What if he ain’t there? What if we kill a bunch of guys and don’t get the Russian? We got to wipe the slate clean, Krill. We turn the house down there into a cemetery.”
“Once again you have shown your great wisdom,” Krill said. “But now you must be quiet.”
“I am operating as your loyal lieutenant and adviser, my jefe.”
“Yes, yes, I know. But you talk like a bat flapping its wings in a cave, filling the air with sound that means nothing. You must cease this constant talking. It’s like glass in my ears.”
Negrito’s BB eyes seemed to grow closer to the bridge of his nose. “I’m here to serve you, nothing more. I worry about this mission. We are killing the Russian because he killed the minister who baptized your children. But this all has it origins with La Magdalena. If she had baptized them as you asked, we would not be having these problems. The Russians are dangerous. If you kill one of them, you kill them all. They come out of prisons worse than Mexico’s. They fuck their mothers and kill their children. Many of them were in insane asylums.”
“Where do you get these ideas, hombre?”
“You don’t listen to the new music, the narcocorridas. The narcocorridas tell us all about these guys. That’s why our people have to be vicious and show no mercy.”
“Look up there on the hillsides, above the stone house. Those two men are Sholokoff’s guards. Let your actions replace your words, Negrito. Take Lupa and Mimo with you and do your job.”
“Stay here and I’ll bring you back their ears. I don’t need Mimo and Lupa to do it, either.”
Krill waved a finger back and forth. “No, you don’t bring back ears.”
“You took the scalp of the DEA agent.”
“Because he killed my brother. Because I had to bring an offering to my brother’s grave so he could rest. You do not bring back trophies from these men. They are only doing what they are told.”
“Wait and see,” Negrito said.
“Everything with you is an argument.” Krill pulled Negrito’s leather hat off his head and started to hit him with it but instead simply shook his head and handed the hat back. He waited several seconds before he spoke, the heat dying in his chest. “The moon is going behind the mountain. As soon as the shadow falls on the house, kill Sholokoff’s guards and come back to me. You are very good at what you do, Negrito. Do not fail me.”
“I will never fail you. When the rooster crows and the sun rises, you will see me at your side and know I have been your loyal servant and follower.”
The moon slipped behind the crest of the mountain, dropping the valley into black shadow. Negrito and the two other men filed down a game trail and climbed silently over a table rock and disappeared into a thicket that was rife with thorns, never hanging their clothes on one of them, never rustling a branch. Krill unslung his assault rifle and knelt in the grass and waited, his gaze roaming over the lighted stone house and the swimming pool steaming behind it and a children’s swing set whose chains made a tinkling sound in the wind.
His M16 had been stolen from an armory in Mexico, along with crates of ammunition and United States Army. 45 automatics and bayonets and grenades and flak vests and other forms of military ordnance that Krill considered of no value. But the M16 was indeed a wondrous product of American manufacturing genius. It was lightweight, simple in design, easy to disassemble, rapid-firing, and soft on the shoulder. In semiauto mode, it could snap off shots individually with lethal accuracy or, on auto mode, hose down an entire room in seconds. The newer ones seldom jammed, and in the dark, the shooter could easily drop an empty magazine and replace it with a fresh one. Krill had jungle-clipped a twenty-round and thirty-round magazine together, so when his bolt locked open on an empty chamber, he could invert the two magazines and jam the full one into the loading slot without ever missing a beat.
Argentinean and American advisers had taught him how to shoot and care for the M16 and how to aim in the dark and not silhouette on a hill and how to crawl through wire on his stomach and sink mines in the trails used by the Sandinistas. They had also taught him the use of the M60 machine gun, a weapon whose murderous effectiveness had never ceased to amaze him. What his advisers had not taught him was how to live with the virus the guns had given him, because that was what it was, he told himself, a virus, one that produced an insatiable bloodlust that was like walking around in a warm pink mist and always wanting more of it.
He looked at the luminescent numbers on his wristwatch. Seventeen minutes had passed. He wondered what was keeping Negrito and the others. Lupa and Mimo were not killers by nature, but they would do as they were told and would not question the morality of the orders, as was almost always the case with poor men who became soldiers. Lupa had earned his nickname, “the magnifying glass,” because of the cheap spectacles he wore in order to read and his attention to details that were of no importance. Like Lupa, Mimo had been a farmer in Oaxaca before the prices for corn had gone to virtually nothing, but he was also a drunkard who drank huge amounts of liquor, made from sugarcane, that could be bought for a few cents a bottle. Neither man was dangerous or violent in himself, and both men together did not form another personality that was necessarily dangerous. But under the direction of Negrito, they would commit any number of heinous acts as long as they believed they were committing them in the interest of their families. Mexico was not a country, Krill thought. It was a revolution that had never stopped. The only things in it that stayed the same were the killings and the river of narcotics flowing to the north. The poor suffered and worked in sweatshops and lived in hovels and abandoned their children to live on the streets of Mexico City. Why did they not all rise up and kill their masters? Krill had no answer. Could it be that they were holy in their passivity? As with Negrito, these were ideas he could not fathom, at least not adequately. Maybe that was why Negrito had become his companion and lieutenant. This last conclusion was a disturbing one, and he did not want to dwell further on it.
He saw Mimo and Lupa coming through the trees and tall grass, bent down, their unshaved faces as severe as those of men staring into an ice storm.
“?Que pasa?” Krill asked.
Their eyes avoided his. Lupa looked over his shoulder.
“?Digame!” Krill said.
“Muerto,” Lupa said.
“?Quiene?” Krill asked.
“Ellos,” Mimo replied.
“Do you think I am stupid? What did you do out there?” Krill said in English.
Neither man replied. They squatted and kneaded their thighs as though they had run a long distance. They wiped their noses on their hands and felt in their pockets for tobacco or chewing gum, then looked with relief over their shoulders when they heard Negrito coming through the brush, bent low, a button-down shirt wadded in his hand.
“What happened out there?” Krill said.
“We took care of them guys. Like you told me. The second guy fought,” Negrito replied.
“What is in your hand?”
“Nothing anybody’s gonna miss. At least them guys ain’t.”
“Do not play games with me, Negrito.”
“Krill, we are doing these things out of loyalty to you. We ain’t getting paid. Why are you on my case, man?”
“Put the shirt on the ground and open it.”
“I am at your orders. But you make a big thing out of nothing. You didn’t want no ears. So I took their noses. They were dead. What does a dead man care about a nose? What’s he gonna smell? There ain’t no flowers in a grave, at least the graves these guys are gonna have.”
“The second man? You said he fought. He alerted others?”
“He couldn’t talk, know what I mean?” Negrito drew a finger across his throat. “But he fought hard just the same. I think he was Russian. The Russians got cojones like baseballs. You got to kill them guys really dead. Krill?”
“?Que pasa?” Krill answered, overwhelmed by the processes of Negrito’s mind.
Negrito seemed to stare at the stone house and the light falling out of the windows on the patio and the windmill palms and umbrella trees and the dark surface of the swimming pool. The wind gusted, wrinkling the water, rustling the limp chains on the swing set. His brow furrowed. “Me and Lupa and Mimo was talking,” he said. “The inside of that house is like a bank. There’s got to be cash all over it. Maybe cocaine, too. We do everybody in there, man, then take what we want.”
“No.”
“What do you mean ‘no’? Come on, cabron. We suppose to work for nothing? It ain’t fair. We’re amigos. We have always shared. But you can’t share nothing.”
“Go back on your own if you don’t like our mission.”
“I will never leave you.”
“Then do as I say.”
“And what is that? To let the Russian’s friends hunt us down? We’re gonna kill them all, right? If we kill them all, why not take what should be ours? All of this land belonged to our ancestors. Now it is owned by everybody except us.”
“You are a logical man. But we do not have an issue with anyone but Josef Sholokoff. I do not want his possessions. We avenge Minister Cody. We made fun of his manhood, but it was he who set the souls of my children free. For that I honor his memory. Do not intrude upon my purpose here.”
Negrito raised his big hands and turned in a circle like a baboon attempting a pirouette. “Then let’s kill the Russian and be gone. I am tired of this place. Do you want me to do it? I would do it with great pleasure. I am tired of talking about baptism and souls while we don’t get paid for the work we do. I am not a mystic. I believe in the knife and gun and dealing seriously with my enemies.”
“You also believe in the shovel.”
“You speak of my cemetery? I signal our adversaries of our potential.”
“You keep a museum under the ground for your pleasure. As a ghoul would. Vamonos,” Krill said. He slung his rifle over his shoulder and walked off through the brush and started down the incline, Negrito’s close-set pig eyes slipping off the side of his face.
As Krill approached the stone house, he forgot about Negrito and began to think about the challenge at hand. When the two guards Negrito had killed did not report in, others would be sent outside to find them. In the meantime, Krill had to find a spot that would allow him a clean shot through the front window. He thought he could hear the sound of a television coming from the front of the house, but in the wind he couldn’t be sure. His informant had told him that Sholokoff was staying at the house with no more than four men. Two of those were already taken care of. If Krill could get a clear shot at Sholokoff and kill him instantly, he might not have to kill his men, too. Few hired killers were willing to risk their lives for a dead employer. But if they chose to avenge their employer’s death, they would share the fate of their comrades on the hillside, Krill thought, and the choice would be theirs, not his.
He stayed in the shadow of the mountain and found a flat place up on a bench behind a rock, perhaps thirty yards from the front of the house, with an unobstructed view through the picture-glass living room window. He removed a small pair of binoculars from a pouch on his web belt and focused them through the glass. A diminutive, gray-headed, wizen-faced man in a belted scarlet robe was watching television from a reclining chair. His wiry beard and angular features made Krill think of a ferret or a toy constructed of Popsicle sticks and glue. How could one so small possess so much wealth and exert so much power over others? Krill wondered. Why did the gringos allow this tiny man to do so much damage in their country? The narcotics he sold were the poor man’s hydrogen bomb. But that was their business and not his. Krill wrapped his left forearm in the rifle sling, fitted his right hand in the pistol grip, and looked through the iron sights. Behind him, he could hear Negrito breathing in the darkness, an aura of dried sweat and tobacco and wood smoke emanating from his body.
“?Que bueno, hombre!” Negrito said.
“Do not talk,” Krill said, shifting the bipod on the rock, depressing the barrel slightly so the hood on the front sight formed a perfect circle around Sholokoff’s tiny head. He tightened his finger on the trigger, letting out his breath, his cheek flush against the dull black finish of the rifle stock.
“ Chingado, go ahead!” Negrito said. “Burn the whole magazine. It’s time we got out of here. I want to fuck my woman tonight.”
Krill had released his finger from the trigger and was staring numbly down the incline at the window. Two little girls and a little boy had just run from a side room and climbed into Sholokoff’s lap. Negrito leaned over Krill’s shoulder to see better, his loins brushing against Krill’s buttocks, his body odor and the smell of onions and garlic and fried meat on his breath enveloping Krill in a toxic cloud.
“Fuck, man, do it,” Negrito said. “I hear a plane. Them hunters come in and out of here all the time. They got a landing strip on the other side of the house.”
“Shut your mouth,” Krill said.
“You ain’t thinking straight. We already killed two guys. You got to finish the job, man. Sholokoff has many friends. We cannot have this man hunting us. Do it now, jefe.”
“Take your hand off my shoulder.”
“Then shoot.”
“You will not give me orders.”
“Then give me the rifle.”
“Remove your hand and take your odor out of my face.”
“Look at the plane. It’s dipping out of the sky. You have to choose between our families and these worthless people. You worry about my odor? What is wrong with you, man?”
“You are like an empty wagon rattling across a bridge,” Krill said. “You speak craziness and nonsense. You are like the demoniac babbling among the swine. We do not kill children. Have you learned nothing? Do you understand nothing except killing?”
“We did not put the children here. This is not our fault. Lupa and Mimo and me will do everything that is necessary inside the house. You will not have to see or hear anything that happens down there. One day you will be right in the head, but now you are not. So we will do these things for you and forget the bad words that you have spoken.”
“You will do nothing without my permission.”
“Take the shot, Krill. Please. You can do it. I’ve seen you shoot the head off a dove at a hundred meters. Concentrate on the Russian and don’t worry about the children. They will be all right. But we cannot leave this man alive.”
Krill’s head was pounding, his ears filled with whirring sounds that were louder than either the wind or Negrito’s incessant talking. Had it been like this for the soldiers in the helicopter who had machine-gunned the clinic built by the East Germans? Had they seen Krill’s children playing in the yard and wondered if they should not abort their mission? Had they fired on the building in hopes that they would not hit the children? Or had they given no thought at all to what they were doing? Did they simply murder his children and fly back to their base and eat lunch and drink warm beer under a palm-shaded table, staring idly at a smokeless blue volcano in the distance? Was that what happened when they slew the innocent children he had loved from the first breath they had drawn?
He bent over the rifle again, feeling the sling tighten on his left arm, his mouth filled with a taste like pennies, a brass band thundering in his head. The little boy was seated firmly in Sholokoff’s lap, watching the television. Krill raised the rifle barrel until the hood on the front sight circled Sholokoff’s head like the frame on a miniature photograph. He took a breath and waited a split second and then exhaled slowly, slowly, slowly, his left eye squinted shut, his right eye bulging like a child’s marble, his index finger tightening as though it had a life of its own.
Suddenly, he stood erect, pulling his hand from the trigger guard as though it had been shocked with a cattle prod. His teeth were chattering, his breath catching in his throat. Murderer, he thought he heard a voice say. Assassin! Man who brought death to his own children . He stared wide-eyed at Negrito.
“You look sick, cabron. You look like your mind has flown into the darkness,” Negrito said.
“We go back through the grass and out the fence,” Krill said. “We are through with this. We will deal with Sholokoff at another time.”
“I cannot believe what you are doing,” Negrito said. “You’re letting us down, man. You are making a great mistake that each of us will pay for. It ain’t fair. You are betraying us, Krill.”
Krill was already walking deep into the mountain’s shadow, his M16 reslung on his shoulder, his eyes empty, like those of a man who has looked into a mirror and is unable to recognize the image staring back at him.