Pam was still staring at him when he got off the phone. “You told the feds about Dowling’s mutilation but not about Barnum?”
“That’s right,” he replied.
“Why does Barnum get a pass?”
“Because if the feds get him into custody, they’ll probably lose interest in Anton Ling. Second, Barnum isn’t a bad kid and, in my opinion, deserves another chance.”
“You have a funny way of looking at the world, Hack.”
“My father used to say, ‘The name of the game is five-card draw. You never have to play the hand you’re dealt.’ He believed everything we see around us now was once part of the Atlantic Ocean, with mermaids sitting up on the rocks, and that one day I would see the mermaids return.”
“We’d better get some breakfast, kemo sabe.”
“I told you that’s what Rie called me, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, I’m sorry, I forgot,” she said.
“Don’t say you’re sorry. You didn’t know Rie. She’d like for you to call me that. She’d like you.”
She looked at him in a strange way, her mouth slightly parted, her face suddenly vulnerable, but he did not see it. Maydeen had just come out of the dispatcher’s cage, her anger palpable. “He’s on the line, Hack,” she said.
“Who is he?”
“He just told me, ‘Put the sheriff on the line, woman.’”
“Collins?”
“I say we hang up on him. Don’t let him jerk you around like this, Hack.”
“No, I think this is the call we’ve been waiting on,” Hackberry said.
Jack Collins was sitting at a small table under a canvas tarp propped on poles next to an airplane hangar, a corked green bottle of seltzer and a glass and a saucer of salted lime slices by his hand. A clutch of banana plants grew tightly against the hangar wall, beads of moisture the size of BBs sliding down the leaves. The wind was hot, the canvas riffling above his head, the desert lidded from horizon to horizon with a layer of solid blue-black clouds that seemed to force the heat and humidity radiating from the desert floor back into the earth. The clouds crackled with electricity but offered no real promise of rain or even a moment of relief from the grit and alkali in the wind and the smell of salt and decomposition that whirled with the dust devils out of the streambeds. Jack decided there was nothing wrong with Mexico that a half-dozen hydrogen bombs and a lot of topsoil couldn’t cure.
Jack’s pilot and two hired killers, the cousins Eladio and Jaime, were waiting for him by the two-engine Beechcraft on the airstrip. The pilot was on retainer, at Jack’s beck and call on a twenty-four-hour basis. Eladio and Jaime were available for any activity that put money in their pockets, night or day; if there were any lines they would not cross, any deeds they would not perform, including a drive-by for La Familia Michoacana on a teenage birthday party in Juarez, Jack had not seen it. Their greatest problem, in his view, was the impaired thought processes that seemed to live behind the indolence in their faces. The inside of Jaime’s head could only be described as a tangled web of cruelty that was linked somehow to his stupidity and sullen nature. The more intelligent of the two, Eladio, thought that his transparent childlike deceit and attempts at manipulation were signs of sophistication. During a rare loss of restraint with the two cousins, Jack had asked Eladio if his mother had been impregnated by a bowling pin. Eladio had responded, “You are a man of knowledge, Senor Jack. But you must not misjudge simple men. We think and feel deeply about our mothers. They are the center of our lives.”
“Then why do you say chinga tu madre to each other at every opportunity?” Jack had said.
“I am not equipped to discuss abstractions with a man of your intelligence,” Eladio had said. “But my mother is eighty and still tells stories of her mother, who was a concubine of Pancho Villa and one of those who helped hide his severed head in the Van Horn Mountains. That is the level of respect we have for the women in our family.”
Jack had made a mental note about the level of stability in his employees.
At this particular moment, he was irritated with the weather, the clouds of black flies buzzing over a calf’s carcass in a nearby streambed, and the fact that the two cousins seemed incapable of doing anything right except killing people. The man who owned the airstrip and the hangar and the improvised cafe outside it had installed a jukebox just inside the hangar door, one loaded with gangsta-rap recordings that blasted through the speakers so loudly that the side of the tin hangar shook. Jack had told Eladio and Jaime to talk with the jukebox’s owner, but either the owner had ignored the warning or they had not bothered. So while he was trying to make notes in preparation for his conversation with the sheriff, his eardrums were being assailed by a level of electronic percussion that was like having a studded snow tire driven over his head.
Jack capped his pen, stuck it between the pages of his notebook, and went inside the hangar, where the owner was cleaning the concrete pad with a push broom. “Can I help you, senor?” he said.
Jack pointed to his ear, indicating he couldn’t hear.
“You got a problem with your ear?” the owner shouted.
Jack pulled the plug on the jukebox, cut the electric cord in two with his pocketknife, and set the plug on top of the casing. “No, I’m fine now. Thanks,” he said.
Then he sat down at his table under the canvas flap and drank a glass of seltzer and chewed on a lime slice, staring into space, each eye like a glass orb with a dead insect frozen inside it. He dialed his cell phone with his thumb and lifted the phone to his ear and waited, his body heat increasing inside his clothes, his pulse quickening. Why would his metabolism react to calling the sheriff? It could be anything, he told himself. Why dwell on it? Maybe it was because he had finally found a worthy opponent.
Or maybe it was something else.
What?
Don’t think about it, he told himself.
Why not? I’m supposed to be afraid of my own thoughts? he asked himself.
Maybe Holland is the father you never had. Maybe you want him to like you.
Like hell I do.
You could have taken him off the board a couple of times. Why didn’t you do it, Jackie Boy?
The situation was one-sided. There’s no honor in that. Don’t call me that name.
There was honor in the shooting of the nine Thai women?
I don’t want to talk about that. It’s over. I did my penance in the desert.
He thought he heard the hysterical laughter of a woman, someone who always hung just on the edge of his vision, ridiculing him, waiting for him to slip up, her smile as cruel as an open cut in living tissue.
When the female deputy answered, Jack said, “Put the sheriff on the line, woman.”
Whatever she said in response never registered. Instead, he heard the voice of the woman who lived in his dreams and his unconscious and his idle daytime moments and his futile attempts at joy. He heard her incessant, piercing laughter, louder and louder, and he knew that eventually, he would once again resort to the release that never failed him, an eruption of gunfire that reverberated through his hands and arms like a jackhammer and made his teeth rattle and cleansed his thoughts and deadened his ears to all sound, both outside and inside his head.
“What do you need, Mr. Collins?” the sheriff’s voice said.
“I know where the Asian woman is. I can take you there,” he replied.
“Where might that be?”
“Down in Mexico, way to heck and gone by car, not so far by air.”
“She’s with Sholokoff?”
“She and Temple Dowling and the ’breed known as Krill. How’s Noie doing?”
“I don’t know. I kicked him loose.”
“You did what?”
“Last time I saw him, he was walking toward the city-limits sign, whistling a song.”
“The feds aren’t going to be happy with you.”
“I’ll try to live with it. Where can we meet, Mr. Collins?”
“You ever lie?”
“No.”
“Not ever?”
“You heard me the first time,” Hackberry said.
“I’m trusting you. I don’t do that with most people.”
“Do whatever you want, sir. But don’t expect me to feel flattered.”
“I’ll give you some coordinates and see you no later than four hours from now. I suppose you’ll bring the female deputy with you?”
“Count on it. Why are you doing this, Mr. Collins?”
“Sholokoff shouldn’t have taken the Asian woman. She’s not a player.”
“There’s another reason.”
“Sholokoff tried to have me capped. I owe him one.”
“There’s another reason.”
“When you find out what it is, tell me so we’ll both know. Don’t bring anybody besides the female deputy and your pilot. A couple of my men will pick you up. If you violate any aspect of our arrangement, the deal is off and you won’t hear from me again. The Asian woman’s fate will be on your conscience.”
“If you try to harm me or my deputy, I’m going to cool you out on the spot. I’m like you, Jack-over-the-hill and out of place and time, with not a lot to lose.”
“Then keep your damn word, and we’ll get along just fine.”
Jack clicked off his cell phone. Unbelievably, the jukebox sprang to life and began blaring rap music out the door. He remembered that the cord he’d cut had both a female and a male plug and was detachable from the box. The owner of the hangar had probably replaced it and decided to prove he could be as assertive and unpleasant as an imperious gringo from Texas who thought he could come to Mexico and wipe his ass on the place.
Jack went to the plane and removed his guitar case and set it on top of the table. The wind was blowing harder, the heat and dust swirling under the canopy as Jack unfastened the top of the case and inserted plugs in his ears and removed his Thompson and snapped a thirty-round box magazine into the bottom of the receiver and went inside the hangar. The owner took one look at him and dropped his push broom and began running for the back door. Jack raised the Thompson’s barrel and squeezed the trigger, ripping apart the jukebox, scattering plastic shards and electronic components all over the concrete pad, stitching the tin wall with holes the size of nickels.
“Senor, what the fuck you doin’?” Eladio said behind him.
Jack still had the plugs stoppered in his ears and could not hear him. The only sound he heard was his mother’s laughter-maniacal, forever taunting, a paean of ridicule aimed at a driven man who would never escape the black box in which a little boy had been locked.
Krill did not know a great deal about the complexities of politics. A man owned land or he did not own land. Either he was allowed to keep the product of his labor or he was not allowed to keep it. The abstractions of ideology seemed the stuff that fools and radicals and drunkards argued about in late-hour bars because they had nothing else to occupy their time. Though Krill did not understand the abstruse terms of social science or economics, he understood jails. He had learned about them in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and he knew how you survived or didn’t survive inside them. Men in confinement all behaved and thought in a predictable fashion. And so did their warders.
Krill had a very strong suspicion that his captors did not understand how jails worked. The gringo Frank was a good example of what American convicts called a “fish.” He had not only baited a prisoner but had informed the prisoner of his ultimate fate, which in this case was death and burial in concrete, telling the prisoner in effect that he had nothing to lose. Frank had made another mistake. He had not bothered to note that when Krill was placed in the cell, he was wearing running shoes, not pull-on boots.
Krill had slept three hours on the floor, his head cushioned on a piece of burlap he had found in the corner. As the early glow of morning appeared through the window on the far side of the cellar, a man came down the stairs carrying two bowls filled with rice and beans. He was a strange-looking man, with dirty-blond hair and a duckbilled upper lip and eyes that were set too far apart and skin that had the grainy texture of pig hide. He took one bowl to the cell where Krill believed La Magdalena was being held, then squatted in front of Krill’s cell and pushed the second bowl through the gap between the concrete floor and the bottom of the door.
“I need something to eat with,” Krill said.
“This isn’t a hotel,” the man said.
“We cannot eat our food with our fingers.”
“Eat out of the bowl. Just tip it up and you can eat.”
“Hombre, we are not animals. You must give us utensils to eat.”
“I’ll see what I can find,” the man said.
“Bring me a spoon. I cannot eat rice with a fork. Bring us water, too.”
“Want anything else?”
“Yes, to use a real toilet, one that flushes with water. Using a chemical toilet is unsanitary and degrading.”
When the man had gone upstairs, Krill lowered his voice and said, “Magdalena, can you hear me?”
“Yes,” the woman said.
“Did they hurt you?”
“No.”
“Where is Dowling?”
“I think he’s dead.”
“Did they mutilate him?”
“Yes, very badly.”
“Listen to me. I must say this in a hurry. I have killed many men. I have also killed a Jesuit priest. I tortured and murdered a DEA informant. I need your absolution for these sins and others that are too many to name.”
“I don’t have that power. Only God does. If you’re sorry for what you did and you renounce your violent ways, your sins are forgiven. God doesn’t forgive incrementally or partially. He forgives absolutely, Antonio. That’s what ‘absolution’ means. God makes all things new.”
“You remembered my name.”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because everyone calls me Krill.”
“It’s a name you earned in war. You shouldn’t go by that name anymore.”
“Maybe I’ll stop using it later, Magdalena. But right now I got to get us out of here. We need a fork from the man who brought us our bowls.”
“Why?”
“There are only two ways we’re going to get out of here. I have to open the lock on my door or get a man in my cell. We need a fork.”
“I heard you ask for a spoon.”
“This man is stubborn and slow in the head. He will do the opposite of what he is asked.”
The upstairs door opened, and the man with the duckbilled mouth came down the stairs. There were two dull metallic objects in his right hand. “I got you what you wanted,” he said. “Put your bowls outside the door when you’re finished.”
Krill stuck his hand through the bars and curved his palm around the utensil the man gave him. A spoon, he thought bitterly.
“Disappointed? I was jailing when I was sixteen,” the man said. “Better eat up. You got a rough day ahead of you.”
The single-engine department plane dropped down over a ridge and followed a milky-brown river that had spread out onto the floodplain and was dotted with sandy islands that had willow trees on them. Above the plane, Hackberry could see the long blue-black layer of clouds that seemed to extend like curds of industrial smoke from the Big Bend all the way across northern Mexico. Down below, the willow trees stiffened in the wind, the surface of the river wrinkling in jagged V-shaped lines. On the southern horizon, the cloud layer seemed to end and looked like strips of torn black cotton churning against a band of perfectly blue sky.
The wings of the plane yawed suddenly, the airframe shuddering. “We’re fine,” the pilot said above the engine noise. He was a crop duster named Toad Fowler who worked on and off for the sheriff’s department. “Those are just updrafts.”
Nonetheless, he kept tapping the glass on his instruments.
“What’s the problem?” Hackberry asked.
“The oil pressure is a little low,” the pilot said. “We’re okay. We’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“How low?” Hackberry said.
“It’s probably not a line, just a leaky gasket,” the pilot said. “I’ll check everything out after we get down. Hang on. We might bounce around a little bit.”
“You didn’t check everything out before we left?” Hackberry asked.
“It’s an old plane. What do you want? Shit happens,” the pilot said.
When the plane dipped down toward the river, Hackberry felt Pam place her hand on top of his shoulder, her breath coming hard against the back of his neck.
“We’re okay,” Hackberry said.
“How do you know?” she asked.
“Toad just told me.”
“Tell him I’m going to shoot him after we land.”
Down below, Hackberry could see great squares of both cultivated and pasture land and bare hills that looked molded out of white clay that had hardened and cracked. The pilot made a wide turn, the wings buffeting, and came in low over the river, the islands sweeping by, then Hackberry saw a feeder lot and hog farm whose holding pens were churned a chocolate color and buildings with tin roofs and houses constructed of cinder block and then a short pale green landing strip that had been recently mowed out of a field, a red wind sock straining against its tether at the far end. They landed hard, rainwater splashing under the tires. A flatbed truck with two men lounging near it was parked by the side of the strip.
“You ever see them before?” Pam said.
“No,” Hackberry replied. “You okay?”
She didn’t reply until Toad had cut the engine and gotten out of the plane and lit a cigarette by the wing. “I’m backing your play, Hack, but the idea of getting involved with Jack Collins makes my stomach churn,” she said.
“I wouldn’t blame you if you stayed with Toad. I can handle it by myself.”
“That’s not going to happen,” she said.
“I have to get Miss Anton back, Pam. If I don’t, I’ll never rest.”
“We’re making a deal with the devil, and you know it.”
“That’s the breaks.”
“You mean after this is over, you’re going to let that bastard slide?”
“Jack Collins isn’t planning to leave Mexico,” he said.
Her eyes went back and forth. “How do you know that?”
“Collins brought us here as his executioners,” he said.
“Or maybe he plans on being ours,” she said.
Hackberry and Pam pulled a duffel bag and a backpack off the plane and walked toward the flatbed truck. The Mexicans standing next to it introduced themselves as Eladio and Jaime. They were unshaved and wore slouch-brim straw hats and unpressed long-sleeve cotton shirts buttoned at the wrists. Their eyes wandered over Pam’s body without seeming to see her, the laziness in their expressions as much mask as indicator of their thoughts.
“Where’s Collins?” Hackberry said.
“He ain’t here,” Jaime said.
“That’s why I asked you where he is,” Hackberry said.
“We’ll take you where he’s at,” Jaime said. “You two can ride in front with Eladio. I’ll ride in back.”
“Where are we going?” Pam asked.
“You’ll know when we get there, chica,” Jaime said.
“Call me that again and see what happens,” she said.
“We are sorry. We do not mean to offend,” Eladio said. “Can we look in your canvas bag and your pack? It would be good if we can look at your cell phones, too.”
“Why would you want to do that?” Pam said.
“Among friends, there is no need of GPS locators,” Eladio said. “It is good to have things of that nature out of our discussions about the liberation of your friend. That is the only reason I raise this question.”
“Look all you want,” Hackberry said.
“Thank you,” Eladio said. “What fine guns you have in your bag. What is in this metal box?”
“Cookies and fruitcake,” Hackberry said.
“You carry such items with you when you go on a serious mission?” Eladio said.
“I have a sugar deficiency. I also thought you might like some. Take them if you like,” Hackberry said.
“That is very kind of you,” Eladio said. “I have children who will love these.”
“When do we see Preacher?” Hackberry asked.
“Very soon. He looks forward to seeing you with great anticipation,” Eladio said.
“You come all the way down here ‘cause of la china?” Jaime said.
“You could say that,” Hackberry replied.
“She must be some broad, hombre,” Jaime said. “It’s true what they say about Chinese women?”
“Do not speak further,” Eladio said, raising his finger to his cousin’s lips.
“It’s just a question. I do not need to be censored,” Jaime said. “These are gringos in our country. We do not suppress ourselves to please gringos in our own country.”
“It’s time for us to see Mr. Collins,” Hackberry said.
He and Pam rode in the cab while Eladio drove and Jaime sat on the flatbed. They proceeded in a southerly direction down dirt roads through irrigated farmland for almost an hour. The colors and configuration and flora in the land were like none that Hack could remember. Wild grapefruit and hibiscus and pink camellias and palm trees with long, slender trunks grew in the turn rows. The soil was loamy and tinted a reddish-brown, as though it had been mixed with rust, but the hills were white and bare and gray-backed, like sea creatures that had died and fossilized. The topography made Hack think of imaginative paintings of ancient Egypt that depicted an era when the earth was still recovering from the Flood and deserts bloomed and gatherers filled date baskets with their hands. Why would a man like Josef Sholokoff locate himself in such a place? To re-create the introduction of the serpent into Eden?
No, nothing so grandiose, Hackberry thought. For Sholokoff, Mexico was probably nothing more than a good tax dodge.
The truck rolled down a long embanked road made of crushed stone, the rocks ting ing steadily under the fenders, the wind stream warm and sultry, the sky lidded with clouds that emitted no sunlight. Ahead, at a crossroads, Hackberry could see a small, paintless wood-frame store with a single gas pump in front and a screened side porch. Behind the store, the terrain seemed to stretch away endlessly, glazed with salt, cracked and sunken in places, as though a lake had once covered the area but had drained through a hole in its center. Eladio parked the truck and cut the engine. “Senor Collins awaits you on the porch,” he said. “Do not take your guns inside. That would cause alarm for the owner of the store. Also, it is a very serious offense to bring guns into Mexico.”
“That’s like saying it’s a serious offense to bring insanity into a lunatic asylum,” Pam said.
“I am not educated and do not understand the comparisons you make, senorita,” Eladio said.
Hackberry looked through the back window of the cab. “Your cousin is eating the cookies you were going to give your children,” he said.
“Jaime, what are you doin’, man?” Eladio yelled out the window.
Jaime replaced the tin lid on the container and wiped the crumbs off his fingers. Pam and Hackberry got out of the cab and followed Eladio to the screen door on the store’s side porch. She glanced over her shoulder at Jaime, who had remained on the truck bed. “I don’t guess these guys are students of Homer,” she said.
“Shut up,” Hackberry said under his breath. He opened the screen door and stepped inside, removing his Stetson hat. Inside the gloom, against the back wall, he saw a man eating refried beans and strips of steak and sliced peppers from a tin plate with a fork. The man wore a blocked hat and a seersucker coat and a gray dress shirt with no buttons on the collar and trousers that were tucked into the tops of his boots. A guitar case was propped on its side against the wall behind him. For Hackberry, Jack Collins was like a figure out of a dream, not quite flesh and blood, vaporous in its dimensions, waiting like an incubus to attach itself to the fear in its victim, in the way a leech attaches itself to living tissue in order to survive.
“Have a good flight?” Collins said.
“Not really,” Hackberry said.
“Sit down. You, too, Deputy Tibbs.”
“I think I’ll stand. You don’t mind, do you?” Pam said.
“I owe you an apology,” Collins said, chewing while he spoke.
“For trying to kill me?” she said.
“If y’all had your way, you would have split me open and salted my innards and tacked me to a fence post. I figure what I did was just fair play.”
“We didn’t come here to talk past history, Mr. Collins. How far are we from our target?” Hackberry said.
Collins pushed two chairs out from the table with his boot. He was wearing a holstered thumb-buster revolver, the bluing rubbed bare around the cylinder, the cartridge loops stuffed with copperjacketed. 45 rounds. “Sit down. Have a Pepsi. The beans and meat aren’t bad. We go in at sunset. Once inside that compound, we don’t negotiate.”
“Listen to me, Collins. You don’t make the rules. I do,” Hackberry said. “We’re down here for one reason only, and that’s to save the life of an innocent woman. We don’t turn people into wallpaper. If you want to settle a personal score with Sholokoff, you find another time and place to do it.”
Collins motioned at the waiter, then looked up at Hackberry. “I bought a big bottle of Pepsi and had him put it in the icebox for y’all. Now sit down and take your nose out of the air. You, too, Deputy Tibbs.” He placed his fork on his plate and removed a folded piece of paper from inside his coat. “I’ve drawn a diagram of the compound and the entrances to it. Are y’all going to sit down or not?”
Pam Tibbs pulled back a chair and sat down, her eyes on his.
“You want to tell me something?” he asked.
“I’d like to park one in your brisket, you arrogant white trash,” she replied.
Collins looked across the table at Hackberry. “I’m not going to have this, Sheriff.”
“Show us the entrances to the compound,” Hackberry said.
“No, you need to correct the mouth on this woman.”
The waiter brought a tall plastic bottle of Pepsi and two glasses, then went away.
“We came a long way, Jack,” Hackberry said. “You’ve done a lot of harm to a lot of people, some of them friends of ours. Don’t expect too much of us.”
“You say I’ve done harm? Right now the Asian woman and the fellow named Krill are learning what harm is all about. Josef Sholokoff doesn’t know Noie is on the street. He thinks he’s still in your jail, and he’s mad as hell and sweating Ms. Ling and the half-breed because of it.”
“You’ve got someone inside?” Hackberry said.
“What do you think?” Collins asked. “They started in on Krill about four hours ago. If I know Josef, he’ll take a special interest in the woman. Why do you think he crucified Cody Daniels and set fire to his church with him hanging on the cross?”
“You tell me.”
“It wasn’t for money. It wasn’t for sheer meanness, either.”
Hackberry remained silent.
“Josef was born with the brain of a rodent and the face of a ferret, and he blames God for the pitiful little toothpick that he is,” Collins said. “For formally educated people, neither of y’all seems real bright, Mr. Holland. But I guess overestimating the intelligence of my fellow man has always been my greatest character defect.” He pushed the diagram toward Hackberry and resumed eating, his fork scraping in the grease at the bottom of the plate, his eyes as empty as glass.