THE SALOON WAS old, built in the nineteenth century, the original stamped-tin ceiling still in place, the long railed bar where John Wesley Hardin and Wild Bill Longley drank still in use. Preacher Jack Collins sat in the back against a wall, behind the pool table, under a wood-bladed fan. Through a side window he could see a clump of banana trees, their fronds beaded with drops of moisture that looked as heavy and bright as mercury. He watched the waiter bring his food from a service window behind the bar. Then he shook ketchup and salt and pepper and Louisiana hot sauce on the fried beef patty and the instant mashed potatoes and the canned string beans that constituted his lunch.
He raised his eyes slightly when the front door opened and Hugo Cistranos entered the saloon and walked out of the brilliant noonday glare toward Preacher’s table. But Preacher’s expression was impassive and showed no recognition of the events taking place around him, not even the arrival of his food at the table or the fact that Hugo had stopped at the bar and ordered two draft beers and was now setting them on the table.
“Hot out there,” Hugo said, sitting down, sipping at his beer, pushing the second glass toward Preacher.
“I don’t drink,” Preacher said.
“Sorry, I forgot.”
Preacher continued eating and did not ask Hugo if he wanted to order.
“You eat here a lot?” Hugo said.
“When they have the special.”
“That’s the special you’re eating now?”
“No.”
Hugo didn’t try to sort it out. He looked at the empty pool table under a cone of light, the racked cues, a hard disk of pool chalk on a table, the cracked red vinyl in the booths, a wall calendar with a picture of the Alamo on it that was three years out of date, the day drinkers humped morosely over their beer glasses at the bar. “You’re an unusual kind of guy, Jack.”
Preacher set his knife on the edge of his plate and let his eyes rove over Hugo’s face.
“What I mean is, I’m glad you’re willing to work with me on this problem I’m having with Nick Dolan,” Hugo said.
“I didn’t say I would.”
“Nobody wants you to do anything you don’t want to, least of all me.”
“A sit-down with the owner of a skin joint?”
“Dolan wants to meet you. You’re the man, Jack.”
“I have a hole in my foot and one in my calf. I’m a gimp. Sitting down with a gimp is going to make him pay the money he owes you? You cain’t handle that yourself?”
“We’re gonna take fifty percent of his nightclub and his restaurant. Ten percent of it will be yours, Jack. That’s for the late payment I owed you. Later, we’ll talk about the escort services Nick owns in Dallas and Houston. Five minutes after we sit down, his signature is going to be on that reapportionment of title. He’s a sawed-off fat little Jew putting on a show for his wife. Believe me, you’ll make him shit his pants. Let’s face it, you know how to give a guy the heebie-jeebies, Jack.”
Hugo salted his beer and drank from the foam. He wore a Rolex and a pressed sport shirt with a diamond design on it. His hair had just been barbered, and his cheeks were glowing with aftershave. He did not seem to notice the tightness around Preacher’s mouth.
“Where’s the sit-down?” Preacher asked.
“A quiet restaurant somewhere. Maybe in the park. Who cares?”
Preacher cut a piece of meat and speared string beans onto the tines of his fork and rolled the meat and string beans in his mashed potatoes. Then he set down the fork without eating from it and looked at the row of men drinking at the bar, slumped on their stools, their silhouettes like warped clothespins on a line.
“He plans to pop both of us,” Preacher said.
“Nicholas Dolan? He’ll probably have to wear adult diapers for the sit-down.”
“You got him scared, and you want him even more scared?”
“With Nick Dolan, it’s not a big challenge.”
“Why do cops use soft-nose ammunition?” Preacher asked.
“How should I know?”
“Because a wounded or scared enemy is the worst enemy you can have. The man who kills you is the one who’ll rip your throat out before you know he has his hand on you. The girl who blinded me with wasp spray and pumped two holes in me? Would you say that story speaks for itself?”
“Thought I’d let you in on a good deal, Jack. But everything I say seems to be the wrong choice.”
“We’re going to talk to Dolan, all right. But not when he’s expecting it, and not because you want to take control of his business interests. We’ll talk to Dolan because you screwed things up. I think you and Arthur Rooney have been running a scam of some kind.”
“Scam? Me and Arthur? That’s great.” Hugo shook his head and sipped from his beer, his eyes lowered, his lashes long like a girl’s.
“I paid him a visit,” Preacher said.
A smile flickered on Hugo’s face, the skin whitening around the edges of his mouth. “No kidding?”
“He’s got a new office there in Galveston, right on the water. You haven’t talked to him?” Preacher picked up his fork and slipped the combination of meat and string beans and potatoes into his mouth.
“I broke off my connections with Artie a long time ago. He’s a welcher and a pimp, just like Dolan.”
“I got the impression maybe you weren’t ’jacking the Asian women for Dolan. You just let Dolan think that way so you could blackmail him and take over his businesses. It was yours and Rooney’s gig from the jump.”
“Jack, I’m trying to get your money to you. What do I have to do to win your faith? You’re really hurting my feelings here.”
“What time does Dolan close his nightclub?”
“Around two A.M.”
“Take a nap. You look tired,” Preacher said. He started to eat again, but his food had gone cold, and he pushed his plate away. He picked up his crutches and began getting to his feet.
“What did Artie tell you? Give me a chance to defend myself,” Hugo said.
“Mr. Rooney was trying to find his finger on the floor. He didn’t have a lot to say at the time. Pick me up at one-fifteen A.M.”
PETE FLORES DID not dream every night, or at least he did not have dreams every night that he could remember. Regardless, each dawn he was possessed by the feeling he had been the sole spectator in a movie theater where he had been forced to watch a film whose content he could not control and whose images would reappear later, in the full light of day, as unexpectedly as a windowpane exploding without cause.
The participants in the film he was forced to watch were people he had known and others who were little more than ciphers behind a window, bearded perhaps, their heads wrapped with checkered cloths, cutouts that appeared like a tic on the edge of his vision and then disappeared behind a wall that was all at once just a wall, behind which a family might have been sitting down to a meal.
Pete had read that the unconscious mind retains a memory of the birth experience-the exit from the womb, the delivering hands that pull it into a blinding light, the terror when it discovers it cannot breathe of its own accord, then the slap of life that allows oxygen to surge into its lungs.
In Pete’s film, all of those things happened. Except the breech was the turret in an armored vehicle, the delivering hands those of a dust-powdered sergeant with a First Cav patch on his sleeve who pulled Pete from an inferno that was roasting him alive. Once more on the street, the sergeant leaned down, clasping Pete’s hand, trying to drag him away from the vehicle.
But even as broken pieces of stone were cutting into Pete’s buttocks and back, and machine-gun belts were exploding inside his vehicle, he knew his and the sergeant’s ordeal was not over. The hajji in the window looked like he had burlap wrapped around the bottom half of his face. In his hands was an AK-47 with two jungle-clipped banana magazines protruding from the stock. The hajji hosed the street, lifting the stock above his head to get a better angle, the muzzle jerking wildly, whanging rounds off the vehicle, hitting the sergeant in at least three places, collapsing him on top of Pete, his hand still clasped inside Pete’s.
When Pete woke from the dream the third day in the motel, the room was cold from the air conditioner, blue in the false dawn, quiet inside the hush of the desert. Vikki was still asleep, the sheet and bedspread pulled up to her cheek. He sat on the side of the bed, trying to focus on where he was, shivering in his skivvies, his hands clamped between his knees. He stared through the blinds at a distant brown mountain framed against a lavender sky. The mountain made him think of an extinct volcano, devoid of heat, dead to the touch, a geological formation that was solid and predictable and harmless. Gradually, the images of a third-world street strewn with chunks of yellow and gray stone and raw garbage and dead dogs and an armored vehicle funneling curds of black smoke faded from his vision and the room became the place where he was.
Rather than touch her skin and wake her, he held the corner of Vikki’s pajama top between the ends of his fingers. He watched the way the air conditioner moved the hair on the back of her neck, the way she breathed through her mouth, the way color pooled in her cheeks while she was sleeping, as though the warmth of her heart were silently spreading its heat throughout her body.
He did not want to drink. Or at least he did not want to drink that day. He shaved and brushed his teeth and combed his hair in the bath room with the door closed behind him. He dressed in a clean pair of jeans and a cotton print shirt and slipped on his boots and put on his straw hat and carried his thermos down to the café at the traffic light.
He put four teaspoons of sugar in his coffee and ate an order of toast spread with six plastic containers of jelly. A Corona beer sign on the wall showed a Latin woman in a sombrero and a Spanish blouse reclining on a settee inside an Edenic garden, marble columns rising beside her, a purple mountain capped with snow in the background. Down the counter, a two-hundred-pound Mexican woman with a rear like a washtub was bent over the cooler, loading beer a bottle at a time, turning her face to one side, then the other, each time she lowered a bottle inside. She wiped her hands on a dish towel and removed Pete’s dirty plate from the counter and set it in a sink of greasy water.
“Those bottles pop on you sometimes?” he asked.
“If the delivery man leaves them in the sun or if they get shook up in the case, they will. It hasn’t happened to me, though. You want more coffee?”
“No, thanks.”
“There’s no charge for a warm-up.”
“Yes, ma’am, I’ll take some. Thank you.”
“You put a lot of sugar in there, huh?”
“Sometimes.”
“You want me to fill your thermos?”
He’d forgotten he had brought it with him, even though it stood right by his elbow. “Thanks, I’m good,” he said.
She tore a ticket off a pad and put it facedown by his cup. When she walked away, he felt strangely alone, as though a script had been pulled preemptively from his hands. He could hear the bottles clinking inside the cooler as she resumed her work. He paid the cashier for his coffee and toast, and gazed out the front door at the sun lighting the landscape, breaking over arid mountains that seemed transported from Central Asia and affixed to the southern rim of the United States.
He walked back to the service counter. “It’s gonna be a hot one. I might need one of those singles with lunch,” he said.
“I don’t have any cold ones,” the Mexican woman said.
“I’ll put it on top of the air conditioner at the motel,” he said. “Fact is, better give me a couple.”
She put two wet bottles in a paper bag and handed them to him. The top of Pete’s shirt was unbuttoned, and the woman’s eyes drifted to the shriveled tissue on his shoulder. “You was in Iraq?”
“I was in Afghanistan, but only three weeks in Iraq.”
“My son died in Iraq.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s six-thirty in the morning,” she said, looking at the bottles in his hand.
“Yes, ma’am, it is.”
She started to speak again but instead turned back to her work, her eyes veiled.
He walked back to the motel and stopped by the desk. Outside, he heard an eighteen-wheeler shifting gears at the traffic light, metal grinding. “We got any mail?” he said to the clerk.
“No, sir,” the clerk said.
“What time does the mailman come?”
“Same time as yesterday, ’bout ten.”
“Guess I’ll check by later,” Pete said.
“Yes, sir, he’ll sure be here by ten.”
“Somebody else couldn’t have misplaced it, stuck it in the wrong box or something?”
“Anything I find with y’all’s name on it, I promise I’ll bring it to your room.”
“It’ll be from a man named Junior Vogel.”
“Yes, sir, I got it.”
Outside, Pete stood in the shadow of the motel and looked at the breathtaking sweep of the landscape, the red and orange and yellow coloration in the rocks, the gnarled trees and scrub brush whose root systems had to grow through slag to find moisture. He slapped a mosquito on the back of his neck and looked at it. The mosquito had been fat with blood and had left a smear on his palm the size of a dime. Pete wiped the blood on his jeans and began walking down the two-lane road that looked like a displaced piece of old Highway 66. He walked past the miniature golf course and angled through the abandoned drive-in theater, passing through the rows of iron poles that had no speakers on them, row after row of them, their function used up and forgotten, surrounded by the sounds of wind and tumbleweed blowing through their midst.
He walked for perhaps twenty minutes, up a long sloping grade to a plateau on which three table sandstone rocks were set like browned biscuits one on top of another. He climbed the rocks and sat down, his legs hanging in space, and placed the bag with the two bottles of beer in it by his side. He watched a half-dozen buzzards turning in the sky, the feathers in their extended wings fluttering on the warm current of air rising from the hardpan. Down below, he watched an armadillo work its way toward its burrow amid the creosote brush, the weight of its armored shell swaying awkwardly above its tiny feet.
He reached into his pocket and took out his Swiss Army knife. With his thumb and index finger, he pulled out the abbreviated blade that served as both a screwdriver and a bottle opener. He peeled the wet paper off the beer bottles and set one sweating with moisture and spangled with amber sunlight on the rock. He held the other in his left hand and fitted the opener on the cap. Below, the armadillo went into its burrow only to reappear with two babies beside it, all three of them peering out at the glare.
“What are you guys up to?” Pete asked.
No answer.
He uncapped the bottle and let the cap tinkle down the side of the rocks onto the sand. He felt the foam rise over the lip of the bottle and slide down his fingers and the back of his hand and his wrist. He looked back over his shoulder and could make out the screen of the drive-in movie and, farther down the street, the steak house and beer joint where Vikki had used another last name and taken a job as a waitress, the money under the table. He wiped his mouth with his hand and could taste the salt in his sweat.
At the foot of the table rocks, the polished bronze beer cap seemed to glow hotter and hotter against the grayness of the sand. It was the only piece of litter as far as he could see. He climbed down from the rocks, his beer bottle in one hand, picked up the cap, and thumbed it into his pocket. The armadillos stared up at him, their eyes as intense and unrelenting as black pinheads.
“Are you guys friendlies or Republican Guard? Identify yourself or get shot.”
Still no response.
Pete reached for the bottle of beer on top of the rocks, then approached the burrow. The adult armadillo and both babies scurried back inside.
“I tell you what,” he said, squatting down, a bottle in each hand. “Anybody that can live out here in this heat probably needs a couple of brews a lot worse than I do. These are on me, fellows.”
He poured the first beer down the hole, then popped off the cap on the second one and did the same, the foam running in long fingers down the burrow’s incline. “You guys all right in there?” he asked, twisting his head sideways to see inside the burrow. “I’ll take that as an affirmative. Roger that and keep your steel pots on and your butts down.”
He shook the last drops out of both bottles, stuck the empties in his pockets, and hiked back to town, telling himself that perhaps he had just walked through a door into a new day, maybe even a new life.
At ten A.M. exactly, he went down to the motel office just as the mailman was leaving. “Did you have anything for Gaddis or Flores?” he said.
The mailman grinned awkwardly. “I’m not supposed to say. There was a bunch of mail for the motel this morning. Ask inside.”
Pete opened the door and closed it behind him, an electronic ding going off in back somewhere. The clerk came through a curtained doorway. “How you doing?” he said.
“I’m not sure.”
“Sorry, I didn’t see nothing in there for y’all.”
“It’s got to be here.”
“I looked, believe me.”
“Look again.”
“It’s not there. I wish it was, but it’s not.” The clerk studied Pete’s face. “Your rent is paid up for four more nights. It cain’t be all that bad, can it?”
THAT NIGHT VIKKI took her sunburst Gibson to work with her and played and sang three songs with the band. The next morning there was no mail addressed to her or Pete at the motel office. Pete used the pay phone at the steak house to call Junior Vogel at his home.
“You promised Vikki you were gonna pick up my check and send it to us,” he said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You damn liar, what’d you do with my check? You just left it in the box? Tell me.”
“Don’t call here again,” Junior said, and hung up.
AT TWO A.M. Nick Dolan watched his remaining patrons leave the club. He used to wonder where they went after hours of drinking and viewing half-naked women perform inches away from their grasp. Did their fantasies cause them to rise throbbing and hard in the morning, unsated, vaguely ashamed, perhaps angry at the source of their dependency and desperation, perhaps ready to try an excursion into the dark side?
Was there a connection between what he did and violence against women? A female street person had been raped and beaten by two men six blocks from his club, fifteen minutes after closing time. The culprits were never caught.
But eventually, out of his own ennui with the subject, Nick had stopped thinking about his patrons or worrying about their deeds past or present, in the same way a butcher does not think about the origins and history of the gutted and frozen white shapes hanging from meat hooks in his subzero locker. Nick’s favorite admonition to himself remained intact and unchallenged: Nick Dolan didn’t invent the world.
Nick drank a glass of milk at the bar while his girls and barmaids and bartenders and bouncers and janitors said good night and one by one went outside to their cars and their private lives, which he suspected were little different from anyone else’s, except for the narcotics his girls often relied upon.
He locked the back door, set the alarm, and locked the front door as he went out. He paused in front of the club and surveyed the parking lot, the occasional car passing on the four-lane, the great star-strewn bowl of sky overhead. The wind was balmy blowing through the trees, the clouds moonlit; there was even a promise of rain in the air. The.25 auto he had taken from his desk rested comfortably in his trousers pocket. The only vehicle in the parking lot was his. For some reason the night struck him as more like spring than late summer, a time of new beginnings, a season of tropical showers and farmers’ markets and baseball training camps and a carpet of bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush just over the rise on the highway.
But for Nick, spring was special for another reason: No matter how jaded he had become, spring still reminded him of his youthful innocence and the innocence his children had shared with him.
He thought of the great green willow tree bending over the Comal River behind his property, and the way his children had loved to swim through its leafy tendrils, hanging on to a branch just at the edge of the current, challenging Nick to dive in with them, their faces full of respect and affection for the father who kept them safe from the world.
If only Nick could undo the fate of the Thai women. What did the voice of Yahweh say? “I am the alpha and omega. I am the beginning and the end. I am He who maketh all things new.” But Nick doubted that the nine women and girls whose mouths had been packed with dirt would give him absolution so easily.
He walked across the parking lot to his car, watching the tops of the trees bend in the wind, the moon like silver plate behind a cloud, his thoughts a tangled web he couldn’t sort out. Behind him, he heard an engine roar to life and tires ripping through gravel down to a harder surface. Before he could turn around, Hugo’s SUV was abreast of him, Hugo in the passenger seat, a kid in a top hat behind the wheel.
“Get in, Nick. Eat breakfast with us,” Hugo said, rolling down the window.
A man Nick didn’t know sat in the backseat, a pair of crutches propped next to him.
“No, thanks,” Nick replied.
“You need to hop in with us, you really do,” Hugo said, getting out of the vehicle and opening the back door.
The man who sat in back against the far door was watching Nick in tently now. His hair was greased, the part a neat gray line through the scalp, the way an actor from the 1940s might wear his hair. His head was narrow, his nose long, his mouth small and compressed. A newspaper was folded neatly in his lap; his right hand rested just inside the fold. “I’d appreciate you talking to me,” the man said.
The wind had dropped, and the rustling sounds in the trees had stopped. The air seemed close, humid, like damp wool on the skin. Nick could hear his pulse beating in his ears.
“Mr. Dolan, do not place your hand in your pocket,” the man said.
“You’re the one they call Preacher?” Nick asked.
“Some people do.”
“I don’t owe you any money.”
“Who said you did?”
“Hugo.”
“That’s Hugo, not me. What are you carrying in your pocket, Mr. Dolan?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t lie.”
“What?”
“Don’t be disingenuous, either.”
“I don’t know what that word means.”
“You’ll either talk to me now, or you’ll see me or Bobby Lee later.”
“Who’s Bobby Lee?”
“That’s Bobby Lee there,” Preacher said, indicating the driver. “He may be a descendant of the general. You told Hugo you wanted to meet me. Don’t demean yourself by pretending you didn’t.”
Nick could hear a brass band marching through his head. “So now I’ve met you. I’m satisfied. I’m going home now.”
“I’m afraid not,” Preacher said.
Nick felt as though a garrote were tightening around his chest, squeezing the blood from his heart. Face it now, when Esther and the kids aren’t with you, a voice inside him said.
“You say something?” Preacher asked.
“Yeah, I have friends. Some of them are cops. They come here sometimes. They eat free at my restaurant.”
“So where does that leave us?”
Nick didn’t have an answer. In fact, he couldn’t keep track of anything he had said. “I’m not a criminal. I don’t belong in this.”
“Maybe we can be friends. But you have to talk to me first,” Preacher said.
Nick set his jaw and stepped inside the SUV, then heard the door slam behind him. The kid in the top hat floored the SUV onto the service road. The surge of power in the engine caused Nick to sway against the seat and lose control of the safety strap he was trying to snap into place. Preacher continued to look at him, his hazel eyes curious, like someone studying a gerbil in a wire cage. Nick’s hand brushed the stiff outline of the.25 auto in his side pocket.
Preacher knocked on his cast with his knuckles. “I got careless,” he said.
“Yeah?” Nick said. “Careless about what?”
“I underestimated a young woman. She looked like a schoolgirl, but she taught me a lesson in humility,” Preacher said. “Why’d you want to meet me?”
“Y’all are trying to take over my businesses.”
“I look like a restaurateur or the operator of a strip joint?”
“There’s worse things.”
Preacher watched the countryside sweeping by. He closed his eyes as though temporarily resting them. A moment later, he reopened them and leaned forward, perhaps studying a landmark. He scratched his cheek with one finger and studied Nick again. Then he seemed to make a decision about something and tapped on the back of the driver’s seat. “The road on the left,” he said. “Go through the cattle guard and follow the dirt track. You’ll see a barn and a pond and a clapboard house. The house will be empty. If you see a car or any lights on, turn around.”
“You got it, Jack,” the driver said.
“What’s going on?” Nick said.
“You wanted a sit-down, you got your sit-down,” Hugo said from the front passenger seat.
“Take the pistol out of your pocket with two fingers and put it on the seat,” Preacher said. Half of his right hand remained inside the fold of the newspaper on his lap. His mouth was slightly parted, his eyes unblinking, his nose tilted down.
“I don’t have a gun. But if I did, I wouldn’t give it to you.”
“You’re not a listener?” Preacher said.
“Yeah, I am, or I wouldn’t be here.”
“You were planning to shoot both me and Hugo if you could catch us unawares. You treated me with disrespect. You treated me as though I’m an ignorant man.”
“I never saw you before. How could I disrespect you?” Nick replied, avoiding Preacher’s initial premise.
Preacher sucked on a tooth. “You attached to your family, Mr. Dolan?”
“What do you think?”
“Answer my question.”
“I have a good family. I work hard to provide for them. That’s why I don’t need this kind of shit.”
“You true to your vows?”
“This is nuts.”
“I believe you’re a family man. I believe you planned to take out me and Hugo even if you had to eat a bullet. You’d eat a bullet for your family, wouldn’t you?”
Nick felt he was being led into a trap, but he didn’t know how. Preacher saw the confusion in his face.
“That makes you a dangerous man,” Preacher said. “You’ve put me in a bad spot. You shouldn’t have done that. You shouldn’t have patronized me, either.”
Nick, with his heart sinking, saw the driver’s eyes look at him in the rearview mirror. The tips of his fingers inched away from the outline of the.25 to the edge of his pocket. He glanced at Preacher’s right hand, partially inserted inside the folded newspaper. The paper was turned at an angle, pointed directly at Nick’s rib cage.
The SUV turned off the service road and passed through a break in a row of slash pines and thumped across a cattle guard onto farmland spiked with weeds and cedar fence posts that had no wire on them. Nick could see moonlight glowing on a pond, and beyond the pond, a darkened house with cattle standing in the yard. He folded his arms on his chest, burying his hands in his armpits to stop them from shaking. The driver, Bobby Lee, looked at Nick in the mirror again, a dent in each of his cheeks, as though he were sucking the saliva out of his mouth.
“I knew it’d come to this,” Nick said.
“I don’t follow you,” Preacher said.
“I knew one of you bastards would eventually blindside me. You’re all the same-black pukes from the Desire, Italian punks from Uptown. Now it’s an Irish psychopath who’s a hump for Hugo Cistranos. None of y’all got talent or brains of your own. Every one of you is a pack animal, always figuring out a way to steal what another man has worked for.”
“Do you believe this guy?” the driver said to Hugo.
“I don’t steal, Mr. Dolan,” Preacher said. “But you do. You steal and market the innocence of young women. You create a venue that makes money off the lust of depraved men. You’re a festering sore in the eyes of God, did you know that, Mr. Dolan? For that matter, you’re an abomination in the eyes of your own race.”
“Judaism isn’t a race, it’s a religion. That’s what I’m talking about. All of you are ignorant. That’s your common denominator.”
Bobby Lee had already cut the headlights and was slowing to a stop by the pond. The open end of the newspaper in Preacher’s lap was still pointed at Nick’s side. Nick thought he was going to be sick. Hugo pulled open the back door and ran his hand along Nick’s legs. His face was so close that Nick could feel Hugo’s breath on his skin. Hugo slipped the.25 auto from Nick’s pocket and aimed it at the pond.
“This is a nice piece,” he said. He released the magazine and worked the slide. “Afraid to carry one in the chamber, Nicholas?”
“It wouldn’t have done me any good,” Nick said.
“Want to show him?” Hugo said to Preacher.
“Show me what?” Nick said.
Preacher tossed the newspaper to the floor and got out on the other side of the vehicle, pulling his crutches after him. The newspaper had fallen open on the floor. There was nothing inside it.
“Tough luck, Nicholas,” Hugo said. “How’s it feel to lose to a guy holding a handful of nothing?”
“Bobby Lee, open up the back. Hugo, give me his piece,” Preacher said.
“I can take care of this,” Hugo said.
“Like you did behind that church?”
“Take it easy, Jack,” Hugo said.
“I said give me the piece.”
Nick could feel a wave of nausea permeate the entirety of his metabolism, as though he had been systemically poisoned and all his blood had settled in his stomach and every muscle in him had turned flaccid and pliant. For just a moment he saw himself through the eyes of his tormentors-a small, pitiful fat man whose skin had become as gray as cardboard and whose hair glowed with sweat, a little man whose corpulence gave off the vinegary stink of fear.
“Walk with me,” Preacher said.
“No,” Nick said.
“Yes,” Bobby Lee said, pressing a.45 hard between Nick’s shoulder blades, screwing it into the softness of his muscles.
The cows in the yard of the farmhouse had strung shiny green lines of feces around the pond. In the moonlight Nick could see the cows watching him, their eyes luminous, their heads haloed with gnats. An unmilked cow, its swollen udder straining like a veined balloon, bawled with its discomfort.
“Go toward the house, Mr. Dolan,” Preacher said.
“It ends here, doesn’t it?” Nick said.
But no one spoke in reply. He heard Hugo doing something in the luggage area of the SUV, shaking out a couple of large vinyl garbage bags and spreading them on the carpet.
“My family won’t know what happened to me,” Nick said. “They’ll think I deserted them.”
“Shut up,” Bobby Lee said.
“Don’t talk to him that way,” Preacher said.
“He keeps sassing you, Jack.”
“Mr. Dolan is a brave man. Don’t treat him as less. That’s far enough, Mr. Dolan.”
Nick felt the skin on his face shrink, the backs of his legs begin to tremble uncontrollably, his sphincter start to give way. In the distance he could see a bank of poplars at the edge of an unplowed field, wind flowing through Johnson grass that had turned yellow with drought, the brief tracings of a star falling across the sky. How did he, a kid from New Orleans, end up here, in this remote, godforsaken piece of fallow land in South Texas? He closed his eyes and for just a second saw his wife standing under the colonnade at the corner of St. Charles and Canal, raindrops in her hair, the milky whiteness of her complexion backlit by the old iron green-painted streetcar that stood motionless on the tracks.
“Esther,” he heard himself whisper.
He waited for the gunshot that would ricochet a.25-caliber round back and forth inside his brainpan. Instead, all he heard was the cow bawling in the dark.
“What did you say?” Preacher asked.
“He didn’t say anything,” Bobby Lee said.
“Be quiet. What did you say, Mr. Dolan?”
“I said Esther, the name of my wife, a woman who will never know what happened to her husband, you cocksucker.”
Nick could hear the tin roof on the farmhouse lift and clatter in the wind.
“What’s wrong, Jack?” Bobby Lee said.
“You swear to God that’s your wife’s name?” Preacher said.
“I wouldn’t cheapen her name by swearing to a man like you about it.”
“Don’t let him talk to you like that, Jack.”
Nick could hear Preacher breathing through his nose.
“Give me his piece. I’ll do it,” Bobby Lee said.
“Bring the vehicle around,” Preacher said.
“What are you doing?” Bobby Lee asked. He was taller than Preacher, and his top hat was silhouetted against the moon, giving him the appearance of even greater height.
“I’m doing nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“We leave this man alone.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Esther told King Xerxes if he killed her people, he’d have to kill her, too. That’s how she became the handmaiden of God. You don’t know that?”
“No, and I don’t waste my time on that biblical claptrap, either.”
“That’s because you’re uneducated. Your ignorance isn’t your fault.”
“Jack, this guy knows too much.”
“You don’t like what I’m doing?” Preacher said.
“This is a wrong move, man.”
Nick could hear the wind and a sound like grasshoppers thudding against the side of the farmhouse. Then Bobby Lee said, “All right, to hell with it.”
Nick heard Bobby Lee’s footsteps going away, then the voices of Bobby Lee and Hugo merging together by the SUV. Preacher inched forward on his crutches until Nick could smell the grease in his hair.
“You take care of your wife,” Preacher said. “You take care of your kids. You never come near me again. Understood?”
But Nick’s mouth was trembling so bad, from either fear or release from it, that he couldn’t speak.
Preacher threw Nick’s.25 auto into the pond, the rings from the splash spreading outward, rippling through the cattails. As Preacher worked his way back toward the SUV, his shoulders were pushed up by his crutches, close to his neck, as if he were a scarecrow whose sticks had collapsed. Nick stared dumbly at his three abductors as though they were caught forever inside a black-and-white still taken from a 1940s noir movie-the giver of death in silhouette, stumping his way across the baked earth, Hugo and Bobby Lee looking at Nick with faces that seemed aware that a new and dangerously complex presence had just come aborning in their lives.