LIAM ERIKSSON HAD parked his pickup truck, one with a camper shell inserted in the bed, down in a sandy bottom thinly shaded by mesquite trees. A shiny green liquid, one with the viscosity of an industrial lubricant, wound through the pebbled creek bed, and gnats and horseflies hung in the brush along the banks. In the distance was a long stretch of baked flatland that glimmered like salt and, beyond it, a range of blue hills. Bobby Lee Motree sat on a rock and took a longneck from a bucket of ice and cracked off the cap.
“I don’t see how you can cut up a sweet piece like that,” he said.
“Business is business. Why be sentimental about it? Besides, I found it, so it ain’t no skin off my ass,” Liam replied.
Liam stood at the rear door of his camper shell, touching the blade of a hacksaw with his thumb. He was bare-chested and wore a straw hat with a wilted brim, like one a female gardener would wear, and hiking shorts with big snap pockets and alpine shoes with lugs on the soles. He had shaved off his orange beard after he had screwed up at the check-cashing store in San Antonio; now the lower half of his face looked like emery paper. Or maybe the skin of a freshly exhumed corpse, Bobby Lee thought.
“You should have left your beard, or maybe just trimmed or dyed it,” Bobby Lee said.
“Something eating on you?”
Yeah, there was. But exactly how much information could he trust Liam with? Bobby Lee bit on his lip and thought about it.
Liam grinned, showing the gaps in his teeth, and locked down a pump shotgun in a machinist vise that was bolted to the bed of his truck. He had already wood-rasped the stock into a pistol grip and machine-sanded the wood smooth. He set the hacksaw blade flush with the pump and began sawing.
“I think I’ve figured out where the soldier boy is living,” Bobby Lee said.
“How’d you do that?” Liam asked, still grinning.
“He led me south, then way to hell and gone out east. I think he’s probably about the same distance in the exact opposite direction.”
“You were always good at ciphering things out, Bobby Lee. Matter of bloodline, maybe,” Liam said. “I’m referring to the fact that Robert E. Lee is in your pedigree.”
Was Liam coming on wise? Bobby Lee narrowed his eyes. All right, let’s take a run at it, he thought. “We’ve worked lots of gigs, me and you.”
“We’ve splattered the walls, bud. They’re never gonna know who did any of it, either,” Liam said.
“But this current deal has gotten complicated.” Bobby Lee let his words hang in the air.
Liam stopped sawing, not raising his eyes. He wiped the cut in the shotgun’s barrel with an oily rag. “Does this have something to do with that call you got from Hugo?”
“Hugo says we get rid of the girl and the soldier. Then we do Nick Dolan and his wife, with special instructions for the wife. Then we do Preacher.”
Liam began sawing again, his back turned to Bobby Lee. “I suspect I misheard you on that last part.”
“Jack cut off Artie Rooney’s finger, and now he’s shaking him down for a half mil. Hugo says it’s time for Jack to join the Hallelujah Chorus.”
Liam turned around. “Do Preacher? You’re actually serious? You haven’t started fooling with acid again?”
“I’m taking you into my confidence, Liam. I don’t like the way things have turned out. But Preacher is slipping. I think it’s because of the deal behind the church.”
“Yeah, well, nobody planned that one. If that’s on anybody, it’s on Hugo.”
“You in or not, Liam?”
“Cap Preacher? That’s like trying to kill death.”
“He’s got a weakness. It’s got something to do with sugar. Or candy or pastry. I don’t get it. But he’s got something wrong with him. A hooker I knew said Jack almost died once because of something he ate.”
“You’re that scared of him?” Without waiting for an answer, Liam casually resumed cutting off the shotgun’s barrel, the muscles in his back rippling like warm tallow as he worked.
Bobby Lee felt a blood vessel pulse in his temple. He took a sip of his beer before he spoke. “Want to add anything to that last remark?”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Because I’m having a little trouble handling it.”
“I was talking about myself. Preacher scares the hell out of me. He’s a mean motor scooter and crazy besides.”
Bobby Lee started to speak again but this time held his tongue. He cracked open another beer and drank from it, realizing irrefutably that he had made his problems worse by taking Liam into his confidence. He had stood up for Liam with Preacher, and this was what he got for it. Liam was no different from any other gutter rat in the business. He had no mercy, either. He had proved that when he went to work on the owner of the diner, what-was-his-name, Junior Kraut Face or something. Now Bobby Lee had both Preacher and Liam to worry about, plus the fact that he hadn’t gotten paid, plus the fact that Preacher had popped a federal agent, which was sure to bring down a ton of heat on all of them.
Liam finished sawing through the shotgun’s barrel and sailed it across the creek bed into a cluster of sandstone boulders. He listened as the barrel tinkled and rolled down the side of a ravine. He begin fitting a series of twelve-gauge shells into the magazine, pushing them in with his thumb until the spring in the loading tube came tight. “I already took out the sportsman’s plug,” he said. “Five double-aught bucks. You want to see the paint fly? These babies can do it.”
He aimed at a jackrabbit running across the hardpan, leading it with the sawed tip of the barrel, one eye closed. Then he breathed out a popping sound and lowered the gun. He grinned and smacked Bobby Lee on the shoulder, causing him to spill beer down the front of his shirt. “Relax, enjoy the time you got,” Liam said. “That’s my philosophy. Life’s a party, right?”
Bobby Lee took a drink from his bottle, eyeing Liam with the caution he would show a snake coiled in the shade of scrub brush.
“You spoke up for me when Preacher wanted to rip my ass,” Liam said. “I’m not forgetting that. We’re buds. Crack me a beer.”
DANNY BOY LORCA was squatted behind the jail at sunup Monday morning when Hackberry parked his truck and started inside. Danny Boy’s skin had the dark, smudged coloration of someone who cooked as a matter of course over open charcoal pits or who cleared and burned brush for a living or who worked land that had been blackened by wildfires. His thick hair, cut like an Apache’s, did not look unwashed as much as dull and ash-powdered, the scars from jailhouse-knife beefs of years ago like dead worms on his hands and forearms. He was drawing a picture in the dirt with a sharpened stick.
“What you got there, Danny Boy?” Hackberry asked.
“Face I saw in a dream.”
“You here to see me about something?”
Danny Boy stood up. He wore jeans that were so tight that they looked painted on his body, and a long-sleeve calico shirt notched around the upper arms with purple garters. Stuffed in his clothes, he had the shape of a giant banana. “Pete Flores called me. He needs me to get him a car. Him and Vikki Gaddis want to go to Montana.”
“Come inside.”
“I been dry three days. I’m staying clear of jail for a while,” Danny Boy said, not moving. The sky in the west was a metallic blue still caught between darkness and first light, the horizon layered with a long band of steel-colored clouds that could have been either dust or rain mist. Danny Boy sniffed at the air and stared at the sky as though he had just heard a brief rumble of thunder that had no source.
“I thought we were friends,” Hackberry said. “I thought you trusted me. You think I’ll do you harm?”
Danny Boy’s eyes seemed full of sleep when he looked back at Hackberry. Hackberry could not remember seeing Danny Boy smile, not ever. “Pete said he got away from a guy who was trying to kill him. Somewhere down by Big Bend. He said the guy was at an A.A. meeting in a church. If Pete can get holt of a car, he’s gonna drive straight through to Montana.”
“Where’s Pete staying?”
Danny Boy shook his head, indicating that he didn’t know or he wasn’t prepared to say.
“How about Vikki?”
“Waitressing and playing in a restaurant or a club. I told Pete I didn’t have no money, but he better not be thinking about stealing a car. He says he ain’t going down for the murder of them Oriental women.”
“He won’t. I promise.”
“Last night I dreamed about rain. I woke up and thought it was hitting on my roof. But it was grasshoppers flying into the windmill and the screens. You say Pete ain’t going down for them murders. But Pete was there when they got killed. Guys like Pete have a hard time in jail. They try to go their own way and get in trouble. He’ll be in Huntsville for a long time.”
“Not if I can help it.”
But Danny Boy had lost interest in the conversation in the same way he had lost interest years ago in the promises of most white people. He was staring at the face he had drawn in the dirt. The Apache haircut, the wide brow, the square jaw, and the small eyes all looked like his own. He rubbed the sole of his shoe back and forth across the drawing, smearing it back into the earth.
“Why’d you do that?”
“He’s one of them ancient rain gods. There was a bunch of them living here when this was a giant valley full of corn. But the rain gods went away. They ain’t coming back, either.”
“How do you know that?”
“They got no reason to. We don’t believe in them no more.”
AT EIGHT A.M. Hackberry called Pam Tibbs into his office.
“Yes, sir?” she said.
“I have a general idea where Vikki Gaddis and Pete Flores might be. My back is flaring up, and I need you to drive me,” he said.
“You ought to see a doctor,” she said. Her eyes left his. “Sorry.”
“I depend on you because you’re smart, Pam. I’m not patronizing you when I say that.”
“You don’t have to explain yourself.”
He let it pass. “We’ll be back late tonight or maybe tomorrow. Get whatever you need out of your locker.” But he couldn’t let it pass after all. Why did she bother him like this? “I know I don’t have to explain myself. I was trying to…Never mind.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Would you get me an aspirin, please? Bring the box.”
At eight-thirty A.M., Hackberry and Pam Tibbs were doing eighty miles an hour down the four-lane, the emergency flasher rippling silently. Hackberry lay back in the passenger seat, half asleep, his Stetson tilted over his eyes, his long legs extended.
Where do you look for a guitar-picking woman in the state of Texas?
Anywhere.
Where do you look for a guitar-picking woman who sings “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” to a beer-joint audience?
In a place that will probably remember the experience for a long time.
Hackberry knew his errand was probably a foolish one. He was out of his jurisdiction and trying to save young people who trusted neither him, his department, nor the system he represented. Cassandra had been given knowledge of the future and simultaneously condemned to a lifetime of being disbelieved and rejected. The wearisome preoccupation of the elderly-namely, the conviction that they had already seen the show but could never pass on the lessons they had learned from it-was not unlike Cassandra’s burden, except the anger and bitterness of old people was not the stuff of Homeric epics.
Hackberry shifted in the seat, pulling his hat lower on his face, and tried to get out of his funk. The cruiser hit a bump and forced his eyes open. He hadn’t realized how far he and Pam had driven. He saw the shapes of mountains in the south and the buildings and planted trees and the planned neighborhoods of a small town spread along the side of a long geological slope that looked as though the land had suddenly tilted into the sky.
“You fell asleep,” Pam said.
“Where are we?”
“Not far from the convenience store where Bobby Lee Motree pulled a semiauto on the night clerk. Did the FBI get you a mug shot of him yet?”
“They will eventually. They have their own problems to deal with.”
“Why do you make excuses for them?”
“Because a lot of them are decent people.”
“I bet they love their grandmothers and they’re kind to animals, too.” She glanced sideways at him, her expression hidden behind her aviator shades, her mouth a flat line.
“My grandfather was a Texas Ranger,” Hackberry said. “He and some of his friends went on a raid into Mexico after Pancho Villa crossed the river and killed a bunch of civilians. My grandfather and his friends attacked a train loaded with Villa’s soldiers. The Texans had captured a Lewis gun. They caught a bunch of those poor devils in an uncoupled cattle car that was rolling downhill. My grandfather said their blood was blowing out of the boards and fanning in the wind like the discharge from a chute in a slaughterhouse.”
“I don’t get your point.”
“My grandfather was an honest lawman. He did some things that bothered his conscience, but you don’t judge a person by one episode or event in his life, and you don’t judge people categorically, either. Ethan Riser is a good man.”
“You really were an ACLU lawyer.”
Hackberry removed his hat and ran a comb through his hair. He could feel his gun belt biting into his hips. “Put it on pause, will you, Pam?”
“Say again?”
“That must be the convenience store yonder,” he said.
They parked and introduced themselves to the assistant manager. He had the manic look and behavioral manner of someone who might have spent his life inside a windstorm. His description of Bobby Lee Motree was not helpful. “You tend to forget what people look like when they’re waving a pistol in your face,” he said.
“You don’t happen to have the surveillance tape, do you?” Hackberry said.
“Them FBI people took it.”
“Have you ever seen Pete Flores?”
“Who?”
“The kid who left the beer on your counter and took off. The one with the long scar on his face.”
“No, sir. I can tell you one thing about him, though. That boy can flat haul ass.”
“How’s that?”
“After the weirdo with the gun drove off, I went out back looking for the kid with the scar. I saw him there on the other side of the road in the moonlight, his shirttail flying, heading due north. He went over the top of a rail fence like he had wings on.”
“Did you get the weirdo’s tag number?” Hackberry asked.
“There was mud smeared on it.” The assistant manager lifted up a baseball bat and dropped it on top of the counter. “The next time I see that guy, I’m gonna park his head over Yellow House Peak. Them FBI people are gonna be hauling off a man with no head.”
Hackberry and Pam got back in the cruiser, the air conditioner running, the sun white and straight overhead. “Where to?” Pam asked.
“Danny Boy Lorca said Pete told him he’d met a guy at an A.A. meeting who tried to kill him,” Hackberry said. “How many A.A. meetings are held on a given night in a rural area like this?”
“Not many. Maybe one or two,” she said.
“You ever attend one?”
“My mother did.”
“Let’s go back to that last town.”
She pulled out on the road, blowing gravel off the back tires. “I’ve never seen you drink,” she said.
“What about it?”
“I thought maybe you went to A.A. meetings at one time or another.”
“No, I just don’t drink anymore. When people ask about it, that’s what I tell them. ‘I used to drink, but I don’t anymore.’”
She looked across the seat at him, her eyes unreadable behind her shades. “Why’d you quit?”
There was a taste like pennies in his saliva. He rolled down the window and spat. He wiped his mouth and stared at the countryside sweeping by, the grass on the hillsides brown and bending in the wind, a cattle truck parked by a turnout where a historical marker stood, the cattle bawling in the heat. “I quit because I didn’t want to be like other members of my family.”
“Alcoholism runs in your family?”
“No, killing people does,” he said. “They killed Indians, Mexicans, gunmen, Kaiser Bill’s heinies-anyone they could get in their sights, they blew the hell out of them.”
She concentrated on the road and was silent a long time.
At the intersection of the county and state highways, Hackberry used a pay phone to call the regional hotline of Alcoholics Anonymous. The woman who answered said that only one meeting was available in the area on the night Hackberry asked about. It was held in a white frame church house just north of the intersection where Hackberry was calling from.
“There’re some early-bird meetings. I also have a schedule for Terlingua and Marathon, if you don’t mind driving a piece,” she said.
“No, I think the one at the church is the one I’m interested in. That’s the only one here’bouts on Tuesday nights, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Who can I talk to there?”
“Anybody at the meeting.”
“No, I mean right now.”
“You think you’re going to drink?”
“I’m an officer of the law, and I’m investigating a multiple homicide…Hello?”
“I have to think about what you just told me.” There was a short pause. “I finished thinking about it. Thanks for calling the A.A. hotline. Goodbye.” The line went dead.
Hackberry and Pam drove through town and found the church on the east side of the state highway. A rail of a man was hammering shingles on the roof, his denim shirt buttoned at the throat and neck against the heat, his armpits dark with sweat, his knees spread like a clamp on the roof’s spine. Pam and Hackberry got out of the cruiser and looked up at him, trying to shield their eyes from the glare.
“You the pastor?” Hackberry called up.
“I was when I got up this morning.”
“I’m looking for a young man named Pete Flores. Maybe he attended an A.A. meeting here.”
“I wouldn’t know,” the man said.
“Why not?” Hackberry said.
“They don’t use last names.”
“I’ve got a picture of him. Mind if I come up?”
“Doubt if it’ll do any good.”
“Why not?”
“I let them use the building, but I don’t go to their meetings, so I’m not real sure who attends them.”
“Give me the picture, Hack. I’ll take it up,” Pam said.
“I’m fine,” Hackberry said. He mounted the ladder and climbed steadily up the rungs, his neutral expression held carefully in place as a bright red fire blossomed in the small of his back. He worked the photo Ethan Riser had given him out of his pocket and handed it to the pastor. The pastor studied it, his uncut hair stuck like wet black points on the back of his neck.
“No, sir, I never saw this fellow at my church. What’d he do?” said the pastor.
“He’s a witness to a crime and may be in danger.”
The pastor looked at the photo again, then handed it back to Hackberry without comment.
“You said you never saw him at your church.”
“No, sir, I haven’t.”
“But maybe you saw him somewhere else.”
The pastor took the photo back, his face starting to show the strain of squatting on the roof’s slant. “Maybe I saw a kid in a filling station or up at the café. He wasn’t in uniform, though. He had a scar on his face. It looked like a long drop of pink wax running down his skin. That’s why I remember him. But the soldier in this picture don’t have a scar.”
“Think hard, Reverend. Where’d you see him?”
“I just don’t recall. I’m sorry.”
“You ever hear of a woman here’bouts who likes to sing country spirituals in nightclubs or beer joints?”
“No, sir. But you must do mighty interesting work. Let me know if you ever want to trade jobs.”
BOBBY LEE’S FRUSTRATION with events and with Liam’s weather-vane personality was starting to reach critical mass. It was Liam’s truck that had broken down on the state highway, forcing them to call for a tow to a shithole with one restaurant and one mechanic’s shop. It was Liam who had left vinyl garbage bags spread all over the bottom of his camper shell, causing the mechanic to ask if they were trying to get a jump on deer season. It was Liam who had droned on and on about how Bobby Lee had screwed up at the convenience store, his eyes as self-righteous and mindless as a moron’s, his tombstone teeth too large for his mouth.
They were in a booth at the back of the restaurant, Liam’s gym bag by his foot, a change of clothes and a shaving kit and the cut-down shotgun zipped inside. They were waiting for the mechanic’s brother-in-law to drive them forty-five miles to the motel where Bobby Lee’s SUV was parked under the porte cochere.
“If you hadn’t pulled your piece on a nerd in a convenience store, we wouldn’t be having this problem,” Liam said. “We could be using your vehicle instead of mine. I told you I had transmission trouble last week. You can’t get information out of a nerd without sticking a gun up his nose?”
“I didn’t pull my piece. You got that? It fell out of my belt. But I didn’t pull it deliberately, Liam. How about giving it a rest?”
The waitress brought their food and poured more water in their glasses. They stopped speaking while she tended to the table. She set a basket with packaged crackers between them, then retrieved salt and pepper shakers from another table and set them by the basket. Bobby Lee and Liam waited. She loomed over them, her big shoulders and wide hips and industrial-strength perfume somehow shrinking the space around them.
“You guys want anything else?” she asked.
“No, we’re good here,” Bobby Lee said.
“I need some steak sauce,” Liam said.
Bobby Lee smoldered in silence until the waitress brought a bottle of A.1. to the table and went away.
“What are you so heated up about?” Liam asked.
“Take off that hat.”
“What for?”
“It’s stupid. It looks like a woman’s.”
Liam stuffed a complete slice of white bread in his mouth and chewed it with his mouth open.
“We got to have an understanding, Liam. I trusted you when I told you maybe Preacher has got to go off the board. I got to know we’re on the same wavelength here. I can’t have you bitching me out all the time.”
“You don’t like to hear the truth, that’s your problem.”
Outside, the sun was red on the horizon, dust rising off the hills in a brown nimbus. Bobby Lee felt as though someone had stuck a metal key into the base of his neck and wound up his nerve endings as tightly as piano wire. He started to eat, then set down his fork and stared emptily at his plate.
He had played the whole deal wrong. Liam was not to be trusted or confided in; he was a whiner who scapegoated his friends. But if Liam wasn’t a bud, who was? Who was the purist in their midst? Who was the guy who did the work less for the money than for the strange visions that seemed to crawl across the backs of his eyelids?
“Looks like you’re doing some heavy thinking,” Liam said.
“You think I blew it for us at the convenience store, that I should have handled it different, that I should have let the soldier take off on me and not even go inside.”
“I thought you said to drop it.”
“I just want you to put yourself in my place and tell me what you would have done, Liam.”
“When this is over, we’ll both get laid. I got a couple of discount coupons from Screw magazine.” Liam waited, grinning idiotically.
Bobby Lee looked into Liam’s eyes. They were a translucent blue, their moral vacuity creating its own kind of brilliance, the pupils like dead insects trapped under glass. They were the eyes of a man to whom there was no significant reality beyond the tips of his fingers.
“When this is over, I’m going back to college. My sister has a house in Lauderdale. I’m gonna take her kids to Orlando,” Bobby Lee said.
“Everybody says that, but it doesn’t work that way. Can you see yourself selling shoes to old guys in Miami Beach with smelly socks?”
“I’m studying to be an interior decorator.”
But Liam wasn’t listening. His attention had shifted to a man and woman who were sitting at a booth by the entrance to the restaurant.
“Don’t turn around yet, but check out John Wayne over there,” he said. “I’m not kidding. From the side, he looks just like Wayne. He’s even got Calamity Jane with him. She must be his traveling punch. Who said western movies are dead?”