PAM TIBBS PULLED the cruiser onto the shoulder of the dirt road and stopped between two bluffs that gave onto a breathtaking view of a wide sloping plain and hills and mesas that seemed paradoxically molded by aeons and yet untouched by time. Hackberry got out of the vehicle and focused his binoculars on the base of the hills in the distance, moving the lenses across rockslides and flumes bordered by mesquite trees and huge chunks of stone that had toppled from the ridgeline and looked as hard and jagged as yellow chert. Then his binoculars lit on a large pile of bulldozed house debris, much of it stucco and scorched beams, and four powder-blue polyethylene tents and a chemical outhouse and a woodstove and an elevated metal drum probably containing water. A truck and an SUV were parked amid the tents, their windows dark with shadow, hailstones melting on their metal surfaces.
“What do you see?” Pam asked. She was standing on the driver’s side of the cruiser, her arms draped over the open door.
“Tents and vehicles but no people.”
“Maybe the Mexican construction guys are living there.”
“Could be,” he said, lowering the glasses. But he continued to stare at the sloping plain with his naked eyes, at the bareness of the hills, the frost that coated the rocks where the sun hadn’t touched them. He looked to the east and the growing orange stain in the sky and wondered if the day would warm, if the unseasonal cold would go out of the wind, if the ground would become less hard under his feet. For just a second he thought he heard the sound of a bugle echoing down an arroyo.
“Did you hear that?” he said.
“Hear what?”
“The old man back there said hippies were living in tepees and smoking dope out here. Maybe some of them are musicians.”
“Your hearing must be a lot better than mine. I didn’t hear a thing.”
He got back in the vehicle and shut the door. “Let’s boogie.”
“About last night,” she said.
“What about it?”
“You haven’t said much, that’s all.”
He looked straight ahead at the hills, at the mesquite ruffling in the wind, at the immensity of the countryside, beveled and scalloped and worn smooth by wind and drought and streaked with salt by receding oceans, a place where people who may have even preceded the Indians had hunted animals with sharpened sticks and crushed one another’s skulls over a resource as uncomplicated in its composition as a pool of brown water.
“You bothered by last night?” she said.
“No.”
“You think you took advantage of an employee?”
“No.”
“You just think you’re an old man who shouldn’t be messing with a younger woman?”
“The question of my age isn’t arguable. I am old.”
“You could fool me,” she said.
“Keep your eyes on the road.”
“What you are is a damn Puritan.”
“Fundamentalist religion and killing people run in my family,” he said.
For the first time that morning, she laughed.
But Hackberry could not shake the depression he was in, and the cause had little to do with the events of the previous night at the motel. After returning from Korea, he had rarely discussed his experiences there, except on one occasion when he was required to testify at the court-martial of a turncoat who, for a warmer shack and a few extra fish heads and balls of rice in the progressive compound, had sold his friends down the drain. Even then his statements were legalistic, nonemotional, and not autobiographical in nature. The six weeks he had spent under a sewer grate in the dead of winter were of little interest to anyone in the room. Nor were his courtroom listeners interested, at least at the moment, in a historical event that had occurred on a frozen dawn in the third week of November in the year 1950.
At first light Hackberry had awakened in a frozen ditch to the roar of jet planes splitting the sky above him, as a lone American F-80 chased two Russian-made MiGs back across the Yalu into China. The American pilot made a wide turn and then a victory roll, all the time staying south of the river, obeying the proscription against entering Red Chinese airspace. During the night, from across a snow-filled rice paddy spiked with brown weeds, the sound of bugles floated down from the hills, from different crests and gullies, some of them blown into megaphones for amplification. No one slept as a result.
At dawn there were rumors that two Chinese prisoners had been brought back by a patrol. Then someone said the Korean translator didn’t know pig flop from bean dip about local dialects and that the two prisoners were ignorant rice farmers conscripted by the Communists.
One hour later, a marching barrage began that would forever remain for Hackberry as the one experience that was as close to hell as the earth is capable of producing. It was followed throughout the day by a human-wave frontal assault comprised of division after division of Chinese regulars, pushing civilians ahead of them as human shields, the dead strung for miles across the snow, some of them wearing tennis shoes.
The marines packed snow on the barrels of their.30-caliber machine guns, running the snow up and down the superheated steel with their mittens. When the barrels burned out, they sometimes had to unscrew and change them with their bare hands, leaving their flesh on the metal.
The ditch was littered with shell casings, the BAR man hunting in the snow for his last magazine, the breech of every M-1 around Hack locking open, the empty clip ejecting with a clanging sound. When the marines were out of ammunition, Hackberry remembered the great silence that followed and the hissing of shrapnel from airbursts in the snow and then the bugles blowing again.
Now, as he gazed through the windshield of the cruiser, he was back in the ditch, and the year was 1950, and for a second he thought he heard a series of dull reports like strings of Chinese firecrackers popping. But when he rolled down the window, the only sound he heard was wind. “Stop the car,” he said.
“What is it?”
“There’s something wrong with that scene. The old man said the Mexicans working here were illegals. But the vehicles are new and expensive. Undocumented workers don’t set up a permanent camp where they work, either.”
“You think Collins is actually there?”
“He shows up where you least expect him. He doesn’t feel guilty. He thinks it’s the rest of us who have the problem, not him.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Call the locals for backup, then call Ethan Riser.”
“I say leave the feds out of it. They’ve been a cluster-fuck from the jump. Where you going?”
“Just make the calls, Pam,” he said.
He walked twenty yards farther up the dirt track. The wind was blowing harder and should have felt colder, but his skin was dead to the touch, his eyes tearing slightly, his palms so stiff and dry that he felt they would crack if he folded them. He could see a haze of white smoke hanging on the ground near the tents. A redheaded turkey vulture flew by immediately over Hackberry’s head, gliding so fast on extended wings that its shadow broke apart on a pile of boulders and was gone before Hackberry could blink.
An omen in a valley that could have been a place of bones, the kind of charnel house one associated with dead civilizations? Or was it all just the kind of burned-out useless terrain that no one cared about, one that was disposable in the clash of cultures or imperial societies?
He could feel a pressure band tightening on the side of his head, a cold vapor wrapping around his heart. At what point in a man’s life did he no longer have to deal with feelings as base as fear? Didn’t acceptance of the grave and the possibility of either oblivion or stepping out among the stars without a map relieve one of the ancestral dread that fouled the blood and reduced men to children who called out their mother’s name in their last moments? Why did age purchase no peace?
But he no longer had either the time or luxury of musing upon abstractions. Where were the men who lived in the tents? Who was cooking food inside a fire ring no different from those our ancestors cooked on in this same valley over eleven thousand years ago?
The cave located up the mountainside from the camp looked like a black mouth, no, one that was engorged, strung with flumes of green and orange and gray mine tailings or rock that had simply cracked and fallen away from constant exposure to heat and subfreezing temperatures.
It was the kind of place where something had gone terribly wrong long ago, the kind of place that held on to its dead and the spiritual vestiges of the worst people who had lived inside it.
Hackberry wondered what his grandfather, Old Hack, would have to say about a place like this. As though Old Hack had decided to speak to him inside the wind, he could almost hear the sonorous voice and the cynical humor for which his grandfather was infamous: “I suspect it has its moments, Satchel Ass, but truth be known, it’s the kind of shithole a moral imbecile like John Wesley Hardin would have found an absolute delight.”
Hackberry smiled to himself and hooked his coat behind the butt of his holstered revolver. He walked back toward the cruiser, where Pam Tibbs was still sitting behind the steering wheel, finishing her call to Ethan Riser.
But something in the door mirror had caught her attention. She put down the phone and turned around in the seat and looked back toward the twin bluffs, then got out of the cruiser with the binoculars and focused them on a vehicle that had come to a stop by the twin bluffs. “Better take a look,” she said.
“At what?”
“It’s a Grand Cherokee,” she said. “It’s flying an American flag on a staff attached to the back bumper.”
“Nick Dolan?”
“I can’t tell. It looks like he’s lost.”
“Forget him.”
“Flores and Gaddis are probably with him.”
“We’re going in, babe. Under a black flag. You got me?”
“No, I didn’t hear that.”
“Yes, you did. Collins has killed scores of people in his life. What’s in the pump?”
“All double-aught bucks,” Pam said.
“Load your pockets with them, too.”
PREACHER WAS EATING his second brownie when the first cramp hit him. The sensation, or his perception of its significance, was not instantaneous. At first he felt only a slight spasm, not unlike an irritant unexpectedly striking the stomach lining. Then the pain sharpened and spread down toward the colon, like a sliver of jagged tin seeking release. He clenched his buttocks together, still unsure what was happening, faintly embarrassed in front of the woman, trying to hide the discomfort distorting his face.
The next spasm made his jaw drop and the blood drain from his head. He leaned forward, trying to catch his breath, sweat breaking on his upper lip. His stomach was churning, the interior of the tent going out of focus. He swallowed drily and tried to see the woman clearly.
“Are you sick?” she said.
“You ask if I’m sick? I’m poisoned. What’s in this?”
“What I said. Chocolate and flour and-”
A bilious metallic taste surged into his mouth. The constriction in his bowels was spreading upward, into his lower chest, like chains wrapping around his ribs and sternum, squeezing the air out of his lungs. “Don’t lie,” he said.
“I ate the brownies, too. There’s nothing wrong with them.”
He coughed violently, as though he had eaten a piece of angle iron. “There must be peanut butter in them.”
“You have a problem with peanut butter?”
“You bitch.” He pulled open the tent flap to let in the cold air. “You treacherous bitch.”
“Look at you. A grown man cursing others because he has a stomachache. A man who kills women and young girls calls other people names because a brownie has upset him. Your mother would be ashamed of you. Where did you grow up? In a barnyard?”
Preacher got to his feet and held on to the tent pole with one hand until the earth stopped shifting under his feet. “What right do you have to talk of my mother?”
“What right, he asks? I’m the mother you took from her husband and her children. The mother you took to be your concubine, that’s who I am, you miserable gangster.”
He stumbled out into the wind and cold air, his hair soggy with sweat under his hat, his skin burning as though it had been dipped in acid, one hand clenched on his stomach. He headed for his tent, where the Thompson lay on top of his writing table, the drum fat with cartridges, a second cartridge-packed drum resting beside it. That was when he saw a sheriff’s cruiser coming up the dirt track and, in the far distance, a second vehicle that seemed part of an optical illusion brought on by the anaphylactic reaction wrecking his nervous system. The second vehicle was a maroon SUV with an American flag whipping from a staff attached to the back bumper. Who were these people? What gave them the right to come on his land? His anger only exacerbated the fire in his entrails and constricted his lungs as though his chest had been touched by the tendrils of a jellyfish.
“Angel! Molo!” he called hoarsely.
“¿Qué pasa, Señor Collins?”
“¡Maten los!” he said.
“¿Quién?”
“Todos que estan en los dos vehiculos.”
The two Mexican killers were standing outside their tent. They turned and saw the approaching cruiser. “¿Nosotros los matamos todos? Hombre, esta es una pila de mierda,” Angel said. “Chingado, son of a beech, you sure you ain’t a marijuanista, Señor Collins? Oops, siento mucho, solamente estoy bromeando.”
But Preacher was not interested in what the Mexicans had to say. He was already inside his tent, gathering up the Thompson, stuffing the extra ammunition pan under his arm, convinced that the voice he had sought in the wind and in the fire and even in an earthquake would speak to him now, with the Jewish woman, inside the cave.
“A GUY JUST came out of a tent,” Pam said, leaning forward on the steering wheel, taking her foot off the gas. “Dammit, I can’t see him now. The trash pile is in the way. Wait a second. Two other guys are talking to him.”
The visual angle from the passenger seat was bad. Hackberry handed her the binoculars. She fitted them to her eyes and adjusted the focus, breathing audibly, her chest rising and falling irregularly. “They look Hispanic,” she said. “Maybe they’re construction workers, Hack.”
“Where’s the other guy?”
“I don’t know. He’s gone. He must have gone back in one of the tents. We need to dial it down.”
“No, it’s Collins.”
She removed the binoculars from her eyes and looked hard and long at him. “You thought you heard a bugle. I think you’re seeing and hearing things that aren’t there. We can’t be wrong on this.”
He dropped open the glove box and removed a Beretta nine-millimeter. He pulled back the slide and chambered a round and set the butterfly safety. “I’m not wrong. Pull to the back of the trash pile. We get out simultaneously on each side of the vehicle and stay spread apart. If you see Collins, you kill him.”
“Listen to me, Hack-”
“No, Collins doesn’t get a chance to use his Thompson. You’ve never seen anyone shot with a weapon that has that kind of firepower. We kill him on sight and worry about legalities later.”
“I can’t accept an order like that.”
“Yes, you can.”
“I know you, Hack. I know the thoughts you have before you think them. You want me to protect myself at all costs, but you’ve got your own agenda with this guy.”
“We left Dr. Freud back there on the road,” he said. He stepped out on the hardpan just as the sun broke over the hill, splintering like gold needles, the bottom of the hill still deep in shadow.
He and Pam Tibbs walked toward the pile of house debris, dividing around it, their eyes fixed on the four tents, their eyes watering in the wind and the smoke blowing from a fire that smelled of burning food or garbage.
But because of the angle, they had lost sight of the two Hispanic men, who had gone back in their tent or were behind the vehicles. As Hackberry walked deeper into the shadows, the sunlight that had fractured on the ridgeline disappeared, and he could see the tents and the pickup truck and the SUV and the mountainside in detail, and he realized the mistake he had made: You never allow your enemy to become what is known as a barricaded suspect. Even more important, you never allow your enemy to become a barricaded suspect with a hostage.
Pam Tibbs was to his left, the stock of her cut-down pump Remington twelve-gauge snugged against her shoulder, her eyes sweeping from right to left, left to right, never blinking, her face dilated as though she were staring into an ice storm. He heard her footsteps pause and knew she had just seen Collins at the same moment he had, pushing a woman ahead of him up a footpath that led to the opening in the mountainside.
Collins had knotted his left fist in the fabric of the woman’s dress and was holding the Thompson by the pistol grip with his right hand, the barrel at a downward angle. He looked back once at Pam and Hackberry, his face white and small and tight under his hat, then he shoved the woman ahead of him into the cave and disappeared behind her.
“He’s got the high ground. We’ve got to get one of the vehicles between us and him,” Hackberry said.
The tent that the two Hispanic men had been using was the largest of the four. The SUV was parked not far from the tent flap; the pickup truck was parked between two other tents. The only sounds were the ruffling of the wind on the polyethylene surfaces of the tents and a rock toppling from the ridgeline and the engine of the maroon SUV coming up the dirt track from the bluffs.
Hackberry turned around and raised one fist in the air, hoping that Pete Flores would recognize the universal military signal to stop. But either Flores did not see him, or the driver, who was undoubtedly Nick Dolan, chose to keep coming.
Hackberry shifted his direction, crossing behind Pam Tibbs, his.45 revolver on full cock, the Beretta stuffed through the back of his gun belt. “I’m going to clear the first tent. Cover me,” he said.
He opened his Queen pocketknife with his teeth and walked quickly to the back of the tent, taking long strides, watching the other tents and the two parked vehicles, both of which had tinted windows. The blade of his knife could shave hair off his arm. He sliced the cords that were tied to the tent’s support poles and steel ground pins and watched the shape go out of the tent as it collapsed in a pile.
Nothing moved under its folds. He crossed behind Pam Tibbs, lifting his eyes to the cave entrance on the mountainside. The pile of building debris was behind them now, the bulldozed stucco powdering, the broken asbestos feathering in the wind. If Collins opened up on them, the only cover available would be the pickup truck or the SUV, and he could not be sure either of them was unoccupied.
He felt naked in the way a person feels naked in a dream, in a public place, before a large audience. But the sense of nakedness in his and Pam’s circumstances went beyond that. It was the kind of sensation a forward artillery observer experiences when the first round he has called in for effect strikes home and his position is exposed. It was the kind of nakedness a navy corpsman feels when he runs through automatic-weapons fire to reach a wounded marine. The sensation was akin to having one’s skin pulled off in strips with a pair of pliers.
Then he realized that regardless of the criminal background of his antagonists, at least one of them had made the mistake of all amateurs: His vanity or his libido or whatever megalomaniacal passion defined him was more important to him than the utilitarian simplicity of a stone killer and survivor like Jack Collins.
One man was wearing lizard-skin cowboy boots, chrome-plated on the heels and toes. They flashed with a dull silvery light beneath the running board on the far side of the pickup truck.
“Three o’clock, Pam!” Hackberry said.
At the same moment the man behind the truck fired an Uzi or a MAC-10 across the hood, then moved back quickly behind the cab. But his one-handed aim was sloppy, and the bullets hit the trash pile and stitched the water drum and cut a line across the hardpan, flicking dirt into the air and ricocheting off rocks and whining into the distance with the diminished sound of a broken bedspring.
Hackberry aimed his.45 with both hands and fired through the tinted window on the driver’s side, cascading glass onto the seats and blowing out the opposite window. He fired two more rounds, one through the window on the extended cab, one through the back door, leaving a clean-edged, polished indentation and hole the size of a quarter. But the three rounds he had let off did no good. The man with the automatic weapon moved behind the back of the cab and sprayed the whole area blindly, probably as masking fire for either the other Hispanic man, who was nowhere in sight, or Jack Collins up in the cave.
The shooting stopped. Hackberry had pulled back to the edge of the trash pile, and Pam was somewhere off to his left, in the shadows or behind the concrete foundation of the destroyed house. In all probability, the shooter was changing magazines. Hackberry got down on his hands and knees, then on his stomach. He heard a metallic click, like a latching steel mechanism being inserted into a socket. He extended his.45, gripping it with both hands, his elbows propped in the dirt, the pain along his spine flaring into his ribs.
Hackberry saw the chrome-sheathed lizard-skin boots of the shooter move from behind the back tire. He sighted down the long barrel of his.45 at the place where the blue-jean cuff of the shooter’s right pants leg met the top of his foot. He pulled the trigger.
The shooter screamed when the 230-grain round tore through his boot. He fell to the ground and yelled out again, holding his destroyed foot and ankle, blood welling through his fingers, his other hand still gripping his weapon.
Pam Tibbs ran toward the truck, her pump shotgun held in front of her, the safety off, lifting the barrel, stepping sideways in an arc around the hood of the truck, almost like an erratic dancer, coming into position so that she stood in full view of the shooter. All the time she was yelling, as though to a man with neither sight nor hearing, “Give it up! Give it up! Give it up! Do it now! Do it now! Throw it away! Hands straight out on the ground! You must do it now! No, you do not do that! Both hands in the dirt! Did you hear me?”
Then she squeezed the trigger. Five feet away, the man who would not release his weapon ate a pattern of buckshot as wide as his hand and watched his brains splatter across the side panel of his truck.
When Hackberry got to her, she had already jacked the spent shell from the chamber and was shoving another one into the magazine with her thumb, her hands still trembling.
“Did you see the other guy?” he said.
“No, where is he?” she said. Her eyes were as round as marbles, jittering in their sockets.
“I didn’t see him. We’re exposed. Get behind the truck.”
“Where’s Collins?”
“In the cave. Get behind the truck. Did you hear me?”
“What’s that sound?”
“What sound?” he said. But the.45 rounds he had fired had left his ears ringing, and he couldn’t make out her words.
“It’s that idiot Dolan,” she said.
They couldn’t believe what they saw next. Nick Dolan’s SUV had veered off the dirt track, swinging wide of the concrete slab on which the stucco house had once stood, and was now coming full-bore across the hardpan, rocks and mud flying up into the undercarriage, the frame jolting on the springs.
“Has he lost his mind?” Pam said.
Nick Dolan plowed through the tent closest to the mountain, ripping it loose from its steel pins, wrapping the polyethylene material and destroyed aluminum poles across the grille and hood. But inside the sounds of the tent tearing and the tie ropes breaking and the steel pins whipping back against the SUV, Hackberry had heard a solid weight impact sickeningly against the SUV’s hood.
Nick slammed on his brakes, and the tangle of material and tent poles and a broken cot rolled off his vehicle into the dirt, with the body of the second Hispanic man inside.
“I saw him go into the tent. He had a gun,” Nick said from the window. A pair of binoculars hung from his neck.
“Your wife could have been in there,” Pam said.
“No, we saw Collins take her into the hole in the mountain. Let’s get up there,” Nick said.
Vikki Gaddis sat in the passenger seat, and Pete Flores sat in back, leaning forward against the front seat.
“Y’all stay where you are,” Hackberry said.
“I’m going up there with you,” Nick said.
“No, you’re not,” Hackberry said.
“That’s my wife,” Nick said, opening the door.
“You’re about to find yourself in handcuffs, Mr. Dolan,” Pam said.
Hackberry dumped the spent shells from the cylinder of his revolver into his palm and reloaded the empty chambers. He motioned to Pam Tibbs and began walking with her toward the mountain, ignoring the three new arrivals, hoping his last words to them had stuck.
“You don’t want to wait for the locals?” she said.
“Wrong move. I’m going straight up the path. I want you to come in from the side and stay just outside the cave.”
“Why?”
“Collins won’t shoot if he thinks I’m alone.”
“Why not?”
“He has too much pride. With Collins, it’s not about money or sex. He thinks it’s the twilight of the gods and he’s at center stage.”
Nick Dolan and Vikki Gaddis and Pete Flores were all getting out of the SUV.
“You three get right back in your vehicle and drive back toward the road and stay there,” Hackberry said.
“To hell with that,” Nick said.
“Sheriff, give me a weapon and let me go up there with you,” Pete said.
“Can’t do it, partner. End of discussion,” Hackberry said. “Ms. Gaddis, you keep these two guys here. If you want to see Mrs. Dolan come out of that cave alive, don’t mess in what’s about to happen.”
Hackberry began walking up the path alone, while Pam Tibbs cut across the green and orange and gray tailings that were strung down the incline, carrying her shotgun at port arms.
Hackberry paused at the cave’s entrance, his.45 holstered, the Beretta still tucked inside the back of his gun belt. He smelled a dank odor like mouse droppings or bat guano and water pooled in stone. He felt the wind coursing over his skin, flowing into the cave. “Can you hear me, Collins?” he said.
There was no answer. Hackberry stepped inside the darkness of the cave as though slipping from the world of light into one of perpetual shade.
The body of a man lay behind a boulder. The wounds in his chest and stomach and legs were egregious. The amount of blood that had pooled around him and soaked into his sheep-lined leather coat and bradded orange work pants seemed more than his body could have contained.
“You can do a good deed here, Jack,” Hackberry called out.
After the echo died, he thought he heard a rattling sound in the dark, farther back in the cave.
“Did you hear me, Jack?”
“You’re backlit, Sheriff,” a voice said from deep in the cave’s interior.
“That’s right. You can pop me any time you want.” Hackberry paused. “You’re not above doing a good deed, are you?”
“What might that be?”
“Mrs. Dolan has children. They want her back. How about it?”
“I’ll take it under advisement.”
“I don’t think you’re a man who hides behind a woman.”
“I don’t have to hide behind anyone. You hear that sound? Why don’t you come toward me a little more and check out your environment?”
“Rattlers are holed up in here?”
“Probably not more than a couple of dozen. Just flatten yourself out against the wall.”
“Your voice sounds a little strange, Jack.”
“He’s had an anaphylactic reaction to peanut butter. It may be fatal,” a woman’s voice said.
“You shut up,” Collins said.
“Is that right, Jack? You want to go to a hospital?” Hackberry said.
But there was no answer.
“I was a navy corpsman,” Hackberry said. “Severe anaphylaxis can bring on respiratory and coronary arrest, partner. It’s a bad way to go, strangling in your spit, your sphincter letting go, that sort of thing.”
“I can squeeze this trigger, and you’ll be a petroglyph.”
“But that’s not what this is about, is it? You’re haunted by the women and girls you killed because your act was that of a coward, not because you robbed them of their lives. You don’t want redemption, Jack. You want validation, justification for an act you know is indefensible.”
“Sheriff Holland, don’t bait this man or try to reason with him. Kill him so he doesn’t kill others. I’m not afraid,” the woman said.
Hackberry gritted his teeth in his frustration with Esther Dolan. “That’s not why I’m here, Jack. I’m not your executioner. I’m not worthy of you. You already said it-I’m a drunk and the sexual exploiter of poor third-world women. I’ve got to hand it to you, for good or bad, you’re the kind of guy who belongs to the ages. You screwed up behind the church, but I think the order for the mass shooting came from Hugo Cistranos and wasn’t your idea. That’s important to remember, Jack. You’re not a coward. You can prove that this morning. Turn Mrs. Dolan loose and take your chances with me. That’s what real cojones are about, right? You say full throttle and fuck it and sail out over the abyss.”
There was a long silence. Hackberry could feel the wind puffing around him, blowing coldly on his neck and the backs of his ears. Again he heard a rattling sound, like the wispy rattling of seeds inside a dried poppy husk.
“I’ve got to know something,” Collins said.
“Ask me.”
“That night I went inside your house, you said my mother wanted me aborted, that I was despised in the womb. Why would you treat me with such contempt and odium?”
“My remark wasn’t aimed at you.”
“Then who?”
Hackberry paused. “We don’t get to choose our parents.”
“My mother wasn’t like that, like what you said. She wasn’t like that at all.”
“Maybe she wasn’t, sir. Maybe I was all wrong.”
“Then say that.”
“I just did.”
“You think your words will make me merciful now?”
“Probably not. Maybe I’ve just been firing in the well.”
“Get out of here, Mrs. Dolan. Go back to your family.”
Unbelievingly, Hackberry saw Esther Dolan running out of the darkness, her shoulder close to the right wall, her arms gathered across her chest, her face averted from something on the left side of the cave.
Hackberry grabbed her and pushed her behind him out into the light. He turned and went back into the cave, lifting his revolver from his holster. “You still there, Jack?”
“I’m at your disposal.”
“Do I have to come in after you?”
“You could wait me out. The fact that you’ve chosen otherwise tells me it’s you who’s looking for salvation, Sheriff, not me. Something happen in Korea you don’t tell a lot of people about?”
“Could be.”
“I’ll be glad to oblige. I’ve got fifty rounds in my pan. Do you know what you’ll look like when I get finished?”
“Who cares? I’m old. I’ve had a good life. Fuck you, Jack.”
But nothing happened. Inside the darkness, Hackberry could hear the rilling sound of small rocks, as though they were slipping down a grade.
“Maybe I’ll see you down the road, Sheriff,” Collins said.
Suddenly, a truck flare burst into flame far back in the cave. Collins hurled it end over end onto a rock shelf where diamondbacks as thick as Hack’s wrists writhed among one another, their rattlers buzzing like maracas.
Hackberry emptied his.45 down the cave shaft, then pulled the Beretta from the back of his belt and let off all fourteen rounds, the bullets sparking on the cave walls, thudding into layers of bat guano and mold, ricocheting deep underground.
When he finished firing, he was almost deaf, his eardrums as insensate as lumps of cauliflower. The air was dense with smoke and the smell of cordite and animal feces and the musky odor of disturbed birds’ and rats’ nests. He could see the snakes looping and coiling on the shelf, their eyes bright pinpoints in the hot red glare of the truck flare. Tarantulas the diameter of baseballs, with black furry legs, were crawling down the sides of the shelf onto the cave floor. Hackberry opened and closed his mouth and swallowed and forced air through his ears. “I get you, Jack?” he called out.
He listened for an answer, his head slightly bowed. All he heard in response were feet moving farther down the shaft, deeper into the mountain, and the voice of an impaired man saying, “Ma, is that you? It’s Jack, your son. Ma?”