Billy Bob and Hackberry Holland Ebook Boxed Set (78 page)

He felt her step on top of his feet, and before he knew it, she had raised her mouth inches from his, the yeasty smell of beer touching his lips.

 

W
HEN
P
REACHER UNZIPPED
the flap on Bobby Lee's polyethylene tent, the storm had passed and the heavens were ink-black again, bursting with stars that stretched from horizon to horizon, the mesas in the east pink and barely visible against the few distant thunderheads that still flickered with lightning.

Bobby Lee pushed his head out of his sleeping bag, his hair matted, his eyes bleary with sleep. “Is the plane here?”

“Not yet. But I made coffee. Get up. I want to take care of some business,” Preacher said.

“It's cold.”

“Put your coat and hat on. Take my gloves.”

“I've never seen it this cold this time of year.”

“I'll get your coffee. Where are your boots?”

“What's going on, Jack?”

Preacher lowered his voice. “I want to give you your money now. Don't wake up Molo and Angel. Nor the woman.”

“You're really taking her with us?”

“What did you think I was going to do?”

“Shoot your wad and get it out of your system?”

Preacher was squatting, balancing on his haunches. He looked at the fire curling and then flattening under the tin coffeepot he had set on the refrigerator grille propped across a ring of blackened rocks. His eyes were as empty as glass in the firelight, his shoulders poking through his suit coat. “Coarseness toward women doesn't behoove a man, son.”

“You slept in the tent with her?” Bobby Lee said, pulling on his boots.

“No, I wouldn't do that, not unless I was invited.”

“She invited us to kidnap her? You're one for the books, Jack.” Bobby Lee climbed out of the tent, pulling on a black sheep-lined leather coat that was spiderwebbed with cracks. “Where's the spendolies—”

Preacher placed a finger to his lips and began walking up the compacted footpath to the cave opening in the side of the mountain, his body bent slightly forward into the incline, his right hand hooked through the bail of a battery-powered lantern. He glanced back at the large tent where the two Mexican killers slept, then smiled enigmatically at Bobby Lee. “The freshness of the predawn hour has no equivalent,” he said. When he stepped inside the cave, the darkness enveloped him like a cloak.

“Jack?” Bobby Lee said.

“In here,” Preacher said, turning on the lantern, which gave off a glow that was gray and dim and created wispy shadows on the cave walls.

Bobby Lee sat down on a rock and watched Preacher pull a suitcase from behind a wood pallet that he sometimes dried his clothes on.

“I promised you ten percent. That's twenty thousand dollars,” Preacher said, squatting to unlatch the suitcase. “Looks nice bundled in rubber bands, doesn't it? What are you going to do with all that money, Bobby Lee?”

“I'm thinking about leasing a building in Key West and starting up an interior decorating business there. The place is full of rich fudge-packers building condos.”

“I've got a question to ask you,” Preacher said. “Remember when you told me you and Liam had been talking about my health, about what I ate and didn't eat, that sort of thing? I just cain't quite get that image
out of my head. Why would you two be so concerned about my food intake? It seems a peculiar subject for young fellows to have any investment in. Wouldn't you say so?”

“I don't even remember what we were talking about.” Bobby Lee yawned, his eyes going out of focus with fatigue. He turned his face to the cold air puffing through the cave entrance. “The stars are beautiful over those bluffs.”

“I don't talk about what you eat and drink, Bobby Lee. It's of no consequence to me. So why would you and Liam be having these discussions about my diet?”

Bobby Lee shook his head. “It's too early in the morning for this stuff.”

“You've always been loyal to me, Bobby Lee. You have, haven't you? No temptations, so to speak?”

“I've modeled my life on you.”

“Can you see the little crack of light in the east? It's behind those thunderheads. A little rip in all that blackness. Our pilot is going to fly us right through that hole into the sunlight. Then we'll make a wide turn to the south and cross into Mexico and fly all the way to the ocean. This afternoon we'll be eating pineapple and mangoes on a beach and watch people race horses in the surf. But first you have to tell me the truth, or our relationship will remain permanently damaged. We cain't allow that to happen, boy.”

“Truth about what? How'd I damage our relationship?”

“You were plotting with Liam to hurt me, Bobby Lee. People are frail. They get scared and betray their friends. I forgive you for it. You thought you'd go where the smart bet was. But you've got to own up to it. Otherwise I can only conclude you think I'm a stupid man. You think I'll abide someone letting on like I'm a stupid man?”

“You're not stupid, Jack.”

“Then what am I?”

“Pardon?”

“If I'm not stupid or ignorant, then what am I? Somebody you can deceive and not pay any price for it? Somebody with no honor or self-respect who lets other people wipe their feet on him? Which is it?”

Bobby Lee propped his hands on his thighs. He stared at his feet and at the cave opening and at the landscape starting to gray with the coming of dawn. “Everybody thought you were losing it. I did, too, at least for a while. You're right, though, I was selfish and thinking of myself. Then I realized you were the only guy I admired, that Liam and Artie and Hugo and the others weren't real soldiers, but you were.”

“You and Liam were going to pop me?”

“It didn't get that far.”

Preacher was smiling. “Come on, Bobby Lee. You've given honest witness about your failure. Don't water the drink now. You'll undo the courage and the principle you've shown me.”

“Yeah, we talked about popping you.”

“You and Liam?”

“I told Liam that was the order from Artie Rooney and Hugo. But I decided all of them were a bunch of dirtbags, and I called you up on my cell phone and told you how much I respected you.”

“That was just before you decided to let Liam eat a bullet point-blank in the women's restroom? I'll hand it to you. You can slide around and reshape yourself faster than quicksilver.”

Bobby Lee started to speak, then realized Preacher had already disengaged from the conversation and was standing in the cave's entrance, his hands on his hips, watching the wind ripple the tents down below, watching the mysterious transformation of the desert from darkness to a pewterlike stillness that resembled a photograph defining itself inside developing fluid. Then Preacher said something Bobby Lee couldn't quite hear.

“Say again?” Bobby Lee asked.

Preacher turned and reached behind the wood pallet. Unconsciously, Bobby Lee fastened the top button on his cracked sheep-lined coat as though protecting himself from a gust of cold air.

“I told you I always wanted you to be a piece of this property,” Preacher said. “That sentiment has not changed one iota.”

Down below, the Mexican killers and Esther were wakened by a burst of machine-gun fire and a tinkling of brass hulls on stone. But the sounds were absorbed so quickly inside the earth, they each wondered if they had been dreaming.

 

A
T FIRST LIGHT
Hackberry Holland and Pam Tibbs talked to an elderly man and a small boy at a dirt crossroads where they were picking up trash out of a ditch. The land was level and hard, marked by little other than fence lines and loading pens that were gray with rot and impacted with tumbleweed. Far to the east, the sun was pale and watery behind a low range of hills that looked coated with frost, ragged like glass along the crests.

“Traven?” the old man said. “No, there's nobody here'bouts by that name.”

“How about Fred Dobbs?” Hackberry said.

“No, sir, never heard of him, either.” The old man was very large and straight in physique for his age, his hands horned with calluses, his face oblong, as big as a jug, the creases so deep there were shadows in them. He wore strap overalls and a yellow canvas coat and no cap. He studied the departmental logo on the cruiser's door, obviously noting Hackberry was out of his jurisdiction. “It's the frozen shits this morning, ain't it?”

Hackberry showed him photographs of Jack Collins, Liam Eriksson, Bobby Lee Motree, and Hugo Cistranos.

“No, sir, if they live around here, I ain't seen them. What'd these fellows do?”

“Take your choice,” Hackberry said from the passenger window. “Did you know a woman by the name of Edna Wilcox?”

“Died of an accident or a fall of some kind?”

“I think she did,” Hackberry said.

“She owned a big chunk of land about ten miles up the road and to the east. People have rented there off and on, but the house burned down. There's some Mexicans been working there. Show your pictures to my grandson. Look right at him when you talk. He cain't hear.”

“What's his name?”

“Roy Rogers.”

Hackberry opened the passenger door and leaned over so he was eye level with the little boy. The boy's hair was jet-black, his skin brown, his eyes filled with a black luminosity sometimes characteristic of people who live inside themselves.

“You know any of these men, Roy?” Hackberry said.

The boy's eyes slid across the photographs that Ethan Riser had sent to Hackberry's office. He remained immobile, the wind tousling his hair, his face as expressionless as clay. In the silence, he wiped at his nose with the back of his wrist. Then he glanced sideways at his grandfather.

“Want to help me out here?” Hackberry said to the grandfather.

“Not much gets by him. Roy's a smart little boy.”

“Sir?”

“You wouldn't tell me what these men had done, but now you want me and him to he'p you out. I suspect that seems like a one-sided deal to him.”

Hackberry got out of the vehicle and squatted down, suppressing the pain that flared in the small of his back. “These men are criminals, Roy. They've done some very bad things. If I can, I'm going to put them in jail. But I need people like you and your grandfather to tell me where these guys might be. If you've seen one of them, just point your finger.”

The boy looked at his grandfather again.

“Go ahead,” the grandfather said.

The boy touched one photograph with the end of his finger.

“Where'd you see this fellow?” Hackberry said.

“The store, last spring,” the boy said, his words like wood blocks that were rounded on the edges.

“We run a store up at the next crossroads,” the grandfather said.

Hackberry patted the boy on the shoulder and stood up. “How many houses are there on the old Wilcox property?” he said to the grandfather.

“A shack here and there, sweat lodges and tepees and such that a bunch of hippies smoke marijuana in.”

“You said there was a place that burned down.”

“That's the place the Mexicans were cleaning up. That's where the Wilcox woman lived. By the way, y'all are the second people to come by this morning asking about those fellows.”

“Who else was here?”

“A little round man in a Cherokee with an American flag flying on it and a young fellow and girl with him. The young fellow had a scar on his
face like somebody glued a pink soda straw on it. Y'all grow them a little strange back where you come from?”

“Where'd they go?”

“Up the road. I can tell you how to get there, but the Mexicans will probably run off when they see y'all coming.”

“They're illegals?”

“Oh, hell no.”

Hackberry got directions and got back in the cruiser. Pam dropped the transmission into gear and drove slowly up the road headed north, waiting for him to speak. A piece of the moon still hung low in the sky, like a carved piece of ice.

“The boy picked out Liam Eriksson, the only guy we know for sure is dead,” he said.

“You want to talk to the Mexicans?”

“For all the good it's probably going to do, why not?” he replied.

 

W
ITHOUT ANY SENSE
of grandiosity, Esther Dolan could say she had never feared mortality. Accepting it in the form it came to most people—in their sleep, in hospitals, or by sudden heart attack—seemed an easy trade-off considering the fact that one did nothing to earn his birth. The stories of violent death told her by her grandparents, who had survived the pogroms in Russia, were another matter.

The word “pogrom” came from an early Russian word that meant “thunder.” It meant destruction and death caused by irrational forces. It meant hatred and suffering that descended on helpless people without cause or motivation or reason. And the perpetrators of it were always the same group: those who wished to infect the world with the same self-loathing that had been the three-6 tattoo they had brought with them from the womb.

In the aftermath of the gunfire, she had stood motionless outside the polyethylene tent, the cold leaching the strength from her body, the wind swelling the tent on the support poles, the hillside black against a sky that was fading to dark blue in the east.

She watched the man called Preacher descend from the cave, his
submachine gun clenched against his side with one hand, his coat collar pulled up and the brim of his fedora pulled down, smoke leaking from the barrel of his weapon. He watched each step he took on the compacted path as though his own life and safety and well-being were of enormous importance, whereas the man he had just killed was a disappearing memory.

The Mexican killers had also come out of their tent. The smoke from the cook fire contained a dense sweet smell, like burning sage or unopened flowers that had been consumed by the flames. Preacher leaned over the fire and, with his bare hand, picked up the metal pot boiling on the refrigerator grille and poured coffee into a tin cup, never setting down the Thompson. He drank from the coffee, blowing on the cup. He gazed at the frost on the hills. “It's going to be a fine day,” he said.