Billy Bob and Hackberry Holland Ebook Boxed Set (82 page)

It was late, on a Wednesday night in April, when Danny Boy walked out into the desert with an empty duffle bag and an army surplus entrenching tool, the sky as black as soot, the southern horizon pulsing with electricity that resembled gold wires, the softness of the ground crumbling under his cowboy boots, as though he were treading across the baked shell of an enormous riparian environment that had been layered and beveled and smoothed with a sculptor's knife. At the base of a mesa, he folded the entrenching tool into the shape of a hoe and knelt down and began digging in the ground, scraping through the remains of fossilized leaves and fish and birds that others said were millions of years old. In the distance, an igneous flash spread silently through the clouds, flaring in great yellow pools, lighting the desert floor and the cactus and mesquite and the greenery that was trying to bloom along a riverbed that never held water except during the monsoon season. Just before the light died, like figures caught inside the chemical mix of a half-developed photograph, Danny Boy saw six men advancing across the plain toward him, their torsos slung with rifles.

He scraped harder in the dirt, trenching a circle around what appeared to be two tapered soft-nosed rocks protruding from the incline below the mesa. Then his e-tool broke through an armadillo's burrow. He inverted the handle and stuck it down the hole and wedged the earth upward until the burrow split across the top and he could work his hand deep into the hole, up to the elbow, and feel the shapes of the clustered objects that were as pointed and hard as calcified dugs.

The night air was dense with an undefined feral odor, like cougar scat and a sun-bleached carcass and burnt animal hair and water that had gone stagnant in a sandy drainage traced with the crawl lines of reptiles. The wind blew between the hills in the south and he felt its coolness and the dampness of the rain mist on his face. He saw the leaves on the mesquite ripple like green lace, the mesas and buttes shimmering whitely against the clouds, then disappearing into the darkness again. He smelled the piñon and juniper and the scent of delicate flowers that bloomed only at night and whose petals dropped off and clung to the rocks at sunrise like translucent pieces of colored rice paper. He stared at the southern horizon but saw no sign of the six men carrying rifles. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and went back to work, scooping out a big hole around the stonelike objects that were welded together as tightly as concrete.

The first shot was a tiny
pop,
like a wet firecracker exploding. He stared into the fine mist that was swirling through the hills. Then the lightning flared again and he saw the armed men stenciled against the horizon and the silhouettes of two other figures who had broken from cover and were running toward the north, toward Danny Boy, toward a place that should have been safe from the criminality and violence that he believed was threading its way out of Mexico into his life.

He lifted the nest of stony egg-shaped artifacts from the earth and slid them into the duffle bag and pulled the cord tight through the brass eyelets at the top. He headed back toward his house, staying close to the bottom of the mesa, avoiding the tracks he had made earlier, which he knew the armed men would eventually see and follow. Then a bolt of lightning exploded on top of the mesa, lighting the floodplain and the willows along the dry streambed and the arroyos and crevices and caves in the hillsides as brightly as the sun.

He plunged down a ravine, holding the duffle bag and e-tool at his sides for balance. He crouched behind a rock, hunching against it, his face turned toward the ground so it would not reflect light. He heard someone running past him in the darkness, someone whose breath was not only labored but desperate and used up and driven by fear rather than a need for oxygen.

When he thought that perhaps his ordeal was over, that the pursuers of the fleeing man would give up and go away and allow him to return to his house with the treasure he had dug out of the desert floor, he heard a sound he knew only too well. It was the pleading lament of someone who had no hope, not unlike that of an animal caught in a steel trap, or a new inmate, a fish, just off the bus at Sugar Land Pen, going into his first night of lockdown with four or five mainline cons waiting for him in the shower room.

The pursuers had dragged the second fleeing man from behind a tangle of deadwood and tumbleweed that had wedged in a collapsed corral dog-food contractors had once used to pen mustangs. The fugitive was barefoot and blood-streaked and terrified, his shirt hanging in rags on the pencil lines that were his ribs, a manacle on one wrist, a brief length of cable swinging loosely from it.

“Dónde está?”
a voice said.

“No se.”

“What you mean you don't know?
Tu sabes.”

“No, hombre. No se nada.”

“Para dónde se fue?”

“He didn't tell me where he went.”

“Es la verdad?”

“Claro que sí.”

“You don't know if you speak Spanish or English, you've sold out to so many people. You are a very bad policeman.”

“No, señor.”

“Estas mintiendo, chico. Pobrecito.”

“Tengo familia, señor. Por favor. Soy un obrador, como usted.
I'm just like you, a worker. I got to take care of my family. Hear me, man. I know people who can make you rich.”

For the next fifteen minutes, Danny Boy Lorca tried to shut out the sounds that came from the mouth of the man who wore a manacle and length of severed cable on one wrist. He tried to shrink himself inside his own skin, to squeeze all light and sensation and awareness from his mind, to become a black dot that could drift away on the wind and re-form later as a shadow that would eventually become flesh and blood again. Maybe one day he would even forget the fear that caused him to stop being who he was; maybe he would even meet the man he chose not to help and be forgiven by him and hence become capable of forgiving himself. When all those things happened, he might even forget what his fellow human beings were capable of doing.

When the screams of the tormented man finally softened and died and were swallowed by the wind, Danny Boy raised his head above a rock and gazed down the incline where the tangle of tumbleweed and deadwood partially obscured the handiwork of the armed men. The wind was laced with grit and rain that looked like splinters of glass. When lightning rippled across the sky, Danny Boy saw the armed men in detail.

Five of them could have been pulled at random from any jail across the border. But it was the leader who made a cold vapor wrap itself around Danny Boy's heart. He was taller than the others and stood out for many reasons, as though the incongruity of his appearance only added to the darkness of his persona. His body was not stitched with scars or chained with Gothic-letter and swastika and death-head tats. Nor was his head shaved into a bullet or his mouth surrounded by a circle of carefully trimmed beard. Nor did he wear lizard-skin boots that were plated on the heels and tips. His running shoes looked fresh out of the box; his navy blue sweatpants had a red stripe down each leg, similar to a design a nineteenth-century Mexican cavalry officer might wear. His skin was clean, his chest flat, the nipples no bigger than dimes, his shoulders wide, his arms like pipe stems, his pubic hair showing just above the white cord that held up his pants. An inverted M16 was cross-strapped across his bare back; a canteen hung at his side from a web belt, and also a hatchet and a long thin knife of a kind that was used to dress wild game. He leaned over and speared something with the tip of the knife and lifted it in the air, examining it against the lights flashing in the clouds. He cinched the object with a lanyard and tied it to his belt, letting it drip down his leg.

Then Danny Boy saw the leader freeze, as though he had just smelled an invasive odor on the wind. He turned toward Danny Boy's hiding place and stared up the incline.
“Quién está en la oscuridad?”
he said.

Danny Boy shrank down onto the ground, the rocks cutting into his knees and the heels of his hands.

“You see something up there?” one of the other men said.

But the leader did not speak, either in Spanish or English.

“It's just the wind. There's nothing out here. The wind plays tricks,” the first man said.

“Ahora para dónde vamos?”
another man said.

The leader waited a long time to answer.
“Dónde vive la Magdalena?”
he asked.

“Don't fuck with that woman, Krill. Bad luck, man.”

But the leader, whose nickname was Krill, did not reply. A moment that could have been a thousand years passed, then Danny Boy heard the six men begin walking back down through the riverbed toward the distant mountains from which they had come, their tracks cracking the clay and braiding together in long serpentine lines. After they were out of sight, Danny Boy stood up and looked down at their bloody handiwork, scattered across the ground, in pieces, glimmering in the rain.

 

Pam Tibbs was Hackberry's chief deputy. Her mahogany-colored hair was both white and sunburned at the tips, and hung on her cheeks in the indifferent way it does on a teenage girl. She wore wide-ass jeans and half-topped boots and a polished gun belt and a khaki shirt with an American flag sewn on one sleeve. Her moods were mercurial, her words often confrontational. Her potential for violence seldom registered on her adversaries until things happened that should not have happened. When she was angry, she sucked in her cheeks, accentuating a mole by her mouth, turning her lips into a button. Men often thought she was trying to be cute. They were mistaken.

At noon she was drinking a cup of coffee at her office widow when she saw Danny Boy Lorca stumbling down the street toward the department, his torso bent forward, as though he were waging war against invisible forces, a piece of newspaper matting against his chest before it flapped loose and scudded across the intersection. When Danny Boy tripped on the curb and fell hard on one knee, then fell again when he tried to pick himself up, Pam Tibbs set down her coffee cup and went outside, the wind blowing lines in her hair. She bent down, her breasts hanging heavy against her shirt, and lifted him to his feet and walked him inside.

“I messed myself. I got to get in the shower,” he said.

“You know where it is,” she said.

“They killed a man.”

She didn't seem to hear what he had said. She glanced at the cast-iron spiral of steps that led upstairs to the jail. “Can you make it by yourself?”

“I ain't drunk. I was this morning, but I ain't now. The guy in charge, I remember his name.” Danny Boy closed his eyes and opened them again. “I think I do.”

“I'll be upstairs in a minute and open the cell.”

“I hid all the time they was doing it.”

“Say again.”

“I hid behind a big rock. Maybe for fifteen minutes. He was screaming all the while.”

She nodded, her expression neutral. Danny Boy's eyes were scorched with hangover, his mouth white at the corners with dried mucus, his breath dense and sedimentary, like a load of fruit that had been dumped down a stone well. He waited, although she didn't know for what. Was it absolution? “Don't slip on the steps,” she said.

She tapped on Hackberry's door but opened it without waiting for him to answer. He was on the phone, his eyes drifting to hers. “Thanks for the alert, Ethan. We'll get back to you if we hear anything,” he said into the receiver. He hung up and seemed to think about the conversation he'd just had, his gaze not actually seeing her. “What's up?” he said.

“Danny Boy Lorca just came in drunk. He says he saw a man killed.”

“Where?”

“I didn't get that far. He's in the shower.”

Hackberry scratched at his cheek. Outside, the American flag was snapping on its pole against a gray sky, the fabric washed so thin the light showed through the threads. “That was Ethan Riser at the FBI. They're looking for a federal employee who might have been grabbed by some Mexican drug mules and taken to a prison across the border. An informant said the federal employee might have gotten loose and headed for home.”

“I've heard Danny Boy has been digging up dinosaur eggs south of his property.”

“I didn't know there were any around here,” Hackberry said.

“If they're out there, he'd be the guy to find them.”

“How's that?” he said, although he wasn't really listening.

“A guy who believes he can see the navel of the world from his back window? He says all power comes out of this hole in the ground. Down inside the hole is another world. That's where the rain and the corn gods live. Compared to a belief system like that, hunting for dinosaur eggs seems like bland stuff.”

“That's interesting.”

She waited, as though examining his words. “Try this: He says the killing took fifteen minutes to transpire. He says he heard it all. You think this might be the guy the feds are looking for?”

Hackberry bounced his knuckles lightly up and down on the desk blotter and stood up, straightening his back, trying to hide the pain that crept into his face, his outline massive against the window. “Bring your recorder and a pot of coffee, will you?” he said.