Rain Gods (7 page)

“In your dreams,” she said.

“I promise I’ll do everything for you I can. Arguing about it won’t help. Everybody gets to the barn. But for you maybe that won’t necessarily have to happen tonight. You’re a kind woman. I’m not forgetting that.”

She threw the coffee at him. But he saw it coming and stepped away quickly, raising one arm in front of his face. In his other hand, he held an unblued titanium revolver, one with black rubber grips. It was not much larger than his palm.

“I cain’t blame you. But it’s time for you to get yourself in the trunk of my automobile. I’ve never struck a woman. I don’t want you to be the first,” he said.

She stared straight ahead, trying to think. What was it she was not seeing or remembering? Something that lay at the tips of her fingers, something that was like a piece of magic, something that God or a higher power or a dead Indian shaman out in the desert had already put at her disposal if only she could just remember what it was.

“I have nothing you want,” she said.

“You dealt the hand, woman. It’s your misfortune and none of my own,” he said, pulling open her door. “Now you slide yourself off that car seat and come along with me. Nothing is ever as bad as you think.”

Amid the litter on the floor, she felt the coldness of a metal cylinder touch her bare ankle. She reached down with her right hand and picked up the can of wasp spray, one that the manufacturer guaranteed could be fired steadily into a nest from twenty feet away. Vikki stuck the spout directly into the Nissan driver’s face and pressed down the plastic button on the applicator.

A jet of foaming lead-gray viscous liquid struck his mouth and nose and both of his eyes. He screamed and began wiping at his eyes and face with his coat sleeves, spinning around, off balance, all the while trying to hold on to his pistol and open his eyes wide enough to see where she was. She got out of the car and fired the spray into his face again, backing away from him as she did, spraying the back of his head, hitting him again when he tried to turn with her. He slammed against her vehicle and rolled on the ground, thrashing his feet, dropping the revolver in the grass.

She tried to get back inside her vehicle, but he was on his hands and knees, grabbing at her ankles, his eyes blistered almost shut. She fell backward and felt her forearm come down hard on the revolver. She picked it up, gathering its cool hardness into her palm, and staggered to her feet. But he came at her again, tackling her around one leg, striking at her genitalia with one fist.

She pointed the revolver downward. It was a Smith & Wesson Airweight .38 that held five rounds. She was amazed at how light yet solid and comforting it felt in her hand. She aimed at the back of his calf and pulled the trigger. The frame bucked in her hand, and fire flew from the muzzle. She saw the cloth in his trousers jump and even smoke for a second. Then it seemed as though his entire pants leg was darkening with his blood.

But the man who called himself Preacher wasn’t through. He made a grinding sound down in his throat, as though both eating his pain and energizing himself, and threw his weight against her, locking his arms around her knees. She fell in the grass and struck at his head with the revolver, lacerating his scalp, to no avail. Then she screwed the muzzle into his ear. “You want your brains on your shirt?” she said.

He didn’t let go. She lowered the revolver and aimed at the top of his shoe but couldn’t position her finger adequately to pull against the trigger’s tension. She worked her thumb over the hammer, cocked it back, and squeezed the trigger against the guard. The barrel made a second loud pop, and a jet of blood exploded from the bottom of his shoe. He sat up on his haunches and grabbed his foot with both hands, his jaw dropping open, his face the pained red of a boiled crab.

She got into her vehicle and turned the ignition. This time the engine caught, and she dropped the transmission into low and began easing back onto the highway.

“My father was a Medicine Lodge police officer and taught me how to shoot when I was ten years old. Next time you won’t get off so easy, bubba,” she said.

She flung the .38 through the passenger window into the darkness and rolled across his cell phone, crushing it into pieces. Then she pushed the accelerator to the floor, a cloud of blue-black oil smoke ballooning behind her.

4

N
OBODY COULD BE this unlucky, Nick Dolan told himself. He had taken his wife and daughters and son with him to their vacation house on the Comal River, outside New Braunfels, hoping to buy time so he could figure out a way to get both Hugo Cistranos and Artie Rooney off his back—in particular Hugo, whom Nick had stiffed for the thousands he claimed Nick owed him.

His vacation home was built of white stucco and had a blue-tile roof and a courtyard with a wishing well and lime and orange trees, and terraced gardens and stone steps that descended to the riverbank. The river had a soap-rock bottom that was free of silt and was green and cold and fed by springs even in August, and pooled with shadows from the giant trees that grew along the bank. Maybe he could enjoy a few days away from problems he did not create, that no one could blame him for, and this trouble would just blow over. Why shouldn’t it? Nick Dolan had never deliberately hurt anybody.

But when he looked out his window and saw a man with a shaved, waxed head stepping out of a government car, he knew the cosmic plot to make his life miserable was still in full-throttle, turbo-prop overdrive and the Fates were about to special-deliver another fuck-you message to Nick no matter where he went.

The government man must have been at least six-four, his shoulders like concrete inside his white shirt, his forehead knurled, his eyes luminous pools behind octagon-shaped rimless glasses, eyes that Nick could only associate with space aliens.

The government man was already holding up his ID when Nick opened the door. “Isaac Clawson, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. You Nick Dolan?” he said.

“No, I just look like him and happen to live at this address,” Nick answered.

“I need a few minutes of your time.”

“For what?”

The sun was hot and bright on the St. Augustine grass, the air glistening with humidity. Isaac Clawson touched at the sweat on his forehead with the back of his wrist. In his other hand he clutched a flat, zippered portfolio, the fingers of his huge hand spread on it like banana peels. “You want to do something for your country, sir? Or would you like me to ratchet up the procedure a couple of notches, maybe introduce you to our grand-jury subpoena process?”

“What, I didn’t pay into workman’s comp for the guy who cuts my lawn?”

Clawson’s eyes stayed riveted on Nick’s. The man’s physicality seemed to exude heat and repressed violence, a whiff of testosterone, an astringent tinge of deodorant. The formality and tie and white shirt and big octagon-shaped glasses seemed to Nick a poor disguise for a man who was probably at heart a bone breaker.

“My kids are playing Ping-Pong in the game room. My wife is making lunch. We talk in my office, right?” Nick said.

There was a beat. “That’s fine,” Clawson said.

They walked through a foyer into an attached cottage that served as Nick’s office. Down on the river, Nick could see a chain of floaters on inflated inner tubes headed toward a rapids. Nick sat in a deep leather swivel chair behind his desk, gazing abstractedly at the sets of mail-order books he had bought in order to fill the wall shelves. Clawson sat down in front of him, his elongated torso as straight as a broomstick. Nick could feel the tension in his chest rising into his throat.

“You know Arthur Rooney?” Clawson asked.

“Everybody in New Orleans knew Artie Rooney. He used to run a detective agency. People in the graveyard knew Artie Rooney. That’s ’cause he put them there.”

“Does Rooney use Thai whores?”

“How would I know?”

“Because you’re in the same business.”

“I own a nightclub. I’m a partner in some escort services. If the government doesn’t like that, change the law.”

“I got a short wick with people like you, Mr. Dolan,” Clawson said, unzipping the portfolio. “Take a look at these. They really don’t do justice to the subject, though. You can’t put the smell of decomposition in a photograph.”

“I don’t want to look at them.”

“Yeah, you do,” Clawson said, rising from his chair, placing eight eight-by-ten black-and-white blowups in two rows across Nick’s desktop. “The shooter or shooters used forty-five-caliber ammunition. This girl here looks like she’s about fifteen. Check out the girl who caught one in the mouth. How old are your daughters?”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“Maybe. Or maybe it does. But you’re a pimp, Mr. Dolan, just like Arthur Rooney. You sell disease, and you promote drug addiction and pornography. You’re a parasite that should be scrubbed off the planet with steel wool.”

“You can’t talk to me like that.”

“The hell I can’t.”

Nick wiped the photos off his desk onto the floor. “Get out. Take your pictures with you.”

“They’re yours. We have plenty more. The FBI is interviewing your strippers. I’d better not hear a story that doesn’t coincide with what you’ve told me.”

“They’re doing what? You’re ICE. What are you doing here? I don’t smuggle people into the country. I’m not a terrorist. What’s with you?”

Clawson zipped up his empty portfolio and looked around him. “You got you a nice place here. It reminds me of a Mexican restaurant in Santa Fe where I used to eat.”

After Clawson was gone, Nick sat numbly in his swivel chair, his ears booming like kettledrums. Then he went into his wife’s bathroom and ate one of her nitroglycerin pills, sure that his heart was about to fail.

WHEN HIS WIFE called him to lunch, he scooped up the photos the ICE agent had left, stuffed them into a manila envelope, and buried them in a desk drawer. At the table in the sunroom, he picked at his food and tried not to let his worry and fear and gloom show in his face.

His wife’s grandparents had been Russian Jews from the southern Siberian plain, and she and their son and the fifteen-year-old twins still had the beautiful black hair and dark skin and hint of Asian features that had defined the grandmother even in her seventies. Nick kept looking at his daughters, seeing not their faces but the faces of the exhumed women and girls in the photos, smeared lipstick on one girl’s mouth, grains of dirt still in her hair.

“You don’t like the tuna?” Esther, his wife, said.

“The what?” he replied stupidly.

“The food you’re chewing like it’s wet cardboard,” she said.

“It’s good. I got a toothache is all.”

“Who was that guy?” Jesse, his son, asked. He was a skinny, pale boy, his arms flaccid, his ribs as visible as corset stays. His IQ was 160. In the high school yearbook, the only entries under his picture were “Planning Committee, Senior Prom” and “President of the Chess Club.” There had been three other members of the chess club.

“Which guy?” Nick said.

“The one who looks like an upended penis,” Jesse said.

“You’re not too old for a smack,” Esther said.

“He’s a gentleman from Immigration. He wanted to know about some of my Hispanic employees at the restaurant,” Nick said.

“Did you pick up the inner tubes?” Ruth, one of the twins, asked.

Nick stared blankly into space. “I forgot.”

“You promised you’d go down the rapids with us,” Kate, the other twin, said.

“The water is still high. There’s a whirlpool on the far end. I’ve seen it. It’s deep right where there’s that big cut under the bank. I think we should wait.”

Both girls looked dourly at their food. His could feel his wife’s eyes on the side of his face. But his daughters’ disappointment and his wife’s implicit disapproval were not what bothered him. He knew his broken promise would result in only one conclusion: The twins would go down the rapids anyway, with high school boys who were too old for them and would gladly provide the inner tubes and the hands-on guidance. In his mind, he already saw the whirlpool waiting for his girls, white froth spinning atop its dark vortex.

“I’ll get the tubes,” Nick said. “Eat your food slowly so you don’t get cramps.”

He went back to his office and locked the door. What was he going to do? He couldn’t even think of a way to safely dispose of the photographs, at least not in the daylight. ICE had his name, Hugo Cistranos was circling him like a shark, and his conscience was pulsing like an infected gland. He couldn’t think of one person on earth he could call upon for help.

He sat at his desk, his face in his hands. How long would it be before Hugo Cistranos was at his door, demanding his money, implying Nick was a coward, making remarks about his nicotine habit, his weight, his bad eyesight, his inability to deal with the catastrophe his careless words “Wipe the slate clean” had created?

To sit and wait for misfortune to befall him was insane. He had heard over and over about people “surrendering” control during times of adversity. Screw that. He thumbed through his Rolodex and punched a number into his desk phone.

“How’d you get this number?” a voice with a New Orleans accent said.