Feast Day of Fools

CHAPTER SIX

Using only starlight, Jack Collins and Noie Barnum made their way up a deer trail along the side of a bluff and into a narrow canyon that was threaded by a creek and strewn with chertlike yellow rock that had toppled from the ridges. Jack was in the lead, a nylon pack on his back, the straps pinching his suit coat tightly into his armpits, his body straining forward. Noie was limping badly, barely able to keep up, one arm tucked against his rib cage. There was a layer of fertile soil on the ground that sloped from the base of the cliffs down to the creek, and grass and wildflowers grew on it.

Jack paused and wiped his face and took his companion’s measure. “You want to sit down, bud?” he asked.

“No, sir, I’m fine.”

“You’re a tough hombre. ”

“I’m not in your class, Jack. You’re a mountain goat.”

Jack walked back down the trail to where his companion was leaning on the twisted remains of a cedar tree, breathing through his nose. “It gets steep up yonder. Put your arm on my shoulder. If you hear a rattler, hold still and give him time to get out of your way.”

“What if he doesn’t?”

“Throw a rock at him.”

“For real?”

“I have the feeling people didn’t tell a lot of jokes where you’re from.”

A cabin stood at the head of the canyon. Next to it was a loading chute that had turned gray with dry rot. In back were a barn with a sliding door and, farther up the hillside, an aluminum cistern supported on steel stanchions. Jack helped Noie the rest of the way up the trail, then slung his pack on the cabin’s porch and eased Noie down on the steps. “I’ll open up and fire the stove and get some food started,” he said.

“Who owns this?” Noie asked.

“Me.”

“You own property?”

“A mess of it.”

“You’re quite a kidder, Jack.”

“That’s me.”

Jack removed the door key from behind a wallboard, unlocked the cabin, and went inside. He stuffed newspaper and kindling and three chunks of firewood in the cookstove and set them ablaze, then went outside and started the gasoline motor that powered the water pump and the electric lights. He slid open the barn door and gazed at an unpainted Trans Am that had lines of rust around the fenders, though it was mounted with four Michelin tires that looked fresh from the dealership. Then he returned to the cabin and opened two cabinets lined with canned goods and boxes of cereal and jars of preserves. He filled a skillet with corned beef and hash and dumped a can of spinach into a pan and set them on the stove. He went back on the porch and helped Noie to his feet. “I think your ribs are fractured,” he said. “The pain will probably be with you six weeks at the inside. You take the bunk, and I’ll make a pallet on the floor.”

“Jack, I have no idea what’s going on. Is this really your camp?”

“You haven’t figured out who I am?”

“No, sir, I’m pretty confused.”

“I was a longtime exterminator for Orkin. I still have my license. That’s a fact.”

“You’re a pest exterminator?”

“That says it all,” Jack replied.

“Why are you doing all this for me?”

“I like your accent. I never met a Quaker from Alabama.”

In the early morning, Jack rose from his pallet and slipped on his boots and retrieved a flashlight and a shovel from the barn. The sky was bursting with stars as he labored up a path to a cave entrance that was not much wider than his hips. He squeezed through the opening, then stood up slowly, in a crouch, and flicked on the flashlight. The interior of the cave was as orange and pale as the inside of a pumpkin, the roof jagged and blackened by the cook fires of hunters and gatherers who may have been there before the Indians. On one wall, petroglyphs and images cut with stone tools depicted the slayings of both animals and people. Jack sometimes wondered if the battle in the stone mural had been fought over food or if the animals had been slain to ensure that the survivors would starve. There was another artifact in the cave that seemed to answer the question for him. A hole used to grind corn had been augered into a slab of table rock that ran the length of one wall. Jack believed the grinding hole proved the battle was not over game. In Jack’s opinion, man killed because he had lost Eden. The bitterness was obviously so great that nothing short of mass fratricide could assuage it. Why else did people enjoy it so? Killing over food? Who was kidding whom? The throngs who attended blood sports weren’t worried about the quality of the hot dogs.

The air inside the cave was cool and smelled of guano and damp clay and the field mice that nested on the ledges. Jack worked his way to the rear of the shaft, then set his light on the table rock and went to work, his dirty panama pulled down on his brow, his unshaved cheeks as lined as old parchment. The mixture of sand and clay and charcoal curdled up like old skin on the shovel’s blade as he pushed the handle toward the rear wall, peeling the ground away in layers, tossing each shovel load to one side. When he was down less than a foot, he glimpsed a piece of black vinyl in the dirt. He got to his knees and began scraping the dirt out of the hole with his fingers, brushing off the vinyl, pushing his hands sideways into the dirt to find purchase on the outer edges of the bag, feeling the hard, familiar contours inside it. He dug faster, his heart beating, his throat tingling with anticipation, his breath loud inside the confines of the cave. He sculpted the bag free of dirt from head to foot, then fitted both hands under it and lifted it from the ground. A damp odor that was as cool and pungent as bruised nightshade rose into his face.

In his haste, he knocked the flashlight off the table rock, and the inside of the cave went black. He groped in the dirt until he felt the aluminum cylinder with his fingers, but when he pushed the switch on and off, nothing happened. The inside of the cave contained a level of darkness that only a blind man would understand. Jack felt as though his eyes had been scooped out of his head with a spoon. He stared up the shaft, hoping to see a glimmer of starlight through the opening, but there was both a bend and a drop in the floor, and the darkness was so absolute that it seemed to flow like liquid through his eyes into his skull.

It was not unlike the inside of a cargo trunk his mother had kept in the boxcar where they had lived. “You cost me the trick, Jack. That’s the only way Ma and you can get by,” she would say. “It hurts me to do this. Why are you such a headstrong little boy? Why do you force Ma to do this to her only begotten?”

He dragged the bag behind him, feeling above with one hand to protect his head, the weight inside the bag slapping across the cave floor. Then he rounded the bend and saw the stars in the sky and felt a sense of release that was like an infusion of pure oxygen into his soul. He climbed through the cave opening into the breeze and the smell of creek water and wet grass and desert bloom, then pulled the bag through the hole after him. When he sat down on the incline, sweat was leaking out of his hat and drying on his face. He waited until he had caught his breath, then tore the garbage bag away from the hard outline. His hands were shaking when he unsnapped the series of latches on the top of the guitar case and pried the top up on its hinges. Set inside the velvet pink liner, just as he had left them one year ago, were his Thompson. 45 submachine gun, a box magazine, two fifty-round ammunition pans, and six boxes of cartridges. He touched the cold blue oiled smoothness of the frame and saw the vaporous whorls of his fingertips clouding on the steel and evaporating, like the melting of dry ice or hailstones. Did the ancient gods give power with the touch of a finger? he asked himself. Or did they absorb it from the beings they touched? Didn’t Death depend on his victims in order to sustain his own existence? Jack wondered what Ma would think if she saw him now. He wondered if she would smile in awe when the electric arc leaped from the muzzle of his Thompson, when he cut down his enemies like a harvester ripping a scythe through wheat. Would she believe her son had become the left hand of God and be proud of him? Or would she run squeaking and skittering like a dormouse squeezing through its hidey-hole?

He entered the back of the cabin and removed fresh underwear and socks from a dresser, and a white dress shirt and an unpressed clean brown suit from the closet. He stripped off his soiled clothes and let them drop to the floor and wrapped his body in a quilt. Then he carried the guitar case and his razor and a bar of soap and the change of clothes down to the creek. He laid out his suit and underwear on a rock and sat down in the center of the creek, the current frothing around his chest, a cluster of deer watching him from an arroyo. He washed his hair and face and body and lathered his throat and cheeks and shaved by touch. Even though he climbed dripping wet onto the bank and dressed without drying off, his skin was as warm as a heated lampshade. The light had started to go out of the sky, but the evening star still hung low in the west, just above the hills, twinkling like a harbinger of a fine day.

He slipped on his boots and lay down on the quilt, the Thompson at his side, his head cushioned on his arm. The ground was patinaed with tiny wildflowers, and as he breathed their fragrance, he thought he could hear the wind whispering through the grass. The whispering grew in volume until it sounded like bees buzzing in a hive, or the whisperings of desperate girls and young women who had been trapped unfairly underground long before their time, all of them Asian girls whose sloe eyes pleaded for mercy and whose voices asked, Why did you do this to us?

I freed you from a life of degradation, he replied.

But his words were like the weighted tips of a flagrum whipped across his soul.

Early the next morning, Maydeen Stoltz walked into Hackberry’s office. She had a pink memo slip in her hand. “That was Bedford at the firehouse. He said he had a call maybe we should know about.”

“Concerning what?”

Maydeen looked at the memo slip. “The caller gave his name as Garland Roark. He said he was an arson investigator with the Texas Department of Public Safety. He said he was compiling information about the incidence of arson along the border.”

“Say that name again.”

“Garland Roark.”

Hackberry wrote it on a legal pad.

“So Bedford told him about the shack burning down, the one maybe Collins was living in,” Maydeen said.

“Go on.”

“The caller wanted to know how Bedford knew it was arson. Bedford told him the whole place stunk of kerosene. Then the caller asked if Bedford had any suspects in mind. Bedford goes, ‘Not unless you count the FBI.’”

“Wait a minute,” Hackberry said. “When did Bedford get this call?”

“A week ago, right after the fire.”

“Bedford suspected the feds did it but didn’t tell us?”

“Hold your water two seconds and I’ll try to finish,” Maydeen said.

“Excuse me.”

“I asked Bedford the same question. He said a trucker saw a car with a government tag parked by the shack just before the flames went up. Bedford figured if the feds set fire to it, there was a reason. He thought maybe it was a stopover place for illegals.”

“So why is Bedford calling us now?”

“He started wondering why this guy Roark didn’t ask about the arson incidents involving wildfires. Like what was the big deal with a shack? This morning he called Austin and was told nobody by the name of Garland Roark worked at the Department of Public Safety.”

“That’s because he’s dead,” Hackberry said.

“You knew him?”

“Garland Roark was the author of Wake of the Red Witch. Jack Collins likes to appropriate the names of famous writers. He used the name of B. Traven, the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, on several legal documents. Jack is quite the jokester when he’s not murdering people.”

“You want me to get Bedford on the phone?”

“Forget Bedford. Call Ethan Riser and fill him in. If he’s not in, leave the information on his voice mail.”

“Shouldn’t you do that?”

“I’m done pulling Ethan’s biscuits out of the fire,” Hackberry replied. “Ask Pam to come in here, please.”

“Yes, sir.”

A moment later, Pam Tibbs tapped on the doorjamb.

“Jack Collins knows the feds burned him out,” Hackberry said.

“Is Riser aware of this?”

“He will be. You have any suggestions?”

She shrugged. “Not really. Collins is going to square it.”

“You and I know that. But we’re the only law enforcement personnel around here who have dealt with him head-on.”

“So maybe Riser will learn a lesson and not be such a smart-ass.”

“We’re not going to let Collins make this county his personal killing ground.”

She took a box of Altoids out of her shirt pocket and put one on her tongue. “Why did you want to talk to me, Hack?”

“You know how Collins thinks.”

“You’re asking me what his next move will be?” she said.

“I thought you might have an opinion, since he tried to machine-gun you.”

“That’s not a subject I’m flippant about.”

“Neither am I,” he said.

“Collins hunts like a cougar,” she said. “He’ll go to the water hole and wait for his prey.”

“Where’s the water hole?”

“Wherever he thinks the feds will show up,” Pam replied.

“Where would that be?”

“You already know where.”

“Tell me.”

“The Asian woman gave refuge to Noie Barnum. The feds are probably watching her. One way or another, Collins will find that out.”

“Want to take a ride?” Hackberry said.

She looked out the window at the flag popping on the silver pole in front of the building. In the north a line of rain mixed with dust was moving across the hills, but to the south the sky was blue, the early sun already hot and as yellow as egg yolk. “Why ask me? You’re the boss man, aren’t you?” she replied.

Two men driving a black SUV had parked their vehicle behind a knoll and set up a high-powered telescope with a camera attached to it on a flat spot that overlooked the valley where the Asian woman lived. They were both dressed in stonewashed jeans and alpine shoes with lug soles and short-sleeve shirts with many pockets. They were both tan and wore shades and had the body tone of men who swam or ran long distances or trained at martial arts or followed a military discipline in their personal lives. One of them opened a lunch box on a rock and removed a thermos of hot coffee and two ham sandwiches. Both men carried Glocks in black nylon holsters on their belts.

Ten minutes later, a rock bounced down from the knoll. The men turned around but saw nothing out of the ordinary. After they finished their sandwiches and poured themselves a second cup of coffee, they heard the pinging of a guitar string. They turned around and saw a solitary figure sitting on the bleached trunk of an uprooted tree, thirty yards up a wash, his face darkened by the brim of a panama hat stained with soot or grime, a guitar propped on one thigh. He picked at a treble string with his thumbnail while he twisted a tuning peg on the guitar’s head. “Howdy,” he said without looking up.

“Where the hell did you come from?” one of the men in shades said.

“Up yonder, past those boulders,” the seated man replied.

“Mind telling us who you are?”

“Just another pilgrim.”

“Where’s your car, pilgrim?”

“Who says I have one?”

The men in shades looked at each other. “He teleported,” one said.

“You cain’t ever tell. I get around. You ever hear that song by the Beach Boys? It’s called ‘I Get Around,’” the seated man replied.

“I get it. You’ve been shooting the curl off Malibu.”

“There aren’t many places I haven’t been.”

“I dig your threads.”

“This?” the seated man said, pinching his suit coat with two fingers.

“Yeah, I thought it might be an Armani.”

“Could be. You fellows are FBI, aren’t you? Or maybe DEA?” The two men in shades and stonewashed jeans glanced at each other. “Looks like we’ve been made,” one said.

“I can tell because you’re wearing Glocks.”

“What’s your name, asshole?”

The seated man laid his guitar flatly across both thighs, his gaze focused on neutral space, the bumps and knots in his complexion like tan-colored papier-mache. A closed tortoiseshell guitar case lay on the ground by his foot. It was of expensive manufacture, the kind of case that might contain a Martin or vintage Gibson. “I disturb y’all?” the seated man said.

“That guitar looks like a piece of junk.”

“It is,” the seated man replied. “It’s got rust on the strings. They sound like baling wire.”

“So how about playing it somewhere else?”

“Y’all think the government has the right of eminent domain?”

“Of what?”

“The right to burn down someone’s house just because the government takes a mind to.”

“I’ve got an extra sandwich here. You can have it. But you need to eat it downwind.”

“You haven’t answered my question. Somebody gave y’all the right to burn a man’s house and his books and clothes and even his Bible?”

“What’s it take, pal? You want me to bust your guitar over a rock? Do we have to walk you over the hill and put you in your car?”

The seated man set down his guitar, the bottom of the sound box grating in the sand. He rubbed his palms up and down on his thighs, the focus gone from his eyes, his lips compressed, downturned at the corners. The knees of his trousers were shiny from wear. “You boys aren’t much of a challenge.”

“Repeat that?”

The seated man lifted his face, the sunlight shining clearly on it. “You don’t recognize me?”

“Why should we? Who are you supposed to be? Somebody from America’s Most Wanted?”

“How’d you know?”

The two men stared silently at the seated man and the somber expression on his face and the uncut hair on the back of his neck lifting in the wind. Their irritability was obviously growing, but the seated man seemed to pay no attention to it. He grinned, his teeth as tiny as pearls. “Got you, didn’t I? They say that Chinese woman down yonder works miracles. Y’all believe that?”

“Buddy, you just don’t listen, do you?”

“You reckon she can mix her spit with dirt and touch the eyelids of a blind man and give him back his sight? Because that’s the kind of he’p both of y’all need. Like all benighted men, you’re arrogant. You walk upon the precipice and never glance at your feet.”

“In about ten seconds, I’ll be forced to hurt you.”

“You wouldn’t be the first.”

One of the men removed his shades and slipped them in a leather case, then began picking up rocks from the ground.

“If you’d read the Bible you burned, you would have learned how Joshua took Canaan for the Hebrews,” the seated man said. “He always attacked at daybreak, with the sun rising on his back. His enemies had to look into the glare while he was killing them.”

The man who had taken off his shades flung a rock at the seated man and struck the side of his face. The rock was sharp-edged and triangle-shaped and left a one-inch cut as thin as thread just below the seated man’s eye, one that seeped blood like tears on ceramic.

“You get the message?” the rock thrower said. “Do I have to do it again?”

“Well, it’s been nice talking to you,” the seated man said. He stood up, silhouetted against the sun, the brim of his panama hat riffling in the wind. He lifted his guitar case from the ground and set it on the hard, barkless worm-scrolled apex of the tree trunk and began unsnapping the latches. When he turned around again, the two men he had mistakenly identified as federal agents stared at him openmouthed, their hands wooden at their sides, their expressions frozen like those of statues.

“It’s a beaut, isn’t it? I paid eighteen thousand for it. Same model you see John Dillinger carrying in that famous photograph.”

“We can talk this out, pal,” the rock thrower said.

“My biggest problem with you boys is your lack of respect. But maybe the devil can teach y’all manners.”

Against the brilliance of the sun, the spray of rounds from the Thompson seemed like an eruption of lightning bolts from a black cutout. The few rounds that missed their target whanged off the rocks and ricocheted into the distance with a sound like the tremolo in a flopping saw blade. Then the man in the panama hat pulled the ammunition drum from the Thompson’s frame and laid the Thompson and the fifty-round drum inside the guitar case and shut and latched the top. Before leaving, he took the remaining ham sandwich from the lunch box on the rock and unwrapped it from the wax paper and let the paper blow across the landscape. He ate the sandwich with one hand while he walked back to his vehicle, the guitar case knocking against his leg, the soles of his boots clopping on a series of flat stones like the feet of a hoofed animal.

When Hackberry and Pam arrived at the Asian woman’s house, the air was dense and sparkling with humidity, coating every surface in sight, clinging to the skin like damp cotton, as though the sunrise were a source not of light but of ignition. The morning itself seemed divided between darkness and shadow, the clouds overhead roiling and black and crackling with electricity against an otherwise blue and tranquil sky. In the north Hackberry could see a great brown plume of dust lifting out of the hills, and he thought he could smell an odor like baitfish that had been trapped in seaweed and left stranded along the edge of a receding ocean, although he was hundreds of miles from salt water. His eyes burned with his own sweat as he watched the Asian woman approach from the backyard, wearing a white dress and a necklace of black stones.

“Here comes Teahouse of the August Moon, ” Pam said.

“Don’t start,” Hackberry said.

“I can’t help it. This woman is a fraud.”

“Time to be quiet, Pam,” he said.

She turned and stared at the side of his face, her nostrils dilating. He stepped forward into the breeze, removing her from the periphery of his vision. He tipped the brim of his hat. “How you doin’, Miss Anton?” he said. “Sorry to bother you, but we’ve got a problem with a guy by the name of Jack Collins.”

“I don’t recall the name,” she replied.

“Collins is a mass killer. Some federal people burned a shack he was using. I think Jack aims to do some serious payback. Your place is probably under surveillance by the feds. I suspect Jack knows that. My bet is he’ll be coming around.”

“Why should this man know I’m under surveillance?”

“Krill knew to come here. Krill is a lamebrain compared to Collins. The Mexicans say he can walk through walls. Collins has killed people for years but has never been arrested or spent one day in jail. He murdered nine Thai girls down by Chapala Crossing. I dug them up.”

“He’s the one who did that?” Anton Ling said, her face frozen as though painted on the air, her eyes elongated and lidless.

“He tried to kill my chief deputy in her cruiser. He executed one of his own men in a cave we had cornered him in. He blew three outlaw bikers all over a motel room. He pushed a corrupt PI off a cliff up in the Glass Mountains. A little earlier in the day, he wiped out a whole collection of gangsters in a hunting lodge. He dressed as a cleaning woman in a San Antonio motel and murdered an ICE agent. Nobody knows his body count across the border.”

Anton Ling seemed to listen less with shock or horror than with the fixed attention of someone revisiting a tape seen before. “You think he’s a threat to the people who come to my house?”

“Probably not. They don’t have anything he wants,” Hackberry said.

“But he could be a threat to me?”

“Possibly.”

“Well, I appreciate your telling me this. But I can’t control what this man does or doesn’t do.”

“It’s not all about you, Ms. Ling. Believe it or not, we’d like to get this guy in custody,” Pam said. “Collins wears suits and fedoras he buys from the Goodwill. His face looks like it was stung by bumblebees. See anybody like that around?”

“No, I haven’t. Otherwise I would have told you.”

“Sure? So far you haven’t been very forthcoming,” Pam said.

“Madam, what did I just say?”

“You can call me Chief Deputy Tibbs, thank you.”

“I’d like to invite you in,” Anton Ling said to Hackberry. “But I have to go to San Antonio. Some of our people are in jail.”

“Your people?” Pam said.

“Yes, that’s what I call them. They’re destitute, cheated out of their money by coyotes, hunted by nativist snipers, and generally treated as though they’re subhuman. The particular woman I’m going to try to bail out watched her two-year-old daughter die of a rattlesnake bite in the desert.”

“I think Pam was just asking a question, Miss Anton,” Hackberry said.

“No, she was making a statement. She’s done it several times now.”

“Why is it we have to keep coming out here to protect you from yourself? To be honest, it’s getting to be a drag,” Pam said.

“Then your problem can be easily solved. Just leave and don’t bother to come back.”

“I think that’s a good idea,” Pam said.

Hackberry was not listening. The thunderheads had blotted out the sun, dropping the countryside into shadow. He had turned his head toward the southeast, where the wind was whipping dust off the hilltops and riffling the mesquite that grew down the slopes. His eyes fixed on a spot where rain had started to tumble out of the sky and a muted sound like crackling foil seemed to leak from the clouds. Hackberry opened and closed his mouth to clear his ears and listen to the sound that had started and now had stopped.

“What is it?” Pam said.

“Somebody was firing a machine gun,” he replied.

“I didn’t hear it,” she said.

Because you were too busy talking, he thought. But he didn’t say it. “You drive. Good-bye, Miss Anton. Thank you for your time.”

“I’ll follow you,” she said.

“That’s not a good idea,” he said.

“My property line goes right through the hills. I have a right to know who’s on my land.”

“In this case, you don’t. Stay here, please. Don’t make me ask you again,” he said.

He got in the passenger side of the cruiser and closed the door, not looking back, then glanced in the outside mirror. Anton Ling was already getting into a skinned-up pale blue truck seamed with rust, the front bumper secured by baling wire. “This stuff has to stop, Pam,” he said.

“Tell her, ” Pam said.

“You two are more alike than you think.”

“Which two?”

“You and Miss Anton. Who else?”

“Yeah?” she said, giving him a look. “We’ll talk more about that later.”

“No, we won’t. You’ll drive and not speak for me to others when we’re conducting an investigation.”

“Maybe I should turn in my badge, Hack. That’s how you make me feel. No, I take that back. I can’t even describe how you make me feel,” she said. “You treated me like I was a fence post.” She started the engine, then had to stop and concentrate on what she was doing.

“You’re one of the best cops I’ve ever known,” he said.

“Save it. You hide behind your years. It’s a sorry excuse.”

“My wife died on this date, Pam. I don’t want to participate in this kind of conversation today. We’re on the job. We need to give this nonsense a rest.”

“I went out to the grave this morning. I thought you might be there.”

He looked at her blankly. “Why did you go there?”

“I thought you might need somebody. I put flowers on her grave.”

“You did that?”

She stared at the hills, her hands tight on the steering wheel, rain striking on the glass. Her expression was wan, her eyes dead. “I think you heard thunder,” she said. “I don’t believe anything is out there.”

“You put flowers on Rie’s grave?”

She would not speak the rest of the way to the place in the hills where Hackberry believed he had heard the staccato firing of a submachine gun. He took a bottle of aspirin from his shirt pocket and ate two of them and gazed out the window, his thoughts poor consolation for the spiritual fatigue that seemed to eat through all his connective tissue.

Pam drove off the main road and up an incline dotted with cactus and small rocks and mesquite and yucca plants whose leaves were darkening in the rain. She squinted at a flat place between two knolls, the sky sealed with black clouds all the way to the southern horizon.

“There’s a telescope on a tripod. It looks like it has a camera on it,” she said.

“Stop here. You go to the left. I’ll come around from the right,” Hackberry said.

She braked the Jeep and turned off the ignition. “Hack?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“Say it.”

“I’ve got your back.”

“You always do. That’s why I wouldn’t partner with anyone else,” he said.

She looked directly into his face, her lips slightly parted, her teeth white. She made him think of a young girl outside a prom, her face tilted up, waiting to be kissed. Then she opened the door and stepped out into the rain, unsnapping the strap on her. 357, her arms pumped and brown and glistening. She looked beyond him, down the incline, and lifted her chin as though pointing. He turned around and saw Anton Ling’s pickup truck approaching from the dirt road, clattering across the rocks, the cactus raking under the bumper and oil pan. “Get down there and stop her,” he said.

“Gladly,” Pam said.

As soon as Pam began walking down the incline, Hackberry headed uphill between the two knolls toward the telescope and camera. He pulled his. 45 revolver from its holster and let it hang loosely against his leg, his back straight so the pain that lived in his lower spine would not flare like an electric burn across his back and wrap around his thighs. He glanced once over his shoulder, then continued straight on toward the telescope, knowing already what he would find, knowing also that his nemesis, Jack Collins, had once again written his signature across the landscape with a dirty finger and had disappeared into the elements.

When Hackberry was little more than a teenage boy, in a battalion aid station at Inchon and later on the firing line at the Chosin Reservoir and even later in a giant POW enclosure the prisoners called the Bean Camp, he had acquired an enormous amount of unwanted knowledge about the moribund and the dead and the rites of passage from the world of the living into the land of the great shade. The opalescence in the skin, the wounds that had the glassy brightness of roses frozen inside ice, and the bodies stuffed in sleeping bags and stacked as hard as concrete in the backs of six-bys were the images a war poet might focus on. But the real story resided in the eyes. The marines and soldiers and navy corpsmen who were mortally wounded or dying of disease or starvation had stared up at him with a luminosity that was like ground diamonds, the pupils tiny dots, so small they could not have recorded an image on the brain. Then, in a blink, the light was gone, and the eyes became as opaque and devoid of meaning as fish scale. That was when he had come to believe that the dying indeed saw through the curtain but took their secrets with them.

The two men on the ground, dressed as casual hikers, must have thought they had walked into a Gatling gun. Their clothes were punched with holes from their shoes to their shirt collars. The spray of ejected shell casings showed no pattern, indicating the shooter had probably shifted his position and fired several bursts from different angles, as though enjoying his work. The fact that one man’s hand was twitching at his side seemed almost miraculous, as though the hand were disembodied and the only part of the victim that was still alive.

“Pam! Call for the paramedics and the coroner and tell Felix and R.C. to get out here!” Hackberry shouted down the incline.

He holstered his revolver and walked past a downed tree, the root-ball impacted with dirt. A worthless guitar, the strings coated with rust, lay on the ground. He gazed down a series of flat yellow rocks that descended like stair steps into a wide flume where an SUV was parked and a second vehicle had left a curlicue of tire tracks in the dirt. He strained his eyes against the distance and thought he saw a speck on the horizon that might have been a car, but he couldn’t be sure. Then the speck was lost inside the bolts of lightning that leaped from the earth to the clouds like gold thread.

“Collins?” Pam said behind him.

“Who else kills like this?” he said.

“I think one of them is still alive.”

“He’s brain-dead. The twitching hand doesn’t mean anything.”

“Better tell her that,” Pam replied.

He turned and saw Anton Ling on her knees next to the dying man, trying to resuscitate him, forcing her breath inside his mouth and down his windpipe, mashing on his chest with the heel of her hand. Her dress and hair and chin and cheeks were speckled with his blood. She turned his head to one side and drained his mouth, then bent over him and tried again.

“Miss Anton?” Hackberry said.

She didn’t speak or even look up.

“This fellow is gone, Miss Anton,” he said.

She stared up into Hackberry’s face. Her mouth was smeared, her eyes slightly crossed. “You gave it your best,” he said, putting his hands under her elbows, lifting her up.

“Who did this?” she said.

“The man who calls himself the left hand of God.”

“That’s an insult to God,” she said.

“Jack Collins is an insult to the planet,” Hackberry said. “But Pam and I need to get to work.”

“Are these federal agents?” Anton Ling asked.

“Maybe,” he said. His knees popping, he squatted down, wincing at the pain in his lower back. He slipped the wallet from the back pocket of the man Anton Ling had tried to resuscitate. The leather was warm and sticky, and he had to wipe his fingers on a handkerchief before he opened it. Hackberry sorted through the credit cards, driver’s license, and celluloid photo holders, then set the wallet down by the dead man’s foot. He recovered the wallet from the second victim and did the same. He got to his feet, slightly off balance. “If Collins was trying to do payback on the feds, he screwed up.”

“How?” Pam said.

“These guys worked for a security service out of Houston. My bet is they were doing scut work for Temple Dowling. He’s a defense contractor and the son of a United States senator I was a hump for.”

“I didn’t catch that.”

“I got politically ambitious back in the sixties.”

“Everybody makes mistakes,” Pam said.

“A mistake is something you do when you don’t know better.”

“What’s the guitar doing here?” she said.

“Who knows? Collins is a harlequin. He has contempt for most of the people he kills.”

Pam gazed down the incline. While Hackberry looked through the wallets of the two dead men, Anton Ling had gone back to her truck and was now walking back up the slope with a small silver bottle in her hand. She unscrewed the top and knelt by the man whose life she had tried to save. She put a drop of oil on her finger and drew the sign of the cross on his forehead.

“Miss Anton?” Pam said. “We shouldn’t mess too much with the bodies until the coroner gets here.”

“If you don’t want me to, I won’t,” Anton Ling said.

Pam looked at Hackberry and waited.

“It won’t hurt anything,” he said.

Pam watched Anton Ling kneel by the second man and make the sign of the cross on his forehead with her thumb. Then Pam went back to the Jeep and returned with an oversize United States Forest Service canteen and a roll of paper towels. She poured water on a clutch of paper sections and squatted down by Anton Ling and began to wipe her hands and her face and then her hair.

“You don’t need to do that,” Anton Ling said.

“I know I don’t,” Pam said.

“I’m quite all right,” Anton Ling said.

“Yeah, you are, ma’am. That’s exactly what you are,” Pam replied. “You’re damn straight you’re all right.”

Anton Ling looked at her quizzically.

Hackberry walked down the slope to the Jeep. He scratched idly at his cheek with three fingers and wondered why men tried to puzzle through the mysteries of heaven when they couldn’t even resolve the ones that lived in the human heart. He picked up the handheld radio from the seat of the cruiser and called R.C. and Felix and asked for their ETA. When a tree of lightning burst on the horizon, he thought he saw a solitary figure standing as starkly as an exclamation point on the deck of a house high up on a plateau. But the raindrops were striking his hat as hard as marbles, and he had to concentrate on his call to Felix and R.C., and he paid no more attention to the solitary figure or the house that resembled the forecastle of a ship, a huge American flag painted on the sandstone bluff behind it.