Rain Gods

10

NICK DOLAN SWALLOWED a tranquilizer and a half glass of water, took Esther into his office, and closed the door behind him. With the dark velvet drapes closed and the air-conditioning set to almost freezing levels, there was an insularity about his office that made Nick feel not only isolated and safe but outside of time and place, as though he could rewind the video and erase all the mistakes he had made in his journey from the schoolyard playground in the Lower Ninth Ward to the day he bought into an escort service and the attendant association with people like Hugo Cistranos.

He told Esther everything that had happened during his abduction-the ride in the SUV down the highway to the empty farmhouse, Preacher Jack Collins sitting next to him, the New Orleans button man Hugo Cistranos and the strange kid in a top hat sitting in front, the moon wobbling under the surface of a pond whose banks glistened with green cow scat. Then he told Esther how the man called Preacher had spared him at the last moment because of her name.

“He thinks I’m somebody out of the Bible?” she said.

“Who knows what crazy people think?” Nick said.

“There’s something you’re leaving out. Something you’re not talking about.”

“No, that’s it. That’s everything that happened.”

“Stop lying. What did these men do in your name?”

“They didn’t do it in my name. I never told them to do what they did.”

“You make me want to hit you, to beat my fists bloody on you.”

“They killed nine women from Thailand. They were prostitutes. They were being smuggled across the border by Artie Rooney. They machine-gunned them and buried them with a bulldozer.”

“My God, Nick,” she said, her voice breaking in her throat.

“I didn’t have anything to do with this, Esther.”

“Yes, you did.” Then she said it again. “Yes, you did.”

“Hugo was supposed to deliver the women to Houston. That’s all it was.”

“All it was? Listen to yourself. What were you doing with people who smuggle prostitutes into the country?”

“We’ve got a half-interest in a couple of escort agencies. It’s legal. They’re hostesses. Maybe some other stuff goes on, but it’s between adults, it’s a free country. It’s just business.”

“You’ve been running escort services?” When he didn’t reply, she said, “Nick, what have you done to us?” She was weeping quietly in the leather chair now, her long hair hanging in her face. Her discomposure and fear and disbelief, and the black skein of her hair separating her from the rest of the world, made him think of the women lined up in front of Preacher’s machine gun, and his lips began to tremble.

“You want me to fix you a drink?” he said.

“Don’t say anything to me. Don’t touch me. Don’t come near me.”

He was standing over her, his fingers extended inches from the crown of her head. “I didn’t want anybody hurt, Esther. I thought maybe I’d get even with Artie for a lot of the things he did to me when I was a kid. It was dumb.”

But she wasn’t hearing him. Her head was bent forward, her face completely obscured, her back shaking inside her blouse. He took a box of Kleenex from his desk and set it on her lap, but it fell from her knees without her ever noticing it was there. He stood in the darkened coldness of his office, the jet of frigid air from the wall duct touching his bald pate, his stomach sagging over his belt, the smell of nicotine rife on his fingers when he rubbed his hand across his mouth. If he had ever felt smaller in his life, he could not remember the instance.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and started to walk away.

“What do these gangsters plan to do now?”

“There was a witness, a soldier who was in Iraq. Him and his girlfriend could be witnesses against Hugo and the kid in the top hat and this guy Preacher.”

“They’re going to kill them?”

“Yeah, if they find them, that’s what they’ll do.”

“That can’t happen, Nick,” she said, raising her head.

“I called the FBI when I was drunk. It didn’t do any good. You want me to go to prison? You think that will stop it? These guys will kill those kids anyway.”

She stared into space, her eyes cavernous. Through the floor, she and Nick could hear the children turning somersaults on the living room carpet, sending a thud down through the walls into the foundation of the house. “We can’t have this on our souls,” she said.

THE MOTEL WAS a leftover from the 1950s, a utilitarian structure checkerboarded with huge red and beige plastic squares, the metal-railed upstairs walkways not unlike those in penitentiaries, all of it located in a neighborhood of warehouses and bankrupt businesses and joyless bars that could afford no more than a single neon sign over the door.

The swimming pool stayed covered with a plastic tarp year-round, and the apron of grass around the building was yellow and stiff, the fronds of the palm trees rattling drily in the wind. On the upside of things, hookers did not operate on its premises, nor did drug dealers cook meth in the rooms. The sodium halide lamps in the parking lot protected the cars of the guests from roving bands of thieves. The rates were cheap. Arguably, there were worse rental lodgings in San Antonio. But there was one undeniable characteristic about the motel and the surrounding neighborhood that would not go away: The rectangularity of line and the absence of people gave one the sense that he was stand ing inside a stage set, one that had been created for the professional sojourner.

Preacher sat in a stuffed chair in the dark, staring at the television set. The screen was filled with static, the volume turned up full blast on white noise. But the images on the screen inside Preacher’s head had nothing to do with the television set in his room. Inside Preacher’s head, the year was 1954. A little boy sat in the corner of a boxcar parked permanently on a siding in the middle of the Texas-Oklahoma Panhandle. It was winter, and the wind was gray with grit and dust, and it chapped the cheeks and lips and dried out the hands and caused the skin to split around the thumbnails. A blanket draped over a rope divided the boxcar in half. On the other side of the blanket, Edna Collins was going at it with a dark-skinned gandy dancer while two more waited outside, their hands stuffed in their canvas coat pockets, their slouch hats pulled low over their ears as protection against the wind.

Preacher’s motel windows were hung with red curtains, and the lamps in the parking lot seemed to etch them with fire. He heard footsteps on the steel stairway, then a shadow crossed his window and someone tapped tentatively on the jalousie.

“What do you want?” Preacher said, his eyes still fixed on the television screen.

“My name is Mona Drexel, Preacher. We met once,” a voice replied.

“I don’t remember the name.”

“Liam is like a client of mine.”

He turned his head slowly and looked at her shadow on the frosted glass. “Liam who?”

“Eriksson.”

“Come in,” he said.

He smelled the cigarette odor on her clothes as soon as she entered the room. Against the outside light, her hair possessed the frizzy outline and color of cotton candy. The foundation on her face made Preacher think of an unfinished clay sculpture, the lines collapsing under the jaw, the mouth a bit crooked, the eye shadow and rouge both sad and embarrassing to look at.

“Can I sit down?” she said.

“You’re in, aren’t you?”

“I heard that maybe people are looking for Liam because of this government check he took into one of these car-title loan places. I didn’t want to have my name mixed up in this, because I’m not really involved or a close friend of his. See, we had a few drinks, and he had this check, and he wanted to party some more, so I went along with him, but it kind of hit the fan for some reason, and Liam said we ought to get out of there, and he thought you were gonna be pissed off, but that was all over my head and not really my business. I just wanted to clear this up and make sure nobody has a misunderstanding. Since we’d already met, I didn’t think you’d mind me coming by to answer any questions you might have.”

“Why should I have questions for you?”

“A couple of people told me this is what I should do. I didn’t mean to bother you during your program.”

Then she looked at the empty screen. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, out of breath and holding her hands in her lap, unsure of what she should say next. She placed one foot on the top of the other as a little girl might, chewing her lip.

“I don’t like touching the bedspreads in motels,” she said, half smiling. “There’s every kind of DNA in the world imaginable on them, not that I mean this place is any worse than any other, it’s just the way all motels are, with unclean people using everything and not caring that other people are gonna use it later.”

The side of Preacher’s face was immobile, the eye that she could see like a marble pushed into tallow. “Mona Drexel is my stage name,” she said. “My real name is Margaret, but I started using Mona when I was onstage in Dallas. Believe it or not, it was a club Jack Ruby once owned, but you can call me whatever you want.”

“Where’s Liam now?”

“That’s why I’m here. I don’t know. Maybe I can find out. I just don’t want to hurt anybody or have anybody think I’m working against them. See, I’m for people, I’m not against anybody. There’s a big difference. I just want everybody to know that.”

“I can see that,” he said.

“Can you turn down the volume on the television?” she said.

“Do you know what I do for a living?”

“No.”

“Who told you I was staying at this motel?”

“Liam said you use it sometimes when you’re in town. That noise is really loud.”

“That’s what Liam told you, did he?”

“Yes,” she said. “I mean, yes, sir, he just mentioned it in passing.”

“Do you know where Liam got the government check?”

“No, he didn’t tell me. I don’t talk with clients about their personal business.”

“That’s a good way to be.”

“It is, isn’t it?” she said, crossing her leg on her knee, her mouth jerking as though she wanted to smile. She watched Preacher’s face in the white glow of the television screen. His eyes never blinked; not one muscle in his face moved. Her own expression went dead.

“I have clients that become friends,” she said. “After they’re friends, they’re not clients again. Then I have friends that are always friends. They never become clients. They’re friends from the first time I meet them, know what I mean?”

“No, I don’t,” he replied.

“I can be a friend to somebody. I have to make a living, but I believe in having friends and helping them out.” She lowered her eyes. “I mean, we could be friends if you want.”

“You remind me of someone,” he said, looking at her directly for the first time.

“Who?” she asked, the word turning to a rusty clot in her throat.

He stared at her in a way no one had ever stared at her in her life. She felt the blood drain from her head and heart into her stomach.

“Somebody who never should have been allowed around small children,” he said. “Do you have children?”

“I did. A little boy. But he died.”

“It’s better that some people don’t live. They should be taken before their souls are forfeit. That means some of us have to help them in ways they don’t like, in ways that seem truly awful at the time.” Preacher reached out into the darkness and pulled a straight chair closer to him. On it were his wallet, a small automatic, an extra magazine, and a barber’s razor.

“Sir, what are you planning to do?” she said.

“You understood what I said.” He smiled. His statement was not a question but a compliment.

“Liam wanted to party. He had the check. I went with him.” Her breath was tangling in her chest, the room starting to go out of focus. “I have a mother in Amarillo. My son is buried in the Baptist cemetery there. I was gonna call her today. She’s hard of hearing, but if I shout, she knows it’s me. She’s seventy-nine and cain’t see real good, either. We still talk to each other. She doesn’t know what I do for a living.”

Preacher was holding something in his hand, but she couldn’t bring herself to look at it. She went on, “If you let me walk out the door, you’ll never see me again. I’ll never tell anyone what we talked about. I’ll never see Liam again, either.”

“I know you won’t,” he said in an almost kindly fashion.

“Please, sir, don’t.”

“Come closer.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You need to, Mona. We don’t choose the moment of our births or the hour of our deaths. There are few junctures in life when we actually make decisions that mean anything. The real challenge is in accepting our fate.”

“Please,” she said. “Please, please, please.”

“Get on your knees if you want. It’s all right. But don’t beg. No matter what else you do in this world, don’t beg.”

“Not in the face, sir. Please.”

She was on her knees, her eyes welling with tears. She felt his hand grasp hers and lift her arm into the air, turning up the paleness of her wrist and the green veins in it. The static-filled storm on the television screen seemed to invade her head and blind her eyes and pierce her eardrums. Her fingernails bit into her palm. She had heard stories of people who did it in a warm bathtub and supposedly felt no pain and just went to sleep as the water turned red around them. She wondered if it would be like that. Then she felt his thumb dig into her palm and peel back her fingers.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“You go into the brightness of the sun. You go inside its whiteness and let it consume you, and when you come out on the other side, you’ve become pure spirit and you never have to be afraid again.”

She tried to pull her hand from his, but he held on to it.

“Did you hear me?” he said.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

He placed five hundred-dollar bills across her palm and folded her fingers on them. “The Greyhound for Los Angeles leaves in the morning. In no time you’ll be in Albuquerque, and you’ll see what I mean. You’ll go west into the sun across a beautiful countryside, a place that’s just like the world was on the day Yahweh created light. The person you were when you walked into this room won’t exist anymore.”

When she got to the bottom of the stairs, she lost a shoe. But she did not stop to pick it up.

DURING THE RIDE to the car-title loan office in San Antonio, Hackberry did not speak again of Pam’s attack on the ICE agent Isaac Clawson. They were in his pickup truck, and the undulating countryside was speeding by rapidly, the chalklike hills layered with sedimentary rock where the highway cut through them, the sun a dust-veiled orange wafer by late afternoon.

Finally, she said, “You don’t want to know why I hit Clawson?”

You attacked him with a blackjack because you’re full of rage, he thought. But that was not what he said. “As long as it doesn’t happen again, it’s not my concern.”

“My father started having psychotic episodes when I was about eight or nine and we were living up in the Panhandle,” she said. “He’d look out on a field of green wheat and see men in black pajamas and conical straw hats coming through elephant grass. He went into a treatment program at the naval hospital in Houston, and my mother stayed there to visit him. She put me in the care of a family friend, a policeman everybody trusted.”

“Sure you want to talk about this?” he said, steering around a silver-plated gas tanker, his yellow-tinted aviator shades hiding the expression in his eyes.

“That bastard raped me. I told a teacher at school. I told a minister. They lectured me. They said the cop was a fine man and I shouldn’t make up stories about him. They said my father was mentally ill and I was imagining things because of my father’s illness.”

“Where’s this guy today?”

“I’ve tried to find him, but I think he died.”

“I used to dream about a Chinese guard named Sergeant Kwong. The day I informed on two fellow prisoners, I discovered I was the eighth man to do so. My fingernails were yellow talons, and my beard was matted with the fish heads I licked out of my food bowl. My clothes and boots were caked with my own feces. I used to think that Kwong and his commanding officer, a man by the name of Ding, had not only broken me physically but had stolen my soul. But I realized that in truth, they’d probably lost their own soul, if they ever had one, and at a certain point I had no control over what I did or what they did to me.”

“You don’t dream about it anymore?”

He looked through the windshield at the dust and smoke from wildfires, and the way the hills went out of focus inside the heat waves bouncing off them, and for just a second he thought he heard bugles echoing out of a valley that had no name.

“No, I don’t dream very much anymore,” he said.

She looked out the side window and watched the countryside go by.

THE LOAN OFFICE was located on a corner where three streets that had once been cow trails intersected and formed a kind of financial center for people who possessed little of value to others, except perhaps their desperation.

Next to the loan office was a bail bonds office. Next to the bail bonds office was a pawnshop. Down the street was a saloon with a railed and mirrored bar, a kitchen that served food, and a clientele to whom the pawnshop, the bondsman, and the car-title loan office were as indispensable as the air they breathed. Few of them cared, or for that matter even knew, that John Wesley Hardin and Wild Bill Longley had been regulars at the saloon.

Hackberry parked in the alley behind the loan office and entered through the side door, removing his hat, waiting until the clerk was free before he went to the counter. Hispanic and Anglo working people were sitting at school desks filling out forms; a woman in glasses oversaw them as she might retarded people. Hackberry opened his badge holder on the counter and placed the photo of Liam Eriksson beside it. “Know this fellow?” he said to the clerk.

“Yes, sir, the FBI was in here about him. I’m the one called up the cops on him,” the clerk said. “He brought in a stolen check.”

“There was a woman with him?”

“Yes, sir, but I wasn’t paying her that much mind. He’s the one had the check.”

“You don’t know who the woman was?”

“No, sir,” the clerk replied. He had neat black hair and a mustache and a deep tan and wore gray slacks and a blue dress shirt and a striped tie.

“You work here long?”

“Yes, sir, almost five years.”

“Get a lot of United States Treasury checks in here?”

“Some.”

“But not many,” Hackberry said.

“No, sir, not a lot.”

“Never saw the woman before?”

“Not that I recall. I mean, I’m pretty certain on that.”

“Pretty certain you don’t know her or pretty certain you don’t recall?”

“A mess of folks come in.”

“This fellow Eriksson and the lady were drunk?”

The clerk looked blankly at Hackberry.

“Eriksson is the real name of the man who was impersonating Pete Flores. He and the woman were drunk?”

“Pretty marinated,” the clerk said, starting to smile for the first time.

“For ID, Eriksson had a library card?”

“Yes, sir, that was the extent of it.”

“Why’d you take the check in back?”

“To run it by my manager.”

“After five years here, you had to consult with your manager? You didn’t know the check was stolen, one brought in by a drunk with a library card? You had to ask your manager? That’s what you’re telling me?”

“It’s like I said.”

“There’s no reason Eriksson would have a history with a business like yours. That means the woman probably brought him here. I also think she’s probably a hooker and a shill and brings her customers here with regularity. I think you’re lying through your teeth, bub.”

“Maybe I’ve seen her once or twice,” the clerk said, his eyes shifting off Hackberry’s face.

“What’s her name?”

“She goes by ‘Mona,’ I think.”

Hackberry pulled at his earlobe. “Where does Mona live?”

“Probably any place a guy has a bottle and two glasses and a few bucks. I don’t know where she lives. She’s not a bad person. Why don’t you give her a break?”

“Tell that to the guy Liam Eriksson tortured to death,” Hackberry said.

The clerk threw up his hands. “Am I in the shitter?”

“Could be,” Hackberry said. “I’ll be giving it some thought.”

HACKBERRY AND PAM began their search for the woman named Mona in a backward pattern, starting up the street through a series of low-bottom bars where no one seemed to possess any memory for either faces or names. Then they reversed direction and went block by block through a district of secondhand stores, and missions that sheltered the homeless, and bars with darkened interiors, where, like prisons, time was not measured in terms of the external world and the patrons did not have to make comparisons.

Hackberry didn’t know if the cause was the smell of the alcohol or the dissolute and wan expression on the faces of the twenty-four-hour drinkers at the bar when he opened the front door of a saloon, but he soon found himself revisiting his long courtship with Jack Daniel’s, like a compulsive man picking up pieces of glass with his fingertips.

Actually, “courtship” wasn’t the appropriate word. Hackberry’s experience with charcoal-filtered whiskey had been a love affair as intense as any sexual relationship he’d ever had. He’d dreamed about it, awakened with a thirst for it in the morning, and turned the first drink of the day into a religious ritual, bruising a sprig of mint inside the glass, staining the shaved ice with three fingers of Jack, adding a half teaspoon of sugar, then setting the glass in the freezer for twenty minutes while he pretended that whiskey had no control over his life. The first sip made him close his eyes with a sense of both release and visceral serenity that he could associate only with the rush and sense of peace that a morphine drip had purchased for him in a naval hospital.

“Not much luck, huh, kemosabe?” Pam said as they entered a saloon that was defined by an old checkerboard dance floor and a long railed bar with a big yellowed mahogany-framed mirror behind it.

“What’d you call me?” Hackberry asked.

“It’s just a joke. Remember the Lone Ranger and his sidekick, Tonto? Tonto was always calling the Lone Ranger ‘kemosabe.’”

“That’s what Rie, my second wife, used to call me.”

“Oh,” Pam replied, clearly not knowing what else to say.

Hackberry opened his badge holder and placed the photo of Liam Eriksson on the bar for the bartender to look at. “Ever see this guy in here?” he said.

The bartender wore a short-sleeve tropical print shirt. His big forearms were wrapped with a soft pad of hair, and just above his wrist was a green and red tattoo of the Marine Corps globe and anchor. “No, cain’t say I’ve ever seen him.”

“Know a gal by the name of Mona, maybe a working girl?”

“What’s she look like?”

“Middle-aged, reddish hair, five feet three or four.”

The bartender propped his arms on the bar and stared at the painted-over front window. He shook his head. “Cain’t say as I remember anyone specific like that.”

“I noticed your tattoo,” Hackberry said.

“You were in the Corps?”

“I was a navy corpsman attached to the First Marine Division.”

“In Korea?”

“Yes, sir, I was.”

“You made the Chosin or the Punch Bowl?”

“I was at the Chosin Reservoir the third week of November, 1950.”

The bartender raised his eyebrows, then looked at the painted-over window again. “What’s the beef on this gal Mona?”

“No beef at all. We just need some information.”

“There’s a woman who lives at the Brazos Hotel about five blocks toward downtown. She’s a hooker, but more of a juicer than a hooker. Her dance card is pretty used up. Maybe she’s your gal. Y’all want a drink? It’s on me.”

“How about carbonated water on ice?” Pam said.

“Make that two,” Hackberry said.

Neither Hackberry nor Pam noticed a solitary man sitting at a back table, deep in the gloom behind the pool table. The man was holding up a newspaper, appearing to study it in the poor light that filtered through an alleyway window. His crutches were propped on a chair, out of sight. He did not lower his newspaper until Hackberry and Pam had left the saloon.

THE BRAZOS HOTEL was made of red sandstone, built in the 1880s, and seemed to rise like a forgotten reminder of lost Victorian elegance in the midst of twenty-first-century urban decay. The lobby contained potted palms, a threadbare carpet, furniture from a secondhand store, a telephone switchboard with disconnected terminals jacked into the holes, and an ancient registration desk backdropped by pigeonholes with room keys and mail in them.

A short-necked, heavyset Mexican woman was behind the desk, a big smile on her face when she talked. Hackberry showed her the photo of Liam Eriksson.

“Yeah, I seen him. Not for a few days, but I seen him here a couple of times, sitting in the lobby or going up the stairs. The elevator don’t always work, so he’d take the stairs.”

“Did he rent a room here?” Hackberry asked.

“No, he was here to see his girlfriend.”

“Mona?” Hackberry said.

“That’s right, Mona Drexel. You know her?”

“I’ve been looking for her. Is she in now?”

“You a sheriff, huh? How come you don’t have a gun?”

“I don’t want to scare people. Which room is Ms. Drexel in?”

“Her room is one-twenty-nine. But I haven’t seen her in a couple of days. See, the key is in her box. She always leaves her key when she goes out, ’cause sometimes maybe she drinks a little too much and loses it.”

“Could I have the key, please?”

“Are you supposed to do that, go in somebody’s room when they ain’t there?”

“If you give us permission, it’s okay,” Hackberry said.

“You sure?”

“She could be sick in there and need help.”

“I’ll open it for you,” the Mexican woman said.

The three of them took the elevator upstairs. When the Mexican woman inserted the key in the door and started to turn it, Hackberry put his hand on hers. “We’ll take it from here,” he said, his voice almost a whisper.

Before the woman could respond, Pam fitted her hands on the woman’s shoulders and moved her away from the door. “It’s okay,” she said, slipping a revolver from under her shirt. “We appreciate what you’ve done. Just stay back.”

Hackberry turned the key and pushed the door open, staying slightly behind the jamb.

The room had been vacated, the closet cleaned out, the drawers in the dresser hanging open and empty. Pam stood in the middle of the room and bit on a thumbnail. She put her revolver back inside the clip-on holster on her belt and pulled her shirt over the handles. “What a waste of time,” she said.

Hackberry went into the bathroom and came back out. In the shadows between a small writing table and the bed, he saw a wastebasket crammed full of newspaper and fast-food wrappers and soiled paper towels. He picked up the can and dumped it on the bedspread. Used Q-tips and balls of hair and dust and wads of Kleenex fell out on the bedspread with the other trash. After Hackberry sorted it all out, he washed his hands in the bathroom. When he came out, Pam was standing over the writing desk, studying the cover of a Time magazine she had positioned under the desk lamp.

“This was stuck under the pillow. Take a look,” she said.

The magazine was two months old, and on the mailing label was the name and address of a beauty parlor. At least a half-dozen phone numbers were inked on the cover. Pam tapped her finger on a notation at the bottom of the cover, one that someone had circled twice for emphasis. “‘PJC, Traveler’s Rest two-oh-nine,’” she read aloud.

“Preacher Jack Collins,” Hackberry said.

“The one and only. Maybe we’ve got the sonofabitch,” she said.

She dialed information and asked for both the phone number and the street address of a Traveler’s Rest motel. She wrote both down in her notebook and hung up. “It’s not more than two miles away,” she said.

“Good work, Pam. Let’s go,” he said.

“What about Clawson?”

“What about him?”

“We’re supposed to coordinate, right?”

Hackberry didn’t reply.

“Right, Hack?” she said.

“I’m not totally confident about Clawson.”

“After you get all over my case about this guy, you suddenly have reservations?”

“One of his colleagues told me Clawson works alone. I took that to mean he operates under a black flag. We don’t do business that way.”

“The guy could have ruined my career and sent me to jail on top of it. If you’re going to stiff him now, I won’t be party to it.”

Hackberry opened his cell phone and punched in Clawson’s number. “It’s Sheriff Holland,” he said. “We think we’ve got Jack Collins located. We just got lucky. A bartender knew the woman Eriksson was with at the car-title place. We’re at her hotel now. It looks like she’s blown town.” Hackberry gave Clawson the room number and the address of the motel where he thought Preacher Jack Collins might be staying.

“You’re fairly certain he’s there?” Clawson said.

“No, not at all. We found a notation on a magazine cover. There’s no telling how long ago it was written there.”

“I’m on the River Walk,” Clawson said. “I thought I had a lead on Eriksson, but it didn’t work out. I’ll need to arrange backup. Don’t do anything till I get back to you.”

Hackberry closed the cell phone and looked at Pam.

“What?” she said.

“We’re not supposed to do anything until he calls us back.” He stared at her, his eyes not quite focused.

“Finish your thought,” she said.

“Remind me not to take your advice anymore.”

“Anything else?”

“Screw Clawson. We bust Jack Collins,” he said.

ISAAC CLAWSON PARKED his car a half block from the Traveler’s Rest motel, put on a rain hat and coat, covering the butt of his holstered semiautomatic, and walked the rest of the way. It was almost dusk, and the wind was blowing in the streets, scouring dust into the sky. He heard the rumble of thunder just as a solitary raindrop struck his face. The decrease in barometric pressure and the sudden cooling of the day and the raindrop that he wiped on his hand and looked at seemed so unusual and unexpected after a week of triple-digit heat that he wondered if somehow the change in weather signaled a change in his life.

But that was a foolish way to think, he told himself. The great change in his life had come irrevocably in the night when two sheriff’s deputies had appeared at the door of his suburban home, removing their hats, and tried to tell him in euphemistic language that a young woman thought to be his daughter had been left locked with her fiancé inside the trunk of a burning automobile. From that moment on, Isaac knew the events of his future life might be modifiers of his mood or his worldview or the degree of anger he woke with in the false dawn, but nothing would ever give him back the happiness he had once taken for granted.

In fact, if there was any release from that night back in Tulsa, it came to him only when he canceled the ticket of someone he could associate in his mind with the two degenerates who had murdered his daughter.

He looked at his watch. It was 7:19, and the street lamps had come on in the motel parking lot. A rain shower was sweeping across the city, the clouds pierced with columns of sunlight, the air smelling of wet flowers and trees and the odor that rain makes when it touches warm concrete in summer.

He glanced up at the lavender hue of the heavens and opened his mouth and felt a raindrop hit his tongue. What a foolish thing to do, like a kid discovering spring, he thought, taking himself to task again.

The motel clerk was a rail of a man, dressed like a cowboy, in a black shirt with roses sewn on it and gray trousers with stripes, the cuffs tucked inside Mexican stovepipes stenciled with red and green flower petals. He wore a flesh-colored Band-Aid at the corner of one eye.

Clawson started to reach for his ID and instead rested his hand on the counter. “Got a nonsmoking room for two?” he asked.

“Need a king or a pair of queens?”

“My wife and I would like two-oh-nine if it’s available. We stayed there the night our son graduated from college.”

The adhesive on the clerk’s Band-Aid was loose, and he pressed it back tight against the skin with the back of his wrist. He looked at his computer screen. “That one is occupied. I could put you in two-oh-six.”

“Let me ask my wife. We’re kind of sentimental about our boy’s graduation.”

“I know what you mean,” the clerk said.

“You hurt your eye?”

“Yeah, put a stick in it. Not too smart, I guess.”

After Isaac Clawson went back outside, the clerk looked in the mirror. The Band-Aid on his face had come almost completely loose, exposing a pair of tattooed blue teardrops at the corner of his eye. He flattened the Band-Aid into place once more and picked up the telephone, punching in only three digits.

Clawson picked up a free shopper’s guide from a newspaper box and held it over his head as he walked into the motel parking lot, as though going to his automobile to confer with his wife. Then he cut around the far side of the motel and entered an outdoor breezeway in the center of the building and mounted the stairs. The clouds were purple in the west, the sun like a yellow rose buried inside them, the sky streaked with rain. In weather like this, his father used to say the devil was beating his wife. Why was Isaac having thoughts like these now, about his boyhood, about his family? Why did a great change in his life seem to be at hand?

THERE HAD BEEN an eight-vehicle pileup by an intersection of I-35 and I-10, a chemical tanker jackknifing and sloshing its load across six lanes of traffic. Hackberry had clamped his magnetized portable flasher on the roof of his truck cab and was trying to thread his way along the road’s shoulder to an exit by a shopping center. He handed his cell phone to Pam. “Try Clawson again,” he said.

She got Clawson’s voice mail. She closed the cell phone but kept it in her lap. “Want to call the locals for backup?” she asked.

“For Clawson?”

She thought about it. “No, I guess he wouldn’t appreciate that too much.”

“Hang on,” Hackberry said.

He swung across the swale, bouncing hard through the bottom, spinning grass and dirt off the rear tires as he powered up the far side. He went the wrong way on the road shoulder, then cut across another swale onto an entrance to I-10 that was free of congestion, the truck slamming down on the springs. Pam kept one hand fastened on the dashboard.

“You all right?” Hackberry said.

“What do you think Clawson plans to do if he gets to Collins before we do?” she asked.

“Maybe he already has a team backing him up. See if you can get hold of Ethan Riser. His number is in my contacts.”

“Who?”

“The FBI agent.”

Pam tried Riser’s number, but the call went directly into voice mail. She left a message.

“Sorry for lecturing you about Clawson. I didn’t think he’d try to use us,” Pam said.

“Reach behind the seat and get my pistol, will you?”

It and its holster and its belt with loops for cartridges were wrapped inside a brown paper bag. Pam slipped the bag free of the gun and the belt that was wound around the holster and set them on the carpet by the console. The pistol was a customized remake of a frontier double-action.45 revolver. It was charcoal blue with white handles and a brass trigger guard and a seven-and-a-half-inch barrel. Its balance was perfect, its accuracy and lethality at forty yards not up for debate.

“You’ve never fired it on the job, have you?” she said.

“Who told you that?”

“No one.”

He looked at her.

“I just knew,” she said.

They were on an elevated expressway, roaring past a neighborhood of warehouses and alleyways with clumps of banana trees in them and houses with dirt yards. Against a rainy, sunlit, mauve-colored sky that made Hackberry think of the Orient, he could see a three-story building with a neon sign on the roof that read Traveler’s Rest.

WHEN ISAAC CLAWSON reached the second floor, he realized the numbers on the room doors were going to be a challenge. The numbering was not sequential; some of the rooms were set in an alcove, inside the breezeway, and some of the rooms did not have any numbers at all. Down the walkway, a cleaning cart was parked against the handrail. A Hispanic maid sat on a bench by the cart, humped forward in a cleaning smock of some kind, eating a sandwich, a scarf knotted under her chin, the mist from the rain blowing in her face.

The palm fronds by the pool were thrashing in the wind, twisting against the trunks. Clawson passed room 206, the room that had been offered to him by the clerk, and saw that the next room had no number and the one after that was 213 and the one after that was 215. He realized that for whatever reason, odd numbers were on one side of the breezeway and even numbers on the other.

Except for 206.

“Where’s two-oh-nine?” he said to the cleaning person, whose mouth was full of cheese and bread.

“Siento mucho, señor, pero no hablo inglés.”

Then why not learn some inglés if you’re going to live in this country? he said to himself.

He went in the other direction, going past the breezeway into an area of even numbers. At the far end of the building, with his hand pushed back inside his coat, his thumb hooked on the holstered butt of his semiautomatic, he paused and looked out over the city. Somewhere out there in the fading light was the Alamo, where he and his wife had taken their daughter when she was nine. He had not tried to explain to her the actuality of the events that had occurred there, the thousands of Mexican soldiers charging the walls on the thirteenth day of the siege, the desperation of the 118 men and boys inside who knew this was their last morning on earth, the screams of the wounded who were bayoneted to death in the chapel. Why should a child be exposed to the cruelty that had characterized much of human history? Hadn’t men like Bowie and Crockett and Travis died so children like his daughter could be safe? At least that was what Clawson had wanted to believe.

How could he have known at the time that his child’s death would be a far worse one than any experienced by the Texans inside the mission? Clawson could feel his eyes watering. He hated himself for his emotions, because his remorse for not having taken better care of his daughter had always paralyzed him and made him, too, the victim of his daughter’s killers, men who had yet to be executed, who ate good food and had medical care and watched television while his daughter and her fiancé lay in a cemetery and he and his wife dwelled daily in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Theologians claimed that anger was a cancer and that hatred was one of the seven deadly sins. They were wrong, Clawson thought. Anger was an elixir that cauterized sorrow and passivity and victimhood from the metabolism; it lit fires in the belly; it provided you with that deadening of the conscience that allowed you to lock down on someone with iron sights and forget he descended from the same tree in a Mesopotamian savannah that you did.

He went back up the walkway to the central part of the building. The cleaning person was still by her cart, looking in the opposite direction. Then he discovered why he had not found room 209. The tin numerals on the door of room 206 had been affixed to the wood with three tiny nails. But the nails at the top and bottom of the numeral 6 had been removed or knocked loose from their holes by the constant slamming of the door. The 6 was actually the numeral 9, turned upside down on the remaining nail.

The curtain was drawn on the window. Clawson tried to see through the corner of the jalousie with no success. Then he realized the door was slightly ajar, perhaps not over a quarter of an inch, the locking mechanism not in place. He put his left hand on the door handle and eased his semiautomatic from the holster. Behind him, he heard the wheels of the cleaning cart begin to move stiffly on the walkway. He pushed open the door, pulling his weapon, keeping it pointed at the floor, his eyes straining into the darkness of the room.

The bed was made, the television set on, the shower drumming in the bathroom. “Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” he said.

But there was no response.

He walked across the carpet, past the television screen, the light flickering on his wrist and hand and the dull black hue of his weapon. The bathroom was coated with steam, the heavy plastic curtain in the shower stall barely containing the water bouncing off its opposite side.

“Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” he repeated. “Turn off the shower and place both your hands against the wall.”

Again there was no response.

He gripped the edge of the curtain and ripped it back on the rod. The shower mist welled into his face.

“You shouldn’t go in a man’s room without a warrant,” a voice said behind him. “No, no, don’t move. You don’t want to look at me, hoss.”

Clawson stood frozen, his weapon held out by his side, the mist from the shower dampening his clothes, the back of his neck burning. But in the instant before he had been warned not to turn around, he had seen what appeared to be a hooded shape against the blowing rain, a nickel-plated pistol barrel in the figure’s left hand.

“Drop your piece in the commode,” the voice said.

“The cowboy at the desk dimed me?”

“You dimed yourself when you came here without backup. You’re guilty of the sins of pride and arrogance, my friend. But they don’t have to be your undoing. That means don’t listen to the kind of thoughts you’re having right now. This doesn’t have to end like you think.”

The grips of the semiautomatic were damp in Clawson’s grasp. Moisture had beaded on his face and was running into his eyes and collar. He could hear a sound in his head that was like the roaring of the sea, like a whoosh of flame from the gas tank of a burning automobile.

BY THE TIME Hackberry turned in to the motel parking lot, the sun had disappeared completely and the thunder had grown in volume, crackling across the sky like a tin roof being peeled joist by joist off a barn.

“I can’t believe this. An honest-to-God rain,” Pam said.

“Try Clawson again,” Hackberry said.

“Waste of time. I think he’s gotten himself into a pile of shit.”

He gave her a look.

“You got it,” she said.

He pulled in front of the motel office while she made the call. He could see a man dressed like a cowboy behind the front desk.

“No answer,” Pam said.

“Well, let’s see what life is like at Traveler’s Rest,” Hackberry said. He got out of the truck and buckled on his gun belt, the open door shielding him from view. Through the motel’s front window, he saw the clerk answer the phone and then go into the back. An electronic bell rang when he and Pam entered the office.

“Be right with you,” a voice in back said.

By leaning sideways, Hackberry could see the clerk standing in front of a mirror. He had just removed a Band-Aid from the corner of one eye. He rolled it up between his fingers and plunked it into a wastebasket, then peeled the paper off a fresh one and glued it against his skin, smoothing the adhesive down firmly with his thumb. He ran a comb through his hair, touched at his nostrils with one knuckle, and came back to the front desk with a smile on his face. His eyes dropped to the revolver on Hackberry’s hip. “Help you?” he said.

Hackberry opened his badge holder. “Has a federal agent by the name of Isaac Clawson been here?”

“Today?”

“In the last hour.”

“Federal agent? No, sir, not to my knowledge.”

“Can you tell me who’s staying in room two-oh-nine?”

The clerk bent to his computer, his expression earnest. “Looks like that’s a gentleman who paid cash. For five days, in advance. I’ll have to look up his registration card.”

“Can you describe what he looks like?”

“I don’t think it was me who checked him in. I don’t place him offhand.” The clerk touched at his nose. His eyes drifted off Hackberry’s onto the parking lot and a palm tree beating in the wind. “Y’all must have brought that weather with you. We can use it,” he said.

“Know a hooker by the name of Mona Drexel?”

“No, sir, we don’t allow hookers in here.”

“Did you see a man who has a shaved head and octagonal-shaped glasses and looks like a weight lifter?”

“Today? I don’t recollect anybody like that.”

“You know who Preacher Jack Collins is?”

“I know some preachers, but not one by that name.”

“I hear the A.B. is for life. Is that true?”

“Sir?”

“Those blue teardrops by your eye, the ones under your Band-Aid.”

“Yes, sir, I had some trouble when I was younger.”

“But the Aryan Brotherhood is for life, correct?”

“No, sir, not for me, it isn’t. I put all that behind me.”

“You were in Huntsville?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Give me the key to two-oh-nine. Don’t pick up that phone while we’re here. If it rings, let it ring off the wall. If you’ve lied to me, you’ll wish you were in lockdown back at the Walls.”

The clerk had to sit down when Hackberry and Pam went out of the office.

ISAAC CLAWSON HAD always subscribed to the belief that a person’s life was governed by no more than two or three choices that usually seemed of little consequence at the time one made them. He had also wondered how many thoughts a man could experience in under a second, at least if his adrenaline level didn’t blow his circuits first.

But was this moment in his life really one that presented him a viable choice? What was the governing principle for any lawman caught in his situation with an armed adversary? That one was easy. You never surrendered your weapon. You hung tough, you kept your enemy talking, you brassed it out, you created an electric storm of “spray-and-pray fire” no sane person would choose to walk into. If all that failed, you ate the bullet.

What were Shakespeare’s words? “By my troth, I care not; we owe God a death, and let it go which way it will, he who dies this year is quit for the next.” Yes, that was it. By accepting your mortality, you walked right through its shadow into the light on the far side.

But the lesson of Shakespeare and the principles Isaac Clawson had learned at Quantico and as many as five other training programs weren’t entirely applicable here. If he was executed in room 209, his killer would walk free and kill again and again. In fact, there would probably be no prosecutable evidence to link Clawson’s death to Preacher Jack Collins. Clawson had been acting alone, confirming his colleagues’ perception that he was a driven man teetering on the edges of nervous collapse. Maybe some of his colleagues and superiors might even be glad Jack Collins had rid them of an agent no one felt at ease with.

If Isaac had just one more season to run, he could find Jack Collins and the others who had murdered the Thai women and girls and take them off the board one by one, each of them in some way payback for the death of his daughter. Even his worst detractors conceded that no one at ICE was more dedicated and successful in hunting down the traffickers in misery who were metastasizing on America’s southern border.

“Last chance, hoss,” the voice said behind him.

“You think you can pop a federal agent and just blow town? They’ll have to pick you up with tweezers.”

“Looks to me like they’ve done a piss-poor job of it so far.”

“You’re the one they call Preacher?”

“You violated the Fourth Amendment. A man’s rental lodging is the same as his home. Y’all don’t abide by your own Constitution. That’s why you’re not deserving of respect. I say y’all are hypocrites, sir. I say a pox on your house.”

Isaac Clawson spun in a half-circle, swinging his semiautomatic at arm’s length, the rain blowing through the door into his face. The figure he saw standing against the wall to one side of the door seemed out of context, unrelated to the events transpiring around him. It was the cleaning woman, or what he had thought was a woman, in a head scarf and a smock, a two-barrel nickel-plated derringer aimed with her left hand, her right hand supporting herself heavily on a chair back as though she were in pain.

Isaac was sure he squeezed off a round. He must have. His finger had tightened inside the trigger guard. He had not flinched; his eyes were wide open. He should have heard the report and felt the solid kick against the heel of his hand and seen the barrel jump with the recoil, the ejected casing tinkling on the floor.

Instead, he had seen a pinpoint of brightness leap from the muzzle of the derringer. The bright circle of light made him think of fire leaking through a metal surface that had been superheated beyond its tolerance, its stress level giving way to the roaring furnace it tried to contain.

He felt a finger touch his brow, and he saw hands reaching toward him from a cool fire that somehow had been rendered harmless, as though the flames had been robbed of their heat and could have no more effect on living tissue than waving shadows could, and he knew that this time he had done something right, that he could pull his daughter and her fiancé from the burning automobile and undo the cruelty and suffering the world had visited upon them.

But as he reached for his daughter’s hands, he realized his life would always be defined by inadequacy and failure. It was his daughter’s hands that grasped his, not the other way around, extending out of a white radiance, slipping up higher on his wrists, seizing them with superhuman strength, pulling him into a place where resistance and rage and even the desire to make choices seemed to have dissolved into nothingness a million years ago.

Isaac’s eyes were open wide when he struck the floor. Preacher Jack Collins looked at him briefly, fitted his hands on the cleaning cart, and worked his way down the walkway to the stairs at the far end of the building.