Rain Gods

11

NO MATTER HOW many pain pills Artie Rooney ate, the throbbing in his hand wouldn’t quit. Nor could he rid himself of the well of fear that was eating its way through the bottom of his stomach. Nor could he get the name of Jack Collins out of his head. It hovered behind his eyes; he woke with it in the morning; it was in his food; it was in his coupling with his whores.

And now it was in his conversation with Hugo Cistranos, here, inside his elegant beachfront office, his helplessness as palpable as the smell of fear that rose from his armpits. He couldn’t believe that only weeks ago, Jack Collins had been a name without a face, the mention of which would have caused him to yawn.

“Jack wants a half million from you?” Hugo said, slumped comfortably in a white leather chair, dressed in golf slacks and a print shirt and Roman sandals, his red-streaked hair glistening with gel.

“He blames me for the loss of his soul,” Artie said.

“Jack doesn’t have one. How can he blame you for losing it?”

“Because he’s crazy?”

Hugo studied the backs of his hands. “You just sat there and let Jack cut off your finger? That’s hard to believe, Artie.”

“He was going to cut my throat. He held the razor right by my eye.”

Hugo’s expression became philosophical. “Yeah, I guess Jack’s capable of that. Must have been terrible. How’d you explain it at the hospital?”

Artie got up from his desk, cradling his injured hand. A hurricane was building in intensity by the hour, three hundred miles southeast of Galveston. Through the enormous glass wall that fronted the beach, he could see a band of greenish cobalt along the southern horizon, and the slick leathery backs of stingrays in the swells and waves threading into yellow froth inside the wind. He wanted to put a bullet in Hugo Cistranos.

“You didn’t tell anybody what happened, huh?” Hugo said. “That was probably the right choice. Must be hard accepting all this-I mean, a religious creep like that walking into your office and turning your desk into a chopping block. Gives me the willies thinking about it.”

“Collins is onto us,” Artie said.

“Who’s this ‘us’ you’re talking about?”

“You set up the scam, Hugo. It was your idea to kidnap the Russian’s whores. You got Nick Dolan to think he was boosting the girls from me, and you got him to believe the mow-down was on him, too. From the beginning, this whole nightmare has had your name all over it.”

But Hugo was already waving a finger back and forth. “Oh, no, you don’t. You knew those girls’ stomachs were loaded with China white, and you thought you’d rip off the Russian for both his cooze and his skag at the same time. You got greedy, Artie. I’m not taking your weight on this, my friend.”

“I didn’t tell you to kill them.”

“When did you ever tell me not to kill somebody? Remember that sex freak who creeped your house in Metairie? Why is it you never asked about him, Artie? The Times-Picayune did a big spread on the body parts that floated up into a picnic ground. You never made the connection?”

Artie Rooney’s face had an expression on it like that of a blowfish with a hook in its mouth. Hugo took a stick of peppermint from the big clear plastic jar on Artie’s desk. He gazed reflectively at the beach and the waves exploding on the tip of a jetty. “It’s too bad about the whores. But they could have stayed in Thailand if they wanted. There’s a gold mine in sex tours for Japanese businessmen. I’m sorry about what happened out there. But there wasn’t any choice in the matter. The balloons were busting in their stomachs, and they were screaming about going to a hospital. ‘Hey, guys, pump out my nine whores loaded with fifteen balloons each of uncut white heroin. While you’re at it, let them tell you about the coyote we capped and buried on federal land.’”

“Oh, funny man.”

“Artie, we’re all sacks of fertilizer. You, me, Preacher Jack, your secretary, the families out there on the beach. You think if it was us buried by that dozer, the Asian girls would be burning incense in a Buddhist temple? They’d be shopping for makeup at Walmart.”

Artie stared wanly at the Gulf and at the hurricane warning flags snapping straight out from their lanyards. Then it struck him: Hugo was talking too much, too cleverly, filling the air with words at Artie’s expense in order to control the conversation. “You’re scared of him,” he said.

“I’ve worked with Preacher before. I respect his boundaries, I respect his talents.”

“His boundaries? You been watching Dr. Phil or something? You just called Collins a religious creep. I think you’re starting to rattle. I think you’ve had some kind of confrontation with him.”

Hugo crossed his legs and untwisted the cellophane from the stick of peppermint, sucking in his cheeks thoughtfully. “Good try, no cigar. You ought to spend some time at the library, Artie, bone up on some history. Foot soldiers don’t go to the wall. Officers do. Foot soldiers are always given the chance to adjust. Your bandage is leaking.”

“What?”

“You’re spotting your shirt. You ought to go to the hospital. What’d you do with the finger? If you put it on ice, maybe they can sew it back on.”

Artie’s desk phone buzzed. He picked up the receiver with his good hand. “I told you not to disturb me,” he said.

“A Mr. Nick Dolan and his wife are here to see you.”

“What are they doing here?”

The secretary didn’t answer.

“Get rid of them. Tell them I’m out of town,” Artie said.

“I don’t think they’re going away, Mr. Rooney,” the secretary whispered.

Artie paused, his eyes locked on Hugo’s. “Tell them to wait a minute,” he said. He replaced the receiver in the cradle. “Go in my conference room and stay there.”

“What for?” Hugo said.

“You ever meet Esther Dolan?”

“What about her?”

“You’ve energized Batgirl, you idiot.”

WHEN NICK AND Esther entered the room, Artie Rooney was sitting behind his desk in a powder-blue suit and a blue-and-gold striped tie and a silk shirt that was as bright as tin, his swivel chair tilted back, his hands hanging loosely over the arms of the chair, a man in charge and at peace with the world.

“Long time, Miss Esther,” Artie said, addressing her in the traditional manner that a gentleman who was a family friend would address a woman in New Orleans.

Esther didn’t reply, her gaze boring into his face.

“We need to straighten out some things,” Nick said.

“I’m always happy to see old friends,” Artie said.

“What happened to your hand?” Nick said.

“An accident with my electric hedge clipper.”

Even while he addressed Nick, Artie’s attention was fixed on Esther, who wore a tight purple dress with green flowers printed on it. “Y’all sit down. I got some shrimp and a pitcher of vodka martinis in the refrigerator. You been doin’ okay, Miss Esther?”

“We’ve tried to contact Hugo Cistranos,” Esther said. “He’s going to hurt a young woman and her boyfriend, an ex-soldier.”

“Hugo? News to me.”

“Cut the crap, Artie,” Nick said.

“You came to Galveston to insult me?” Artie said.

“Nick has told me everything,” Esther said. “About those gangsters working for you and how they almost killed Nick by a farmhouse. He told me about the Oriental girls, too.”

“You sure about what you’re saying here? This has got me all confused.”

“They were killed because you were smuggling them into the United States. They were peasant girls machine-gunned by one of your hired animals,” Esther said.

“I’m part owner of some dating services. Maybe I’m not altogether proud of that. But I have to put food on the table like everybody else. Your husband is not innocent in this, Miss Esther. And don’t be saying I murdered anybody.”

“Nick just signed over all his interests in what you call ‘dating services.’”

Artie looked at Nick. “I’m hearing this right? You sold out in Houston and Dallas?”

“No, I didn’t sell out, I got out,” Nick said.

Artie straightened in his chair and rested his arms on his desk pad. He took a pill from a tiny tin container and put it in his mouth, then swallowed it with a half-glass of water. A look of tension, of pain held carefully in place, seemed to recede back into his face. “I don’t have contact with Hugo anymore. I think maybe he’s in New Orleans. Maybe I’ll be hanging it up here and moving back there myself.”

“You going to stop that killer from hurting those kids or not?” Esther said.

“Don’t be implying what you’re implying, Miss Esther. You try to bring the house down, you’ll find yourself standing in the living room with the roof caving on Nick’s head and maybe yours, too,” Artie said.

“Don’t you talk to her like that,” Nick said.

“Remember that time at the Prytania Theatre when we did a swirlie with your face in the commode?” Artie said.

“How about I mash your hand in your drawer?” Nick said.

“You survived in New Orleans because we allowed you to, Nick. Didoni Giacano once said your mother was probably knocked up by a yeast infection and you were not to be trusted. I told Dee-Dee his perceptions were on target but that you were also gutless and greedy, and for those reasons alone, you’d do whatever he told you, all the way to the graveyard. So in a way, I helped make your career. I think you ought to show a little gratitude.”

“Dee-Dee Gee said that about my family and me?”

Artie gestured at the glass wall behind him. “See that storm building out there?” he said. “Katrina washed out most of the Ninth Ward. I hope this one changes course and hits New Orleans just like Katrina did and finishes the job. I hope you’re there for it, Nick. I hope you and your people are washed off the earth. That’s how I feel.”

Esther leaned forward in her chair, her hands folded in her lap, a realization growing in her face. “You deceived Nick, didn’t you?” she said.

“About what?”

“The smuggling and the murder of the girls. You were using Nick somehow. That’s how you set up the extortion.”

“I got news for you. Your husband is a pimp. The houses you own, the cars you drive, the country club you belong to, they’re all paid for by money he makes off whores. The ones you think are just college bimbos taking off their clothes at the club do lap dances and jerk off guys in the back rooms. You’re a smart woman, Miss Esther. You married Mighty Mouse. Why pretend otherwise?”

She rose from her chair, her hands crimped on her purse. “My husband is a good man,” she said. “I’ll never allow you to hurt him. You threaten my family again, and I’ll make your life awful.”

“Right. Sorry you have to run,” Artie said, taking another pain pill from the tin box.

“You hurt the soldier or his girlfriend, we’re calling the FBI,” Nick said. “I know what you can do to me, Artie. It doesn’t matter. I’m not gonna have the blood of those kids on my conscience.”

“How do you like that, you cheap gangster?” Esther said. “You were talking about doing swirlies on people? Think about yourself in a prison cell full of sexual degenerates. I hope you’re in there a thousand years.”

After they were gone, Artie opened the door to his conference room. Hugo was smoking a cigarette, gazing at the waves crashing on the beach.

“You get an earful?” Artie asked.

“Enough,” Hugo replied. He mashed out his cigarette in an ashtray on the conference table. “How do you want to play it?”

“I got to tell you?”

“I’m lots of things, but omniscient isn’t one of them.”

“Hose everybody who needs to go. That means the soldier and his broad, that means Preacher Jack Collins, that means anybody who can dime us. That means that fat little kike and his wife and, if necessary, his kids. When I say ‘hose,’ I mean slick down to the tile from one end of the building to the other. I’m getting through loud and clear here?”

“No problem, Artie.”

“If you’re working in close?”

Hugo waited.

“Put one in Esther’s mouth,” Artie said. “I want her to know where it came from, too.”

YEARS AGO, IN a Waycross, Georgia, public library, Bobby Lee Motree happened to see a book titled My Grandfather Was the Only Private in the Confederate Army. He was puzzled by the title and, flipping through the pages, tried to figure out what it meant. Then he stopped thinking about the matter altogether, in part because Bobby Lee’s interest in history was confined largely to his claim that he was a descendant of perhaps the greatest military strategist in American history, a claim based on the fact that his first and second names were respectively Robert and Lee, as were those of his father, a petty thief and part-time golf caddie who was killed while sleeping on a train trestle.

Now, during a sunset that seemed somehow to be a statement about his life, he stood by his vehicle, not far from a jagged mountain whose bare slopes were turning darker and darker against the sky. The wind was hot and smelled of creosote and dust and road-patch tar that had dissolved into licorice during the day. In the distance, he saw a trio of buzzards circling high above the hardpan, their outstretched wings stenciled against a yellow sun that reminded him of light trapped behind a dirty window shade. He opened a cell phone and punched in a number.

Then he hesitated and removed his thumb from the send button. Bobby Lee wasn’t feeling well. He could see torn pieces of color floating behind his eyelids, as though his power to think were deteriorating, as though his uncontrolled thoughts had become his greatest enemy.

He reached inside his SUV and drank from a can of warm soda. Was he coming down with something? No such luck. His world was coming apart. He had always admired Preacher for his professionalism and invisibility, and for the way he had become a legend, a one-man Murder, Inc., without ever going inside the system. But Preacher had gone along with Hugo on the mass mow-down of the Asians, and now he’d popped a federal agent. Somebody would have to go down for it. Hugo? That was a laugh. Preacher? Jack would eat a Gatling gun before he’d allow anyone to take him into custody. Who did that leave?

The answer wasn’t one Bobby Lee liked to think about. The rest of the team consisted of him and Liam Eriksson, and Liam was already on Jack’s S-list for stealing the disability check and trying to cash it while he and his hooker girlfriend were drunk. Liam and Bobby Lee were basically working stiffs, making a score here and there, putting away a few bucks for a better life, waiting for the proper time to hang it up. They weren’t religious crazoids like Jack, or guys like Hugo who got off on capping people. For Liam and Bobby Lee, it was just a job. But working stiffs were disposable and replaceable. If anyone disagreed with that, he just needed to check out the audience at an ultimate-fighter match.

Bobby Lee remembered when he did his first hit, at age twenty, out on Alligator Alley between Fort Lauderdale and Naples, a five-thou whack on a Cuban who’d raped the daughter of a Mobbed-up guy from the Jersey Shore. At first Bobby Lee thought it might bother him to pop a guy he had nothing against, but it didn’t. He bought the hit a couple of drinks in Lauderdale, told him he had a fishing camp in the Glades, then showed him this big grassy bay in the moonlight and parked two.22 hollow-points, pow, pow, that fast, behind the guy’s ear, and suddenly the guy was facedown in the water, his arms outstretched, his suit coat puffed with air like he was studying the bottom of the bay, the night air throbbing with bullfrogs.

But what should Bobby Lee do now? Deep-six the brothers-in-arms stuff and blow Dodge on Preacher? That thought didn’t sit well, either. If Bobby Lee was to remain a pro back in Florida, where he planned to re-enroll at Miami-Dade, doing an occasional contract job when he needed money, he had to keep his reputation intact. Also, bailing out on Preacher was a good way to ensure a lifetime of looking over his shoulder.

Bobby Lee opened his cell phone again and hit the redial button.

“Where you been?” Preacher’s voice said.

“All over most of two counties.”

“Think about what you just said. It’s a contradiction in terms.”

“What?”

“What did you find?”

“Nothing. But I got an idea.”

“What do you mean, ‘nothing’?”

“What I said. I couldn’t find a Siesta motel. That’s where the guy Junior Whatever said the girl and the soldier were staying.”

“Call me back on a landline.”

“Jack, the CIA isn’t following us around. They pull stuff out of the air when they’re after the rag heads.” Bobby Lee stopped, his frustration with Preacher building. He wanted to throw the cell phone down on the asphalt and stomp it into junk. “You still pissed at Liam ’cause he tried to cash the soldier’s check?”

“What do you think?”

“I say give Liam a break. The guy’s out there, he’s trying.”

“Out where?”

This time Bobby Lee ignored Preacher’s constant attempts to correct his language and somehow turn it against him. “Look, I’ll call you back later. I’ve got a plan.”

“You’ve been wandering around on the border for two days. That’s a plan?”

“You ever know a junkie who was farther than one day away?”

“What’s your point?”

“There’s no difference between a junkie and a drunk. A rat goes to its hole. The soldier is a juicer and drifts in and out of A.A., at least that’s the word. Hugo says he’s got a pink scar on his face as thick as an earthworm. I’ll find him. I guarantee it. I called the A.A. hotline and got an area schedule. You still there, Jack?”

Had the service simply gone down, or had Preacher hung up? Bobby Lee hit the speed dial, but his call went immediately to voice mail. He closed and opened his eyes, the mountain in front of him like a dark volcanic cone cooling against the evening sun.

THERE WERE FEW twelve-step groups in the area, or at least few that met more often than once a week, and the following day Pete Flores felt he was lucky to hitch a ride to one called the Sundowners that met in a fundamentalist church thirty miles down the road from the motel where he and Vikki were staying. The church house was a white-frame building with a small false bell tower on the apex of the roof and a blue neon cross mounted above the entranceway. In back were a mechanic’s shed and, next to it, a cemetery whose graves were strewn with plastic flowers and jelly glasses green with dried algae. Even with the windows wide open, the air inside the building was stifling, the wood surfaces as warm to the touch as a cookstove. Pete had arrived early at the meeting, and rather than sit in the heat, he went outside and sat on the back steps and looked at the strange chemical-green coloration in the western sky, the sun still as bright as an acetylene torch on the earth’s rim. The sedimentary layers of the mesalike formations were gray and yellow and pink above the dusk gathering on the desert floor. Pete felt as though he were sitting at the bottom of an enormous dried-out riparian bowl, one shaped out of potter’s clay in a prehistoric time, the land giving off an almost feral odor when rain tried to restore it to life.

The man who sat down next to Pete on the step was wearing an immaculate white T-shirt and freshly pressed strap overalls. He smelled of soap and aftershave lotion, and his dark hair was boxed on the back of his neck. His thick half-moon eyebrows were neatly clipped, the cleft in his chin shiny from a fresh shave. There was a bald spot in the center of his head. When he stared southward at the desert, his mouth was a gray slit without expression or character, his eyes dulled over. He pulled a cigarette out of his pack with his lips, then shook another one loose and offered it to Pete.

“Thanks, I never took it up,” Pete said.

“Good choice,” the man said. He lit his cigarette and blew the smoke from the side of his mouth deferentially. “I’m new at this meet. How is it?”

“Don’t know. This is my first time here, too.”

“You got some sobriety in?”

“A few days, that’s about it. I’ve got a twenty-four-hour chip.”

“Twenty-four hours can be a bitch.”

“You work here’bouts?” Pete asked.

“I was hauling pipe between Presidio and Fort Stockton, up to last month, anyway. I got a service-connected disability, but my boss was a pretty hard-nosed character. According to him, time in the Sandbox was for jerks.”

“You were in Iraq?”

“Two tours.”

“My tank got blown up in Baghdad,” Pete said.

The man’s eyes drifted to the long welted scar that ran like a pink raindrop down the side of Pete’s face. “You start drinking when you came home?”

Pete studied the deepening color in the sky, the hills that seemed humped against a fire burning just beyond the earth’s rim. “It runs in my family. I don’t think the war had much to do with it,” he said.

“That’s a stand-up way to look at it.”

“How much sobriety you have?”

“A couple of years, more or less.”

“You have a two-year chip?” Pete said.

“I’m not big on chips. I do the program my own way.”

Pete folded his hands and didn’t reply.

“You got wheels?” the man said.

“I hitched a ride with a guy who smelled like a beer truck. I asked him to come in with me, but he said Jesus’s first miracle was turning water into wine, and his followers weren’t hypocrites about it. I couldn’t quite fit all that together.”

“Want to get some coffee and a piece of pie after the meet? I’m springing,” the man in overalls said.

During the meeting, Pete forgot about his conversation with the man he’d met on the back steps. A woman was talking about going on a dry drunk and experiencing flashbacks that returned her to the inside of a blackout. Her voice, like that of a benighted soul forced to witness light, became threaded with tension as she told the group she might have killed someone with her automobile. The room was quiet when she finished speaking, the people in the pews and folding chairs staring at their feet or into space, their faces wan, each knowing the speaker’s story could have been his or her own.

After the meeting, the man in overalls helped stack chairs and wash out cups and the coffeemaker. He glanced in the direction of the woman who thought she might have committed vehicular homicide. He lowered his voice. “That one is about to talk herself into Huntsville pen,” he said to Pete.

“What you hear and who you see here stays here. That’s the way it’s supposed to work,” Pete said.

“Anybody who believes that has a lot more trust in people than I do. Let’s get something to eat, and I’ll take you home.”

“You don’t know how far I live.”

“Believe me, I got nothing better to do. My girlfriend boosted my truck and took off with a one-legged Bible salesman,” the man in overalls said. He stared across the row of pews at the woman who had spoken of a dry drunk earlier; his forehead creased with furrows. The woman stood at a window, her attention fixed on the darkness outside, her hands resting on the sill as though they weren’t attached to her arms. “Goes to show you, doesn’t it?” he said.

“Show you what?” Pete said.

“That woman over there, the one confessed to killing somebody who might not exist. She looks like she just figured out she’s created a bigger mess than the one she was already in.”

Pete didn’t answer. Ten minutes later he drove to a restaurant with the man in overalls, who said his name was Bill, and ordered a piece of cake and a glass of iced tea.

“You got a girl?” Bill said.

“I like to think I do,” Pete replied.

“She’s in the program, too?”

“No, she’s normal. I never could figure why she got involved with the likes of me.”

“Where y’all living?”

“A low-rent joint up the road.”

Bill seemed to wait for the next words Pete would speak.

“I’ve been thinking about something,” Pete said. “That woman back yonder at the meet?”

“The wet-brain?”

“I wouldn’t call her that.”

Bill picked up the check and studied it, then looked irritably in the direction of the waitress.

“She was willing to confess to something maybe she didn’t do,” Pete continued. “Or if she did do it, she was willing to confess to it and maybe go to prison. For her, it didn’t make any difference. She just wants to be forgiven for whatever she’s done wrong in her life. That takes guts and humility I don’t reckon I have.”

“That broad can’t add,” Bill said, getting up with the check in hand. “I’ll meet you outside. We need to haul freight. I got to get some shut-eye.”

Pete waited in the parking lot, chewing on a plastic soda straw, looking at the stars, Venus winking above a black mountain in the west. What had Bill said earlier about a two-year sobriety chip? He hadn’t bothered to accept it? That one didn’t quite slide down the pipe. That would be like turning down the Medal of Honor because the ceremony conflicted with an evening of color-matching your socks.

“Ready to roll?” Bill said, exiting the café.

Pete removed the soda straw from his mouth and looked at Bill in the glow of a neon beer sign.

“Problem?” Bill said.

“No, let’s boogie,” Pete said.

“You still haven’t told me where you live.”

“At the red light, turn east and keep going till you run out of pavement.”

“I thought you said you lived up the road, not east,” Bill said, trying to smile.

“I guess I’m not that sharp when it comes to the cardinal points of the compass. Actually, our place is so far back in the sticks, we got to bring the sunshine in on a truck,” Pete replied. “That’s a fact.”

Bill was quiet as they drove eastward through hardpan countryside dotted with mesquite and old tires and scrap metal that sparkled like mica under the moon. He put a mint on his tongue and sucked on it and looked sideways at Pete as the SUV hit chuckholes that jarred the frame. “How much farther?”

“Another five or six miles.”

“What the hell do you do out here?”

“I’m shaving and treating fence posts for a fellow.”

“That’s interesting. I didn’t know there was that much wood around here.”

“It’s what I do.”

“How about your girl?”

“She’s got a little Internet business.”

“Selling what? Lizard turds?”

“She does right well with it.”

Bill drove past another mile marker. Set back between two hills was a lighted house with a gasoline truck parked in the yard and a windmill in back. Horses stood motionlessly in a railed pen where the grass was nubbed down to the dirt.

“Excuse me,” Bill said, reaching across Pete.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s my Beretta. You see that jackrabbit go across the road? Hang on.”

Bill pulled onto the shoulder and got out, staring at a dry wash running from a culvert into a tangle of brush that had leaves like thick green buttons. Out in the moonlight, away from the shadows, were cactuses blooming with yellow and red flowers. A nine-millimeter semiauto hung from Bill’s right hand. “Want to take a shot?” he said.

“What for?”

“Sometimes in hot weather, they get worms. But if you gut and skin them right and hang them from wire overnight, so all the heat drains out, they’re safe to eat. Come on, hop out.”

Pete opened the SUV’s door and stepped down on the gravel, the wind warm on his face, a smell like dried animal dung in his nostrils. The highway was empty in both directions. On the other side of the border, he thought he could see electric lights spread across the bottom of a hill.

“Follow me down here,” Bill said. “You can have the first shot. He’s gonna spook out of the brush in just a minute. Jackrabbits always do. They don’t have the smarts to stay put, like a cottontail does. You never hunted rabbits when you were a kid?”

Pete took his soda straw out of his pocket and put it in his mouth. “Not often. Our farm was so poor the rabbits had to carry their own feed when they hopped across it.”

Bill grinned. “Come on, we’ll flush him out. Afraid of rattlers?”

“Never given them much thought.”

“Think I’m gonna rape you?”

“What?”

“Just a bad joke. But your behavior strikes me as a little bit queer.”

“How are you using the word ‘queer’?”

“That’s what I mean. You’re wrapped too tight, trooper. If you ask me, you need to get your pole polished.”

Bill seemed to lose interest in the conversation. He reached down and picked up a rock. He studied the clump of brush with buttonlike leaves at the bottom of the wash and flung the rock into it hard enough to break a branch and make a clattering sound far down the wash. “See him scoot? Told you he was in there,” he said.

“Yeah, you called it.”

Bill turned and faced Pete. His nine-millimeter was pointed downward, along his thigh, the butterfly safety pushed to the fire position. He formed a pocket of air in one cheek, then the other, like a man rinsing his mouth. “Yes, sir, you’re a mite spooky, Pete. A hard man to read, I’d say. I bet you blew up some hajji ass over there, didn’t you?”

Pete tried to remember giving his name to Bill. Maybe he had, if not at the meet, perhaps at the café. Think, think, think, he told himself. He could feel his scalp tightening. “I’d better be getting on home. I’d like to introduce you to my girlfriend.”

“She’s waiting on you, huh?”

“Yeah, she’s a good one about that.”

“Wish I was you. You bet I do,” Bill said. He looked southward into the darkness, his thoughts hidden. Then he released the magazine on his gun and stuck it in his pocket. He cleared the chamber and inserted the ejected round into the top of the magazine and shoved the magazine back into the frame with the heel of his hand. “Think fast,” he said, throwing the gun to Pete.

“Why’d you do that?”

“See if you were paying attention. Scared you, didn’t I?”

“Pert’ near,” Pete replied. “You’re quite a card, Bill.”

“Not when you come to know me,” Bill said. “No, sir, I wouldn’t say I was a card at all. Just stick my piece back in the glove box, will you?”

Five miles farther down the road, the hills flattened and the moon sat on the horizon like a huge, bruised white balloon. Up ahead, Pete could see a passing lane, then a brightly lit convenience store and gas-pump island. “We’re just about two miles or so from the dirt track that goes to our house,” he said. “I can get off up yonder if you want.”

“In for a penny, in for a pound. I’ll take you all the way.”

“I got to be honest about something, Bill.”

“You kill somebody with your car while you were in a blackout?”

“The reason I don’t have a lot of sobriety is I want to drink.”

“You mean now?”

“Now, yesterday, last week, tomorrow, next month. When I catch the bus, the undertaker will probably have to set a case of Bud on my chest to keep me in the coffin.”

“What are you trying to tell me?”

“Like they say, unless you’ve reached your bottom, you’re just jerking on your dork. Pull into the store yonder.”

“Sure that’s what you want to do?”

“Hell, yes, it is. What about you?”

“One or two cold brews wouldn’t hurt. I’m no fanatic. What about your girlfriend?”

“She doesn’t complain. You’ll like her.”

“I bet I will,” Bill said.

He pulled the SUV into the gas island and got out to fill the tank while Pete went inside the convenience store. The air was thick and warm and smelled of burned diesel. Hundreds of moths had clustered on the overhead lights. Pete took two packs of pepperoni sausage from a shelf and two cartons of king-size beers from the cooler. The cans were silver and blue and beaded with moisture and cold inside the cardboard. He set them on the counter and waited while another customer paid for a purchase, clicking his nails on top of one carton, looking around the store as though he had forgotten something. Then he adjusted his belt and made a face and asked the cashier where the men’s room was. The cashier lifted his eyes only long enough to point toward the rear of the store. Pete nodded his thanks and walked between the shelves toward the back exit, out of view from the front window.

Seconds later, he was outside in the dark, running between several eighteen-wheelers parked on a grease-compacted strip of bare earth behind the diesel island. He dropped down into an arroyo and ran deeper into the night, his heart beating, clouds of insects rising into his face, clotting in his mouth and nostrils. The heat lightning flaring in the clouds made him think of the flicker of artillery rounds exploding beyond the horizon, before the reverberations could be felt through the earth.

He crawled through a concrete culvert onto the north side of the two-lane state highway, then got to his feet and began running across a stretch of hill-flanged hardpan traced with serpentine lines of silt and gravel that felt like crustaceans breaking apart under his shoes.

He had created a geographic forty-five-degree angle between his present location and the Fiesta motel, where Vikki waited for him. The distance, by the way the crow flies, was probably around forty-five miles. With luck, if he ran and walked all night, he would be at the motel by sunrise. As he raced across the ground, the lightning threw his shadow ahead of him, like that of a desperate soldier trying to outrun incoming mail.