Rain Gods

21

BOBBY LEE HAD driven through the darkness and into the morning with the sunrise at his back, the flood of warm air and light spreading before him across the plains, lifting mesas and piles of rock out of the shadows that had pooled on the hardpan, none of it offering any balm to his soul.

He had put his money on Preacher because Preacher was smart and Artie Rooney wasn’t. He was double-crossing Hugo because Hugo was a viper who’d park one behind your ear the first time the wind vane swung in the opposite direction. Where did that leave him? He had teamed up with a guy who was smart and had large amounts of money in offshore accounts and had probably read more books than most college professors. But Preacher was not necessarily smart in the way a survivor was smart. In fact, Bobby Lee was not sure Preacher planned to be a survivor. Bobby Lee wasn’t sure he liked the prospect of becoming the copilot of a guy who had kamikaze ambitions.

He drove across a cattle guard onto Preacher’s property and stared disbelievingly at the stucco house that the bikers had destroyed and Preacher had paid a dozer operator to blade into a two-story pile of scorched debris. Preacher was now living in a polyethylene tent at the foot of the mountain behind the concrete slab the dozer had scraped clean. His woodstove sat outside it, and next to it was a vintage icebox with an oak door and brass hinges and handle and a drawer underneath that could be filled with either crushed or chopped-up block ice. Behind the tent, against the mountain, was a portable blue chemical toilet.

Clouds had moved across the sun, and the wind was blowing hard when Bobby Lee entered the tent, the flap tearing loose from his hands before he could retie it. He sat down on Preacher’s cot and listened to the brief silence when the wind slackened. “Why do you stay out here, Jack?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“The cops aren’t interested in your house getting blown up?”

“It was caused by an electrical short. I make no trouble for anyone. I’m a sojourner who checks books out of the library. These are religious people. Disrespect their totems and feel their wrath. But they don’t take issue with a polite and quiet man.”

Preacher was sitting in a canvas chair in front of a writing table, wearing a soiled long-sleeve white shirt and small nonprescription reading glasses and unpressed dark slacks with pin stripes and a narrow brown belt that was notched tightly into his rib cage. On the table was a GI mess kit with a solitary fried egg and blackened wiener in it. A Bible was open next to it, the pages stiff and rippled and tea-colored, as though they had been dipped in creek water and left to dry in the sun.

“You’re losing weight,” Bobby Lee said.

“What are you not telling me?”

Bobby Lee’s brow furrowed, the implicit criticism like the touch of a cigarette to his skin. “Holland was at the Dolan house. Then he went to a motel with the woman who capped Liam. That’s all I know. Jack, let go of the Dolan family. If we got to take care of the Gaddis girl, let’s get on with it. Hugo told you where she’s working. We grab her and the soldier boy, and you finish whatever it is you got to do.”

“Why do you think Hugo told us where she was working?”

“If we see Hugo or any of his talent around, we splatter their grits. That number you did on those bikers was beautiful, man. A hooker dimed them for you after she screwed them? You know some interesting broads. Remind me not to get in the sack with any of them.”

“My mother is buried here.”

Bobby Lee wasn’t making the connection. But he seldom did when Preacher started riffing. The wind was blowing harder against the tent, vibrating the aluminum poles, straining the ropes tied to the steel pins outside. A ball of tumbleweed smacked against the side, freezing momentarily against it, then rolling away.

“You asked why I live here. My mother married a railroad man who owned this land. He died of ptomaine,” Preacher said.

“You inherited the place?”

“I bought it at a tax sale.”

“Your mom didn’t leave a will?”

“What business is it of yours?”

“It isn’t, Jack,” Bobby Lee said. “Those guys you had to deal with in the motel room? They were Josef Sholokoff’s people?”

“They didn’t have time to introduce themselves.”

“I have to line out something to you. About Liam. It’s eating my lunch. I set him up in that café. I called him on my cell and said that Holland had made him. I split and let him take the fall.”

Preacher gazed at Bobby Lee, his legs crossed, his wrists hanging off the arms of the chair. “Why you telling me this, boy?”

“You said I was like a son to you. You meant that?”

Preacher crossed his heart, not speaking.

“I got a bad feeling. I think you and me might go down together. But I don’t see that I’ve got a lot of choices right now. If we get cooled out, I don’t want a lie between us.”

“You’re a mixed bag of cats, Bobby Lee.”

“I’m trying to be straight up with you. You’re a purist. There’s not many of your kind around anymore. That doesn’t mean I like eating a bullet.”

“Why do you think we’re going to get cooled out?”

“You tried to machine-gun a deputy sheriff. Then you had a chance to clip the sheriff and didn’t. I think maybe you’ve got a death wish.”

“That’s what Sheriff Holland probably thinks. But you’re both wrong. In this business, you recognize the great darkness in yourself, and you go inside it and die there, and then you don’t have to die again. Why do you think the Earp brothers took Doc Holliday with them to the OK Corral? A man coughing blood on his handkerchief with one hand and covering your back with a double-barrel ten-gauge won’t ever let you down. So you fed ole Liam to the wolves, did you?”

Bobby Lee looked away from Preacher. Then he corrected his expression and stared straight into Preacher’s face. “Liam made fun of me after I stood up for him. He said I was lots of things, but I would never be a soldier. What was that about a great darkness inside us?”

If Bobby Lee’s question registered on Preacher, he chose to ignore it. “I’m going to rebuild my house, Bobby Lee. I’d like for you to be part of that. I’d like for you to feel you belong here.”

“That makes me proud, Jack.”

“You look like you want to ask me something.”

“Maybe we could put some flowers on your mother’s grave. Where’s she buried?”

The wind was thumping the tent so hard, Bobby Lee could not be sure what Preacher said. He asked him to repeat the statement.

“I never quite get through to you,” Preacher shouted.

“The wind’s howling.”

“She’s underneath your feet! Where I planted her!”

ON THE FAR end of the same burning, windswept day, one on which the monsoonal downpour had been baked out of the topsoil and dust devils formed themselves out of nothing and spun across the plains and, in the blink of an eye, broke apart against monument rocks, Vikki Gaddis walked from the Fiesta motel to the steak house where she waited tables and sometimes sang with the band. The sky had turned yellow as the heat went out of the day, the sun settling into a melted orange pool among the rain clouds in the west. In spite of the humidity and dust, she felt a change was taking place in the world around her. Maybe her optimistic mood was based on the recognition that no matter what a person’s situation was, eventually it would have to change, for good or bad. Perhaps for her and Pete, change was at hand. There was a greenish tint to the land, as though a patina of new life had been sprinkled on the countryside. She could smell the mist from the grass sprinklers on the center ground and the flowers blooming in the window boxes of the motel at the intersection, a watered date-palm oasis in the midst of a desert, a reminder that a person always had choices.

Pete had told her of his conversation with the sheriff whose name was Hackberry Holland and the offer of protection the sheriff had made. The offer was a possibility, a viable alternative. But to step across a line into a world of legal entanglement and processes that were irreversible was easier said than done, she thought. They would be risking the entirety of their future, even their lives, on the word of a man they didn’t know. Pete kept reassuring her that Billy Bob would not have given him Hackberry’s name if he were not a good person, but Pete had an incurable trust in his fellow man, no matter how much the world hurt him, to the point where his faith was perhaps more a vice than a virtue.

She remembered an incident that had occurred when she was a little girl and her father had been awakened at two in the morning by the chief of police in Medicine Lodge and told to pick up an eighteen-year-old black kid who had escaped from a county prison in Oklahoma. The boy, who had been arrested for petty theft, had crawled through a heating duct in January and had almost been fried before he kicked a grille from an air vent that, by sheer chance, gave onto an unsecured part of the building. He had ridden a freight train into Kansas with two twisted ankles and had hidden out in his aunt’s house, where in all probability he would have been forgotten, since his criminal status was marginal and not worth the expense of finding and bringing him back.

Except the escapee had the IQ of a seven-year-old and phoned the county prison collect and asked the jailer to mail his possessions to Medicine Lodge. He made sure the jailer wrote down his aunt’s correct address. A ninety-day county bit had now been augmented by a mandatory minimum of one year in McAlester Pen.

Three days later, Vikki watched her father and an Oklahoma sheriff’s deputy lead the escapee in an orange jumpsuit and waist and leg chains to the back of an Oklahoma state vehicle and lock him to a D-ring inset in the floor. The escapee was limping badly and could not have weighed over a hundred pounds. His arms were like sticks. His skin seemed to be possessed of a disease that leached it of color. His hair had been cut so that it resembled a rusty Brillo pad glued to his scalp.

“What’s gonna happen to him, Daddy?” Vikki had asked.

“He’ll be cannibalized.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Honey, it means on a day like this, your old man would like to be a full-time musician.”

What would her father say about her and Pete’s situation now? She had always identified her father more with his music than with his career as a lawman. He was always happy, his tanned skin crinkling at the corners of his eyes, and seldom let the world injure him. He lent money to people who could not pay it back and befriended drunkards and minorities and didn’t allow either politics or organized religion to carry him away. He had collected all the Carter Family’s early music and was immensely proud to have known the patriarch of the family, Alvin Pleasant Carter, who, in a postcard to Vikki’s father, had called him “a fellow musicianer.” His favorite Carter family song was “Keep on the Sunny Side of Life.”

Where are you now, Daddy? In heaven? Out there among the mesas or inside the blowing clouds of dust and rain? But you’re somewhere, aren’t you? she said to herself. You always said music never dies; it lives on the trade winds and wraps all the way around the world.

She had to wipe a tear from her eye before she went inside the steak house.

“A couple of famous fellows were asking about you,” the bartender said.

“How do you define ‘famous’?”

The bartender was an ex-rodeo rider nicknamed Stub, for the finger he had pinched off when he caught it in a calf-rope at the Calgary Stampede. He was tall and had a stomach shaped like a water-filled enema bottle and hair that was as slick and black as patent leather. He wore black trousers and a long-sleeve white shirt and a black string tie and was drying champagne glasses and setting them upside down on a white towel while he talked. “They were in last night and wanted to meet you, but you were busy.”

“Stub, would you just answer the question?”

“They said they were from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.”

“They’re hanging out here rather than Malibu because they like the weather in late August?”

“They didn’t say.”

“Did you give them my name?”

“I said your name was Vikki.”

“Did you give them my last name or tell them where I live?”

“I didn’t tell them where you live.”

“What are their names?”

“They left a card here. Or I think they did.” He looked behind him at two or three dozen business cards in a cardboard box under the cash register. “They liked your singing. One of them said you sounded like Mother something.”

“Maybelle?”

“What?”

“I sound like Mother Maybelle?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Stub-”

“Maybe they’ll come in tonight.”

“Don’t talk about me to anyone. No one, not for any reason. Do you understand?”

Stub shook his head and dried a glass, his back to her.

“Did you hear me?”

He sighed loudly, as though a great weight had been unfairly set on his shoulders. She wanted to hit him in the head with a plate.

Until nine-thirty P.M. she served dinners from the kitchen and drinks from the bar to tourists on their way to Big Bend and family people and lonely utility workers far from home who came in for a beer and the music. Then she took her guitar from a locked storage compartment in back and removed it from the case and tuned the strings she had put on only last week.

The Gibson had probably been manufactured over sixty years ago and was the biggest flattop the company made. It had a double-braced red spruce top and rosewood back and sides. It was known as the instrument of choice of Elvis and Emmylou or any rockabilly who loved the deep-throated warm sound of early acoustic guitars. Its sunburst finish and pearl and flower-motif inlay and dark neck and silver frets seemed to capture light and pools of shadow at the same time and, out of the contrasts, create a separate work of art.

When she made an E chord and ticked the plectrum across the strings, the reverberation through the wood was magical. She sang “You Are My Flower” and “Jimmie Brown the Newsboy” and “The Western Hobo.” But she could hardly concentrate on the words. Her gaze kept sweeping the crowd, the tables, the utility workers at the bar, a group of European bicyclists who came in sweaty and unshaved with backpacks hanging from their shoulders. Where was Pete? He was supposed to meet her at ten P.M., when the kitchen closed and she usually started cleaning tables and preparing to leave.

A man who was alone at a front table kept spinning his hat on his finger while he watched her sing; one side of his face was cut with a grin. He wore exaggerated hillbilly sideburns, cowboy boots, a print shirt that looked ironed on his tanned skin, jeans that were stretched to bursting on his thighs, and a big polished brass belt buckle with the Stars and Bars embossed on it. When she glanced at him, he gave her a wink.

Over the heads of the crowd, she saw Stub answer the phone. Then he replaced it in the cradle and said something to a drink waitress, who walked up to the bandstand and told Vikki, “Pete said to tell you not to eat dinner, he’s going to the grocery to fix y’all something.”

“He’s going to the grocery at ten o’clock?”

“They stay open till eleven. Count your blessings. My old man is watching rented porn at his mother’s house.”

Vikki laid her guitar in its case, fastened the clasps, and locked the case in the storage room. At closing time, Pete still had not shown up. She went to the bar and sat down, her feet hurting, her face stiff from smiling when she didn’t feel like it.

“Pretty fagged out?” a voice beside her said.

It was the cowboy with the Confederate belt buckle. He had not sat down but was standing close enough that she could smell the spearmint and chewing tobacco on his breath. He was holding his hat with both hands, straightening the brim, pushing a dent out of the crown, brushing a spot out of the felt. He put it on his head and took it back off, his attention focusing on Vikki. “You off?” he said.

“Am I what?”

“You need a ride? Every foot of wind out there has got three feet of sand in it.”

Stub compressed a small white towel in his palm and dropped it on the bar in front of the cowboy. “Last call for alcohol,” he said.

“Include me out.”

“Good, because this is a family-type joint that closes early. Then Vikki helps me clean up. Then I walk her home.”

“Glad to hear it,” the cowboy said. He put a breath mint in his mouth and cracked it between his molars, grinning while he did it.

Stub watched him leave, then set a cup of coffee in front of Vikki. “Those guys come back?” he asked.

“The ones who claim they’re with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band?”

“You don’t believe they’re the genuine article?”

She was too tired to talk about it. She lifted her coffee cup, then replaced it in the saucer without drinking from it. “I won’t be able to sleep,” she said.

“You want me to walk you home?”

“I’m fine. Thanks for your help, Stub.”

He picked up a business card tucked under the register. “I dug this one out of the box,” he said. He set it in front of her.

She picked it up and looked at the printing across the face. “It says ‘Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.’”

“The guy wrote something on the back. I didn’t read it.”

She turned the card over in her palm. “It says he loved my singing.”

“Who?”

“Jeff Hanna. His name is right there.”

“Who’s Jeff Hanna?”

“The guy who founded the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.”

She walked back to the motel. The stars had come out, and in the west, the bottom of the sky was still lit with a glow that was like a flare burning inside a green vapor. But she could take no comfort in the beauty of the stars and late-summer light on a desert plain. Each time a car or truck passed her, she unconsciously moved away from the asphalt, averting her face, her eyes searching for a sidewalk that led to a building, a driveway to a house, a swale that fronted a filling station.

Would they live this way the rest of their lives?

She unlocked her door and went inside her motel room. The air conditioner was cranked up all the way, moisture running down its side onto the rug. Pete had not returned from the grocery store, and she was exhausted and hungry and scared and incapable of thinking about the next twenty-four hours. Only Pete would choose to prepare a late and complicated dinner on the night they had to make a decision that would either confirm their status as permanent fugitives or place them in the hands of a legal system they didn’t trust.

She undressed and went into the shower and turned on the hot water. The steam rolled out of the stall in a huge cloud and fogged the mirror and glistened on the plaster walls and puffed through the partially open door into the bedroom.

When she had been a teenager, her father had always teased her about her love for stray animals. “If you’re not careful, you’ll find a fellow just like one of those cats or dogs and run off with him,” he had said.

Who had she found?

Pete, bumbling his way into the maw of mass murderers.

As she stared at her reflection through a small hole in the fogged mirror, she was stricken with shame and guilt by her own thoughts. Today was her birthday. She had forgotten it, but Pete had not.

She was filled with unrelieved anger at herself and the intractability of their situation. For the first time in her life, she understood how people could deliberately injure and even kill themselves. Their desperation didn’t have its origins in depression. The warm tub of water was cosmetic; the quick downward movement across the forearms was born out of rage at the self.

She got into the shower and washed her hair and lathered her breasts and underarms and thighs and abdomen and buttocks and calves, holding her face so close to the hot spray that her skin turned as red as a blister. How would they take back their lives? How would they free themselves from the fear that waited for them every morning like a hungry animal? The only sanctuary they had was a motel room with a clanking air conditioner dripping rust on the rug, a bed stained with the fornications of others, and curtains they could close on a highway that led back to a rural crossroads and a mass burial ground she couldn’t bear to think about.

She propped her forehead against the stall, the jet of shower water exploding on her scalp, the steam seeping into the bedroom where the night chain on the door hung down on the jamb. She had started out the evening thinking about choices. The rain had changed the land, and the sunset had reshaped the mountains and cooled the desert. He who was the alpha and the omega made all things new, didn’t He? That was the promise, wasn’t it?

But when you were in a room that seemed to have no exit except false doors painted on the walls, how were you supposed to choose? What kind of cruel joke was that to play on anyone, much less on those who had tried to do right with their lives?

She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and kept her head pressed so hard against the shower wall that she thought her skin would split.

PETE STEERED HIS basket to the deli counter and dropped a rotisserie chicken, a carton of potato salad, and a carton of coleslaw inside. Then he lifted a six-pack of ice-cold Dr Pepper out of the cooler and a half-gallon of frozen yogurt from the freezer and headed for the bakery. He picked up an angel food cake and found a loaf of French bread that was still soft. The baker was working late and was cleaning up behind the pastry counter. Pete asked her to scroll “Happy Birthday, Vikki” on his cake.

“Special girl, huh?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am, ain’t none better,” he replied.

He paid up front and, with a grocery bag in each arm, began the one-mile walk toward the motel. The sun’s afterglow had finally died on the horizon, and he could see the evening star bright and twinkling above a rock ridge that looked carved from decaying bone. The wind had stopped completely, and under an overhang of trees, he thought he could smell an autumnal odor like gas and chrysanthemums in the air. An eighteen-wheeler passed him, its brakes hissing, a backwash of heat and diesel fumes enveloping him. He veered away from the road’s edge, walking now on an uneven surface, gravel breaking under his feet, his coned-up Mexican straw hat bobbing on his head. Up ahead, under a chinaberry tree, was a shut-down Sno-Ball stand, a cluster of bright red cherries painted on a wood sign above its shuttered serving counter. In the distance, when a vehicle approached from the west, he could dimly see the abandoned drive-in theater and the weed-grown miniature-golf course and the silhouettes of the Cadillac car bodies buried nose-down in the hardpan. Vikki must be at the motel by now, he thought. Waiting for him, worrying, maybe secretly regretting she had ever hooked up with him.

He thought the word “Vikki,” so it became a sound in his head rather than a word. He thought it in a way that turned the word into a heart with blood pumping in it and curly hair and strangely colored recessed eyes and breath that was sweet and skin that smelled as fresh as flowers opening in the morning. She was smart and pretty and brave and talented and took no credit for any of it. If he had money, they could go to Canada. He had heard about Lake Louise and the blue Canadian Rockies and places where you could still cowboy for a living and drive a hundred miles without seeing a man-built structure. Vikki talked all the time about Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston and the music of the Great American West and the promise the land had held for the generation that came out of the 1940s. Montana, British Columbia, Wyoming, the Cascades in Washington, what did it matter? Those were the places for a new beginning. He had to turn things around and make it up to Vikki for what he had done. He had to separate himself from the nine murdered Asian women and girls who lived in his dreams. Didn’t all dead people grow weary and eventually go toward a white light and leave the world to its illusions?

If it cost him his life, he had to make these things happen.

He shifted the sack that was cupped in his right forearm so he wouldn’t bruise the cake inside. Behind him, he heard the tires of a diesel-powered vehicle pulling off the asphalt onto the gravel.

“Pete, want a ride?” the driver of the pickup said. He was grinning. A felt hat with a wilted brim hung on the gun rack behind him. He wore a print shirt that was as taut on his torso as his sun-browned skin.

“I don’t have far to go,” Pete replied, not recognizing the driver.

“I work with Vikki. She said y’all are cooking up a meal tonight. Special occasion?”

“Something like that,” Pete said, still walking, looking straight ahead.

“That sack looks like it’s fixing to split.” The driver was steering with one hand, keeping his pickup on the road’s shoulder, tapping the brake to keep the idle from accelerating his vehicle past Pete.

“Don’t remember me? That’s ’cause I’m in the kitchen. Bending over the sink most of the time.”

“Don’t need a lift. Got it covered. Thanks.”

“Suit yourself. I hope Vikki feels better,” the driver said. He started to pull back on the asphalt, craning out the window to see if the lane was clear, his shoulders hunched up over the wheel.

“Hang on. What’s wrong with Vikki?” Pete said.

But the driver was ignoring him, waiting for a church bus to pass.

“Hey, pull over,” Pete said, walking faster, the bottom of one bag starting to break under the weight of the damp six-pack of Dr Pepper. Then the bottom caved, cascading the six-pack and a box of cereal and a quart of milk and a container of blueberries onto the gravel.

The driver of the pickup pulled his vehicle back onto the safety of the shoulder, leaning forward, waiting for Pete to speak again.

“Vikki’s sick?” Pete said.

“She was holding her stomach and looking kind of queasy. There’s a nasty kind of flu going around. It gives you the red scours for about a day or so.”

“Park up yonder,” Pete said. “It’ll take me a minute.”

The driver didn’t try to conceal his vexation. He looked at the face of his watch and pulled into darkness under the chinaberry tree and cut his lights, waiting for Pete to pick up his groceries from the roadside and carry them to the bed of the truck. The driver did not get out of his vehicle or offer to help. Pete made one trip, then returned to pick up the bag that had not broken. The back window of the truck was black under the tree’s overhang, the hood ticking with heat. The driver sat with his arm propped casually on his window, rolling a matchstick on his teeth.

Pete walked to the passenger side and got in. A pair of handcuffs hung from the rearview mirror.

“Them are just plastic,” the driver said. He grinned again, his pleasant mood back in place. He wore a brass buckle on his belt that was embossed with the Stars and Bars and was burnished the color of browned butter. “You got a knife?”

“What for?”

“This floor rug keeps tangling in my accelerator. It like to got me killed up the road.”

Pete worked his Swiss Army knife out of his jeans and opened the long blade and handed it to the driver. The driver started sawing at a piece of loose carpet with it. “Strap yourself in. The latch is right there on your left. You got to dig for it.”

“How about we get on it?”

“State law says you got to be buckled up. I tend to be conscious of the law. I did a postgraduate study in cotton-picking ’cause I wasn’t, know what I mean?” The driver saw the expression in Pete’s face. “Ninety days on the P farm for nonsupport. Not necessarily anything I’d brag to John Dillinger about.”

Pete stretched the safety belt across his chest and pushed the metal tongue into the latch and heard it snap firmly into place. But the belt felt too tight. He pushed against it, trying to adjust its length.

The driver tossed the piece of sawed fabric out the window and folded the knife blade back into the handle with his palm. “My niece was wearing it. Hang on. We ain’t got far to go,” he said. He took the gearshift out of park and dropped it into drive.

“Give me my knife.”

“Just a second, man.”

Pete pressed the release button on the latch, but nothing happened. “What’s the deal?” he said.

“Deal?”

“The belt is stuck.”

“I got my hands full, buddy,” the driver replied.

“Who are you?”

“Give it a break, will you? I got a situation here. Do you believe this asshole?”

An SUV had pulled off the road beyond the Sno-Ball stand and was now backing up.

“What the fuck?” the driver of the pickup said.

The SUV was accelerating, its bumper headed toward the pickup, the tires swerving through the gravel. The driver of the pickup dropped his gearshift into reverse and mashed on the accelerator, but it was too late. The trailer hitch on the SUV plowed into the truck’s grille, the steel ball on the hitch and the triangular steel mount plunging deep into the radiator’s mesh, ripping the fan blades from their shaft, jolting the pickup’s body sideways.

Pete jerked at the safety belt, but it was locked solid, and he realized he’d been had. But the events taking place around him were even more incongruous. The driver of the SUV had cut his lights and leaped onto the gravel, holding an object close to his thigh so it could not be seen from the road. The man moved hurriedly to the driver’s door of the pickup, jerked it open, and, in one motion, thrust himself inside and grabbed the driver by the throat with one hand and, with the other, jammed a blue-black.38 snub-nose revolver into the driver’s mouth. He fitted his thumb over the knurled surface of the hammer and cocked it back. “I’ll blow your brains all over the dashboard, T-Bone. You’ve seen me do it,” he said.

T-Bone, the driver of the pickup, could not speak. His eyes bulged from his head, and saliva ran from both sides of his mouth.

“Blink your eyes if you got the message, moron,” the man from the SUV said.

T-Bone lowered his eyelids and opened them again. The driver of the SUV slid the revolver from T-Bone’s mouth and lowered the hammer with his thumb and wiped the saliva off the steel onto T-Bone’s shirt. Then, for no apparent reason other than unbridled rage, he hit him in the face with it.

T-Bone pressed the flat of his hand to the cut below his eye. “Hugo sent me. The broad is at the Fiesta motel,” he said. “We couldn’t find the Fiesta ’cause we were looking for the Siesta. We had the wrong name of the motel, Bobby Lee.”

“You follow me to the next corner and turn right. Keep your shit-machine running for three blocks, then we’ll be in the country. Don’t let this go south on you.” Bobby Lee Motree’s eyes met Pete’s. “It’s called a Venus flytrap. Rapists use it. It means you’re screwed. But ‘screwed’ and ‘bullet in the head’ aren’t necessarily the same thing. You roger that, boy? You’ve caused me a mess of trouble. You can’t guess how much trouble, which means your name is on the top of the shit list right now. Start your engine, T-Bone.”

T-Bone turned the ignition. The engine coughed and blew a noxious cloud of black smoke from the exhaust pipe. Something tinkled against metal, and antifreeze streamed into the gravel as the engine caught, then steam and a scorched smell like a hose or rubber belt cooking on a hot surface rose from the hood. Pete sat silent and stiff against the seat, pushing himself deeper into it so he could get a thumb under the safety strap and try to work it off his chest. His Swiss Army knife was on the floor, the red handle half under the driver’s foot. A car went by, then a truck, the illumination of their headlights falling outside the pool of shadow under the chinaberry tree.

“My piece is under the seat,” T-Bone said.

“Go ahead.”

“I need to talk to Hugo.”

“Hugo doesn’t have conversations with dead people. That’s what you’re gonna be unless you do what I say.”

T-Bone bent over, his gaze straight ahead, and lifted a.25 auto from under the seat. He kept it in his left hand and laid it across his lap so it was pointed at Pete’s rib cage. A thin whistling sound like a teakettle’s was building inside the hood. “I didn’t mean to get in your space, Bobby Lee. I was doing what Hugo told me.”

“Say another word, and I’m going to seriously hurt you.”

Pete remained silent as T-Bone followed Bobby Lee’s SUV out of town and up a dirt road bordered by pastureland where black Angus were clumped up in an arroyo and under a solitary tree by a windmill. Pete’s left hand drifted down to the latch on the safety belt. He worked his fingers over the square outline of the metal, pushing the plastic release button with his thumb, trying to free himself by creating enough slack in the belt to go deeper into the latch rather than pull against it.

“You’re wasting your time. It has to be popped loose with a screwdriver from the inside,” T-Bone said. “By the way, I ain’t no rapist.”

“Were you at the church?” Pete asked.

“No, but you were. Way I see it, you got no kick coming. So don’t beg. I’ve heard it before. Same words from the same people. It ain’t their fault. The world’s been picking on them. They’ll do anything to make it right.”

“My girlfriend is innocent. She wasn’t part of anything that happened at that church.”

“A child is created from its parents’ fornication. Ain’t none of us innocent.”

“What were you told to do to us?”

“None of your business.”

“You’re not on the same page as the guy in the SUV, though, are you?”

“That’s something you ain’t got to worry about.”

“That’s right. I don’t. But you do,” Pete said.

Pete saw T-Bone wet his bottom lip. A drop of blood from the cut under his eye slipped down his cheek, as though a red line were being drawn there with an invisible pencil. “Say that over.”

“Why would Hugo send you after us and not tell Bobby Lee? Bobby Lee is working on his own, isn’t he? How’s the guy named Preacher fit into all this?”

T-Bone glanced sideways, the shine of fear in his eyes. “How much you know about Preacher?”

“If Bobby Lee is working with him, where’s that leave you?”

T-Bone sucked in his cheeks as though they were full of moisture. But Pete guessed that in reality, his mouth was as dry as cotton. The dust from the SUV was corkscrewing in the pickup’s headlights. “You’re a smart one, all right. But for a guy who’s so dadburned smart, it must be strange to find yourself in your current situation. Another thing I cain’t figure out: I talked with your girlfriend at the steak house. How’d a guy who looks like a fried chitling end up with a hot piece of ass like that?”

Up ahead, the brake lights on the SUV lit up as brightly as embers inside the dust. To the south, the ridges and mesas that flanged the Rio Grande were purple and gray and blue and cold-looking against the night sky.

Bobby Lee got out of his vehicle and walked back to the truck, his nine-millimeter dangling from his right hand. “Cut your lights and turn off your engine,” he said.

“What are we doing?”

“There’s no ‘we.’” Bobby Lee’s cell phone hung from a cord looped over his neck.

“I thought we were working together. Call Hugo. Call Artie. Straighten this out.”

Bobby Lee screwed the muzzle of a nine-millimeter against T-Bone’s temple. The hammer was already cocked, the butterfly safety off.

“You use your nine on your-”

“That’s right, I do,” Bobby Lee said. “A fourteen-rounder, manufactured before the bunny huggers got them banned. Hand me your piece, butt-first.”

T-Bone lifted his hand to eye level, his fingers clamped across the frame of his.25. Bobby Lee took it from him and dropped it in his pocket. “Who’s down here with you?”

“A couple of new people. Maybe Hugo’s around. I don’t know. Maybe-”

“Maybe what?”

“There’s a lot of interest in Preacher.”

Bobby Lee removed the nine-millimeter’s muzzle from T-Bone’s temple, leaving a red circle that seemed to glow against the bone. “Get out.”

T-Bone stepped carefully from the door. “I was supposed to grab the girl and call Hugo and not do anything to her. I didn’t pull it off, so I saw the kid carrying his groceries on the road, and I took a chance.”

Bobby Lee was silent, busy with thoughts inside of which people lived or died or were left somewhere in between; his thoughts shaped and reshaped themselves, sorting out different scenarios that, in seconds, could result in a situation no human being wanted to experience.

“If you see Preacher-” T-Bone said.

“I’ll see him.”

“I just carry out orders.”

“Do I need to jot that down so I got the wording right?”

“I ain’t worth it, Bobby Lee.”

“Worth what?”

“Whatever.”

“Tell me what ‘whatever’ is.”

“Why you doing this to me?”

“Because you piss me off.”

“What’d I do?”

“You remind me of a zero. No, a zero is a thing, a circle with air inside it. You make me think of something that’s less than a zero.”

T-Bone’s gaze wandered out into the pasture. More Angus were moving into the arroyo. There were trees along the arroyo, and the shadows of the cattle seemed to dissolve into the trees’ shadows and enlarge and darken them at the same time. “It’s fixing to rain again. They always clump up before it rains.”

Bobby Lee was breathing through his nose, his eyes unfocused, strained, as though someone were shining a light into them.

T-Bone closed his eyes, and his voice made a clicking sound, but no words came from his throat. Then he hawked loudly and spat a bloody clot on the ground. “I got ulcers.”

Bobby Lee didn’t speak.

“Don’t shoot me in the face,” T-Bone said.

“Turn around.”

“Bobby Lee.”

“If you look back, if you call Hugo, if you contact anybody about this, I’m gonna do to you what you did to that Mexican you tied up in that house in Zaragoza. Your truck stays here. Don’t ever come in this county again.”

“How do I know you’re not-”

“If you’re still sucking air after about forty yards, you’ll know.”

Bobby Lee rested his forearm on the truck window and watched T-Bone walk away. He slowly turned his gaze on Pete. “What are you looking at?”

“Not a whole lot.”

“You think this is funny? You think you’re cute?”

“What I think is you’re standing up to your bottom lip in your own shit.”

“I’m the best friend you got, boy.”

“Then you’re right. I’m in real trouble. Tell you what. Pop me out of this safety belt, and I’ll accept your surrender.”

Bobby Lee walked around to the other side of the vehicle and opened the door. He pulled a switchblade from his jeans and flicked it open. He sliced the safety strap in half, the nine-millimeter in his right hand, then stepped back. “Get on your face.”

Pete stepped out on the ground, got to his knees, and lay on his chest, the smell of the grass and the earth warm in his face. He twisted his head around.

“Eyes front,” Bobby Lee said, pressing his foot between Pete’s shoulder blades. “Put your hands behind you.”

“Where’s Vikki?”

Bobby Lee didn’t reply. He stooped over and hooked a handcuff on each of Pete’s wrists, squeezing the teeth of the ratchets as deep as he could into the locking mechanism. “Get up.”

“At the A.A. meeting, you said you were in Iraq.”

“What about it?”

“You don’t have to do this stuff.”

“Here’s a news flash for you. Every flag is the same color. The color is black. No quarter, no mercy, it’s ‘burn, motherfucker, burn.’ Tell me I’m full of shit.”

“You were kicked out of the army, weren’t you?”

“Close your mouth, boy.”

“That guy, T-Bone, you saw yourself in him. That’s why you wanted to tear him apart.”

“Maybe I can work you in as a substitute.”

Bobby Lee opened the back door of the SUV and shoved Pete inside. He slammed the door and lifted the cell phone from the cord that hung around his neck, punching the speed dial with his thumb. “I got the package,” he said.