Rain Gods

23

PETE AND VIKKI had climbed down from Danny Boy Lorca’s truck cab, retrieved a duffel bag and guitar case from the truck bed, and entered the building dehydrated, sunburned, and windblown with road grit. Their clothes stiff with salt, they sat down in front of Hackberry’s desk as though his air-conditioned office were the end of a long journey out of the Sahara. They told him of their encounter with Preacher Jack Collins and Bobby Lee and the man named T-Bone and the fact that Collins had let them go.

“We got on the bus early this morning, but it broke down after twenty miles. So we hitchhiked,” Pete said.

“Collins just cut you loose? He didn’t harm you in any way?” Hackberry let his gaze linger on Vikki Gaddis.

“It happened just like we told you,” Vikki said.

“Where do you think Collins went?” Hackberry asked.

“Collins is y’all’s business now. Tell us what you want us to do,” Pete said.

“I haven’t quite thought it through,” Hackberry said.

“Repeat that, please?” Vikki said.

“I’ve got two empty cells. Go up the iron stairs in back and check them out.”

“You’re offering us jail cells?” she said.

“The doors would stay unlocked. You can come and go as you like.”

“I don’t believe this,” she said.

“You can use the restroom and the shower down here,” Hackberry said.

“Pete, would you say something?” Vikki said.

“Maybe it’s not a bad idea,” he replied.

Pam Tibbs came into the office and leaned against the doorjamb. “I’ll go with you, honey.”

“With luck, we can probably find an iron staircase by ourselves,” Vikki said. “Excuse me, I forgot to call you ‘honey.’”

“Suit yourself, ma’am,” Pam said. She waited until they were out of earshot before she spoke again. “How do you read all that stuff about Collins and Bobby Lee Motree and this character T-Bone?”

“Who knows? Collins probably has psychotic episodes.”

“Vikki Gaddis has a mouth on her, doesn’t she?”

“They’re just kids,” Hackberry said.

“That doesn’t mean you should put your ass in a sling for them.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Maydeen Stoltz walked into the room. “Ethan Riser is on the phone. Want me to take a message?”

“Where’s he calling from?” Hackberry asked.

“He didn’t say.”

“Ask him if he’s in town.”

“Like that? ‘Are you in town?’”

“Yeah, tell him I want to ask him to dinner. Would you please do it, Maydeen?”

She went back into the dispatcher’s office, then returned. “He’s in San Antonio.”

“Put him through.”

“I’m going to get a job on a spaceship,” she said.

A moment later, the light on Hackberry’s desk phone went on, and he picked up the receiver. “Hey, Ethan. How are you?”

“You called me by my first name.”

“I’m trying to get a perspective on a couple of things. Is there any development with Nick Dolan’s situation?”

“Not a lot.”

“Have y’all interviewed him yet?”

“No comment.”

“So he’s still bait?”

“I wouldn’t use that particular term.”

“Hang on.” Hackberry covered the receiver with his palm. “Keep those kids out of here.”

“I’m kind of busy,” Riser said. “What can I help you with?”

“How valuable is Pete Flores to you?”

“He’s the weak sister in the mass killing. He can give us names. It takes just one thread to pull a sweater loose.”

“I don’t think ‘weak sister’ is a good term for a kid like that.”

“Maybe not. But Flores made his choice when he signed on with the bunch who murdered those women and girls. We can use him to testify against the others. That means he goes into custody as a material witness.”

“Custody? In the can?”

“That’s a certainty. Flores has made an art form out of flight.”

“How about witness protection?”

“Maybe down the line. But he cooperates or he takes the weight for the others. Let’s be honest. These guys running skag and meth and girls into the country are Mobbed up all the way to Mexico City. Our jails are full of MS-13 and Mexican Mafia hitters. Flores may have his throat cut before he ever sees a grand jury. It’s too bad. The kid might be a war hero, but those women and girls who ate the forty-five rounds aren’t here to mourn for him.”

Hackberry took the phone from his ear and opened and closed his mouth to clear a sound like cellophane crinkling inside his head. Outside, the flag was popping and straightening in a flume of yellow dust.

“You still with me, Sheriff?” Riser said.

“Yeah, copy that. Listen, isn’t Hugo Cistranos the key? Don’t tell me y’all don’t have dials on this guy. Why aren’t you squeezing him instead of chasing Flores and Vikki Gaddis around?”

“I don’t get to call all the shots, Sheriff.”

Hackberry could sense the change in Riser’s mood. Through his office door, he could see Pam Tibbs escorting Flores and Gaddis to a small room that was used for interviews. “I can appreciate your situation,” he said.

“Sorry I haven’t gotten back to you. I had to go back to Washington, and I’ll probably have to take off again tomorrow. What’s all this about? If I were you, I’d ease up. You’re a combat veteran. Sometimes you have to lose a few for the greater good. That might sound Darwinian, but those who believe different belong in monasteries.”

“This is all about nailing Josef Sholokoff, isn’t it?”

“Neither of us makes the rules.”

“Have a good trip to Washington.”

“Let me be up-front again. I’ll try to keep you in the loop. But the word is ‘try.’”

“You couldn’t be more clear, Mr. Riser.” Hackberry replaced the receiver in the cradle. Pam Tibbs stood in the doorway. He looked woodenly at her.

“I hope Bonnie and Clyde appreciate this,” she said.

“Bring a cruiser around to the back door. Bonnie and Clyde were never here. Indicate that to Maydeen on your way out.”

“You got it, boss man.”

“Don’t call me that.”

THE THERMOMETER HAD just peaked at 119 degrees when Nick Dolan carried his bag out of the Phoenix airport and hailed a cab, one with more dents than it should have had. The driver was from the Mid-east and had festooned the inside of the cab with beadwork and pictures of mosques and words from the Koran and was burning incense on the dashboard and playing Arabian music on a tape deck. “Where to, sir?” he said.

“I’m not sure. Where can you get a blow job in Mecca?”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“The Embassy Suites.”

“In Phoenix?”

“What’s your name?”

“Mohammed.”

“I’m shocked. No, I want to go to the Embassy Suites in Istanbul. Do you hand out earplugs with that music?”

“Earplugs? What earplugs, sir?”

“The Embassy Suites off Camelback.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Hang on, sir.” The driver floored the cab, swinging out into traffic, throwing Nick across the seat with his luggage.

“Hey, we’re not on a hijack mission here,” Nick said. He knew his histrionic display at the driver’s expense was a mask for the fear that once again had taken up residence in his breast and was feeding at his heart. He had gotten the phone number of Josef Sholokoff from his old partner in the escort business and had made an appointment to meet Sholokoff at his house at nine P.M. that evening. The fact that Sholokoff had given Nick easy access to his home only increased Nick’s sense of insecurity.

“Hey, Mohammed, you ever hear of a guy named Josef Sholokoff?” Nick said. He gazed out the window, waiting for the driver’s reply. He watched the palm trees and stucco homes on the boulevard zoom by, the gardens bursting with flowers.

“Hey, you up there in the clouds of incense, you know a guy by the name of-”

The driver’s eyes locked on Nick’s inside the rearview mirror. “Yes, sir, Embassy Suites,” he said. He turned up the volume, filling the cab with the sounds of flutes and sitars.

Nick checked in to the hotel and undressed down to his boxer shorts and strap undershirt. His suite was on the fifth floor and overlooked the outdoor swimming pool; he could hear children shouting and splashing in the water. He started to go into the bathroom and take a shower but felt so weak he thought he was going to collapse. He fixed a glass of ice and bourbon from the hospitality bar and sat down in a chair and picked up the telephone. He could see his reflection in the mirror on the bathroom door. It was that of a small, puffy, round man in striped underwear, his childlike hand clenching a thick water glass, his pale legs knotted with clumps of varicose veins, his face a white balloon with eyes and a mouth painted on it. He punched his wife’s cell phone number into the phone.

“Hello?” she said.

“It’s me, Esther.”

“Where the hell are you?”

“In Phoenix.”

“Arizona?”

“Yeah, what are you doing?”

“What am I doing? I’m pulling weeds in the flower bed. Which is what you should be doing. You’re actually in Arizona? Not just down the street having a nervous breakdown?”

“I didn’t tell you because I thought you’d be upset. I got a return flight booked at six-forty-five in the morning. So it’s not like I’m really gone.”

“You’re over a thousand miles away, but that’s not gone?”

“I’m gonna see this guy Josef Sholokoff. I called him up at his house.”

“This guy is worse than Jack Collins.”

“Nothing is gonna happen. I’ll be at his house. He’s not gonna hurt me in his own house.”

“I think I’m going to faint. Hold on, I got to get in the shade.”

“Did you know Esther was the name of Bugsy Siegel’s wife?”

“Who cares? Is my husband totally nuts?”

“I’m saying I’m no Benny Siegel, Esther.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

“You there?” he said. “Esther? What’s wrong?”

Then he realized she was crying. “Don’t be sad,” he said. “You’re brave. I married the bravest, prettiest woman in New Orleans. We’re gonna start over again. We got the restaurant. We got each other and the kids. The rest of it doesn’t matter. Hello?”

“Come home, Nick,” she said.

Nick showered and, for the next half hour, lay nude on top of his king-size bed, the points of his feet and hands spread in a giant X, like Ixion fastened to his burning wheel. Then he put cold water on his face and neck, and dressed in slacks and loafers and a fresh shirt, and called for a cab. He walked out of the hotel and stood under the porte cochere, his head as light as helium. The city was beautiful in the summer twilight, the palm trees tall and rustling, the mountaintops sharply etched against a magenta sky, the outdoor cafés filled with families and young people for whom death was an abstraction that happened only to others.

The dented cab that pulled up for him looked altogether too familiar. Nick opened the back door, and a sweet-sick cloud of incense that made him think of perfumed camel flop covered his skin and clothes. “Mohammed,” Nick said.

“Tell me where you want to go, sir,” the driver said.

“To the home of Josef Sholokoff,” Nick replied, getting in the back. He wondered if he was actually trying to get Mohammed to talk him out of his mission. “I got the address on this piece of paper. It’s up there in the hills somewhere.”

“Not good, sir.”

“When we get there, I want you to wait for me.”

“Not good at all, sir. No, not good. Very bad, sir.”

“You’re my man. You gotta have my back.”

The driver was turned all the way around in the seat, looking aghast at his fare. “I think you have been given very poor advice about your visit, sir. This is not a nice man. Would you like to go to the baseball game? Or I can drive you by the zoo. A very nice zoo here.”

“You people blow yourselves up with bombs. You afraid of some Russian schmuck who probably can’t get it up without watching one of his own porn films?”

Mohammed pushed down the flag on his meter. “Hang on, sir,” he said.

The cab snaked its way up a mountain that was just north of a golf resort. From the window Nick could see the great golden bowl of the city, the flow of headlights through its streets, the linear patterns of palm trees along the boulevards, the concrete canals brimming with water, the chains of sun-bladed swimming pools that extended for miles through the neighborhoods of the rich. The west side of town, where the hardscrabble whites and poor Hispanics lived, was another story.

“You watch trash TV, Mohammed?” Nick asked. “Jerry Springer, that kind of crap?”

“No, sir.” Mohammed looked in the rearview mirror. “Maybe sometimes.”

“Those people, the guests, they don’t get paid for that.”

“They don’t?”

“No.”

“Then why do they do it to themselves?”

“They think they’ll be immortal. They get inside a movie or a television show, and they think they got the same magic as celebrities. Look down there. That’s what it’s about. The big score.”

“You are a very smart man. That’s why I do not understand you.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“Why you are going to the home of a man like Josef Sholokoff.”

Mohammed pulled the cab up to the locked gates of a compound that was sculpted back into the mountain. Inside the walls, the lawn was a deep, cool green in the shadows, the sod soggy from soak hoses, the citrus trees heavy with fruit, the balconies on the upper stories of the house scrolled with Spanish-style ironwork. The gates swung inward electronically, but no security personnel or even gardeners were in sight. Mohammed drove to the carriage house and stopped.

“You’re gonna wait, right?” Nick said.

“I think so, sir.”

“Think?”

“I have a wife and children to consider, sir.”

“The guy sells dirty movies. He’s not Saddam Hussein.”

“They say he kills people.”

Yeah, that, too, Nick said to himself.

By the side of the house were a flagstone patio and a swimming pool that glittered like diamonds from the underwater lighting. A half-dozen women lay on beach chairs or on float cushions in the pool. Four men were playing cards on a glass-topped table. They wore print shirts with flower or parrot designs and golf slacks and sandals or loafers. Their demeanor was that of men who felt neither threatened nor ill at ease with their role in the world nor aggrieved by tales of carnage or privation or suffering on the evening news. Nick knew many like them when he ran the cardroom for Didoni Giacano in New Orleans. They turned their lethality on and off as easily as one did a light switch, and they did not consider themselves either violent or aberrant. Ultimately, it was their personal detachment from their deeds that made them so frightening.

The overseer of their game sat in a high chair, the kind used by an umpire on a tennis court. He was a small, fine-boned man with a long jaw and narrow cranium. His grin exposed his teeth, which were long and crooked and looked tea-stained and brittle, as though they would break if their possessor bit into a hard surface. His nose was scarred by acne, his nostrils were full of gray hair, the shape of his eyes more Asian than Occidental. “There he is, right on time,” he said.

“I’m Nick, if you’re talking about me. You’re Mr. Sholokoff?”

“This is him, boys,” the man in the chair said to the men playing cards.

“I thought maybe we could talk in private.”

“Call me Josef. You want a drink? You like my ladies? Your eyes keep going to my ladies.”

“I feel like I’m at the public pool here.”

“Tell me what you want. You had a long trip out. Maybe you want to relax in one of my cottages back there. See the Negro girl down at the shallow end? She’s starting her movie career. Want to meet her?”

“I didn’t have anything to do with killing those women you were running into the country.”

Sholokoff seemed barely able to contain his mirth. “So you think I’m a human smuggler? And you’ve come out here to tell me you never did me any injury? Maybe you got a wire on you. You got a wire? You working for the FBI?”

“Hugo Cistranos had the women killed. He used to do hits in New Orleans for Artie Rooney. I wanted to get even with Artie for some things he did to me a long time ago. I thought it was him bringing the Asian women in. I thought I was gonna put them to work for me. I came to these kinds of conclusions because I was a dumb fuck who should have stayed in the restaurant and nightclub business. I don’t want my family hurt. I don’t care what y’all do to me. I’m getting a crick in my neck looking up at you here.”

“Get him a chair,” Sholokoff said. “Bring me the artwork, too.”

One of the cardplayers brought a white-painted iron chair from the lawn for Nick to sit in; another went inside the house and returned with a manila folder in his hand.

Sholokoff opened the folder on his lap and sorted through several eight-by-ten photos, glancing at each of them appraisingly, the grin never leaving his face.

“These guys aren’t Russians?” Nick asked, nodding at the cardplayers.

“If they were Russian, my little Jewish friend, they would eat you alive, toenails and all.”

“How do you know I’m Jewish?”

“We know everything about you. Your family name was Dolinski. Here, look,” Sholokoff said. He tossed the folder into Nick’s lap.

The photos spilled out in Nick’s hands: his son, Jesse, entering the San Antonio public library, the twin girls crossing a busy street, Esther unloading groceries in the driveway.

“Your wife’s family came from the southern Siberian plain?” Sholokoff said.

“Who took these pictures?”

“They say Siberian women rule their men. Is that true?”

“You leave my family out of this.”

Sholokoff propped his elbows on the arms of the chair, elevating his shoulders up around his neck, his face still split with a grin. “I got a deal for you. And if you don’t like it, I got maybe one other deal. But there’s not many deals on the table for you. Think real hard about your choices, Mr. Dolinski.”

“I came here to tell you the truth. Everyone says you’re a good businessman, the best at marketing the product you’re in. A good businessman wants facts. He doesn’t want bullshit. That’s what Artie Rooney and Hugo Cistranos sell, one hundred percent bullshit. You don’t want the facts about those women, I’m out of here.”

“You said you wanted to get even with Arthur Rooney. What did Arthur Rooney do to you?”

Nick glanced sideways at the cardplayers and at the women floating on cushions in the pool or lying on beach chairs. “When we were kids, him and his friends did a swirlie on me at the movie theater.”

“Explain this ‘swirlie’ to me.”

“They used my face to scrub out the toilet bowl. It was full of piss when they did it.”

Sholokoff’s laughter caused a convulsion in his cheek muscles that was like rictus in a corpse. He held a stiffened hand to his mouth to make it stop. Then his men started laughing, too. “You were paying back a guy because he washed your hair in piss? Now you’re in Phoenix bringing Josef a great truth about the operation of his business. I am in awe of you. You are what they call a great captain of industry. Now here are the deals for you, Mr. Dolinski. You ready?

“You can give Josef your restaurant and your vacation house on the river. Then Arthur Rooney and Hugo won’t be doing swirlies on your head anymore. Or you can take the second deal. This one is more interesting, one I like a lot more. Your wife has all the marks of a Siberian woman, a strong face and big tits and a broad ass. But I got to try her out first. Can you fly her out here?”

The men at the card table did not look up from their game but laughed under their breath. The hot wind blowing across the face of the mountain rustled the palm and bottlebrush trees and scattered bits of leaves on the surface of the pool. The women’s bodies looked as hard and sleek as those of seals.

Nick stood up from the chair. His feet were sweaty and felt like mush inside his socks. “I met some of your whores when I was running an escort service in Houston. They talked about you a lot. They kept using words like ‘rodent’ or ‘ferret.’ But they weren’t just talking about your face. They said your dick looked like a thumbtack. They said that was how come you got into porn. You got secret desires to be a human tampon.”

Sholokoff began laughing again, but much more quietly and not nearly as convincingly. One of his eyes seemed frozen in place, as though a separate and ugly thought were hidden in it.

“And here’s my deal to you, you Cossack cocksucker,” Nick continued. “You come around me or my family, I’m gonna mortgage or sell my restaurant, whichever is quicker, and use every dollar of the money to have your bony worthless ass greased off the planet. In the meantime, you might run a VD test on your skanks and Lysol your pool. I think I saw a couple of them lined up at the free herpes clinic in West Phoenix.”

Nick walked back across the lawn toward the carriage house. He could hear chairs scraping behind him and the voice of Josef Sholokoff starting to rise, like that of a man tangled inside his own irritability and his unwillingness to concede its origins.

Be there for me, Mohammed, Nick thought.

Mohammed was having his own troubles. He had moved the cab from near the carriage house to a spot by the corner of the building-probably, Nick suspected, to avoid seeing women dressed only in bikini bathing suits. But two of Sholokoff’s men had come out the front door and were blocking the driveway. Nick headed straight down the drive toward the electronic gates. Behind him, he heard Mohammed stepping on the gas, then the sound of tires whining across a slick surface.

Nick looked over his shoulder and saw Sholokoff’s cardplayers coming around the side of the house. Nick broke into a jog, then a run.

The cab was fishtailing across the lawn, blowing fountains of black soil and water and divots of grass from under the fenders, exploding a birdbath across the grille, destroying a flower bed in order to get on the driveway again. Mohammed swerved past Nick and hit the brakes. “Better get in, sir. I think we’re in deep excrement,” he said.

Nick piled into the backseat, and Mohammed floored the accelerator. The front end of the cab crashed into the gates just before they could lock shut, flinging them backward on their hinges, breaking both of the cab’s headlights. The cab careened into the street, one hubcap bouncing over the opposite curb, rolling like a silver wheel down the mountainside.

Nick sat back in the seat, his lungs screaming for air, his heart swollen the size of a bass drum, sweat leaking out of his eyebrows. “Hey, Mohammed, we did it!” he shouted.

“Did what, sir?”

“I’m not sure!”

“Why are you shouting, sir?”

“I’m not sure about that, either! Can I buy you a drink?”

“I don’t drink alcohol, sir.”

“Can I buy you a late dinner?”

“My ears are hurting, sir.”

“Sorry!” Nick shouted.

“My family is waiting supper for me, sir. I have a wife and four children at home. I have a very nice family.”

“Can I take all of you to a late dinner?”

“That’s very good of you, sir. My family and I would love that,” Mohammed said, pressing his palm to one ear, starting to shout himself. “I could hear you talking to those men. These are very dangerous men. But you spoke up to them like a hero. You are a very nice and brave man. Hang on, sir.”