Rain Gods

6

NICK DOLAN FELT he might have dodged a bolt of lightning. Hugo Cistranos had not shown up at the club or followed him to his vacation home on the Comal River. Maybe Hugo was all gas and flash and Afghan hash and would just disappear. Maybe Hugo would be consumed by his own evil, like a candle flame cupping and dying inside its own wax. Maybe Nick would finally get a break from the cosmic powers that had kept him running on a hamster wheel for most of his life.

Just outside the city limits of San Antonio, Nick lived in a neighborhood of eight-thousand-to-ten-thousand-square-feet homes, many of them built of stone, the yards cordoned off by thick green hedges, the sidewalks tree-shaded. The zoning code was strict, and trucks, trailers, mobile homes, and even specially outfitted vehicles to transport the handicapped could not be parked on the streets or in driveways overnight. But Nick cared less about the upscale, quasi-bucolic quality of his neighborhood than he did about the latticework enclosure and patio he had built with his own labor behind his house.

The palm trees that towered overhead had come from Florida, their root balls wrapped in wet burlap, the excavations they were dropped into sprinkled with dead bait fish and bat guano. The grapevine that wound through the latticework had been transplanted from his grandfather’s old home in New Orleans. The flagstones had been discovered during the construction of an overpass and brought by a friendly contractor to Nick’s house, four of them chiseled with a seventeenth-century Spanish coat of arms. His hedges flowered in spring and bloomed until December. In the center of his patio were a glass-topped bamboo table and bamboo chairs, all of it shaded by Hong Kong orchid trees rooted inside redwood barrels that had been sawed in half.

In the cooling of the day, Nick loved to sit at the table in fresh white tennis togs, a glass of gin and tonic and cracked ice in his hand, an orange slice inserted on the lip of the glass, and read a book, a best seller whose title he could drop in a conversation. The breeze was up tonight, the lavender sky flickering with heat lightning, the freshly clipped ends of the flowers in his hedge like thousands of pink and purple eyes couched among the leaves. Nick had smoked only nineteen cigarettes that day, a record. He had many things to be thankful for. Maybe he even had a future.

Inside the fragrance of his enclosure, he felt himself drowsing off, the weight of his book pulling itself from his hand.

His head jerked up, his eyes opening suddenly. He rubbed the sleep out of his face and wondered if he was having a bad dream. Hugo Cistranos was standing above him, grinning, his forearms thick and scrolled with veins, as though he had been wrist-curling a barbell. “Looks like you got quite a sunburn on the river,” he said.

“How’d you get in my yard?”

“Through the hedge.”

“Are you nuts coming here like this?”

Nick’s scalp constricted. He had just done it again, admitting guilt and complicity about things he hadn’t done, indicating he and Hugo had a relationship of some kind, one based on shared experience.

“Didn’t want to embarrass you at the club. Didn’t want to ring the bell and disturb your family. What’s a guy to do, Nicholas? We’ve got mucho shit-o to work through here.”

“I don’t owe you any money.”

“Okay, you owe it to my subcontractors. Put it any way you want. The vig is running as we speak. My chief subcontractor is Preacher Jack Collins. He’s a religious fanatic who did the hands-on work behind the church. Nobody knows what goes on inside his head, and nobody asks. I just delivered him his Honda and paid his medical expenses. Those services are all on your tab, too, Nicholas.”

“I don’t use that name.”

“No problemo, Nick-o. Know why I had to pay Preacher’s medical expenses? Because this broad here put two holes in him.”

Hugo placed a four-by-five color photograph on the glass tabletop. Nick stared down at the face of a girl with recessed eyes, her chestnut hair curled at the tips. “Ever see this cutie?” Hugo asked.

Nick’s scalp constricted again. “No,” he replied.

“How about this kid?” Hugo said, placing another photo next to the girl’s. A soldier in a United States Army dress uniform, an American flag on a staff as a backdrop, stared up at Nick.

“I never saw this person, either,” Nick said, studiously not letting his eyes drift back to the girl’s photograph.

“You said that pretty quick. Take another look.”

“I don’t know who they are. Why are you showing these pictures to me?”

“Those are two kids who can bring a lot of people down. They have to go off the board, Nick. People got to get paid, too, Nick. That means I’m about to be your new business partner, Nick. I’ve got the papers right here. Twenty-five percent of the club and the Mexican restaurant and no claim on anything else. It’s a bargain, little buddy.”

“Screw you, Hugo,” Nick said, his face dilating with the recklessness of his own rhetoric.

Hugo opened a manila folder and sorted through a half-inch of documents, as though giving them final approval, then closed the folder and set it on the table. “Relax, finish your drink and have a smoke, talk it over with your wife. There’s no rush.” He looked at his wristwatch. “I’ll send a driver for the papers, say, tomorrow afternoon, around three. Okay, little buddy?”

NICK HAD HOPED he would never see the girl named Vikki Gaddis again. His nonnegotiable rules for himself as the operator of a skin joint and as the geographically removed owner of escort services in Dallas and Houston had always remained the same: You paid your taxes, and you protected your girls and never personally exploited them.

Nick’s rules had preempted conflicts with the IRS and purchased for him an appreciable degree of respect from his employees. About eighteen months back, he had run a want ad in the San Antonio newspapers for musicians to play in the Mexican restaurant he had just built next to his strip club. Five days later, when he was out in the parking lot on a scalding afternoon, Vikki Gaddis had driven off the highway in a shitbox leaking smoke from every rusted crack in the car body. At first he thought she was looking for a job up on the pole, then he realized she hadn’t seen the ad but had been told he needed a folksinger.

“You’re confused,” Nick said. “I’m opening a Mexican restaurant. I need some entertainment for people while they’re eating dinner. Mexican stuff.”

He saw the disappointment in her eyes, a vague hint of desperation around her mouth. Her face was damp and shiny in the heat. Heavy trucks, their engines hammering, were passing on the highway, their air brakes hissing. Nick touched at his nose with the back of his wrist. “Why don’t you come on in the restaurant and let’s talk a minute?” he said.

Nick had already hired a five-piece mariachi band, one complete with sombreros and brocaded vaquero costumes, beer-bellied, mustached guys with brass horns that could crack the tiles on the roof, and he had no need of an Anglo folksinger. As he and the girl walked out of the sun’s glare into the air-conditioned coolness of the restaurant, the girl swinging her guitar case against her hip, he knew that an adulterer had always lived inside him.

She wore white shorts and a pale blue blouse and sandals, and when she sat down in front of his desk, she leaned over a little too far and he wondered if he wasn’t being played.

“You sing Spanish songs?” he said.

“No, I do a lot of the Carter Family pieces. Their music made a comeback when Johnny Cash married June. Then the interest died again. They created a style of picking that’s called ‘hammering on and pulling off.’”

Nick was clueless, his mouth hanging open in a half-smile. “You sing like Johnny Cash?”

“No, the Carters were a big influence on other people, like Woody Guthrie. Here, I’ll show you,” she said. She unsnapped her guitar case and removed a sunburst Gibson from it. The case was lined with purplish-pink velvet, and it glowed with a virginal light that only added to Nick’s confused thoughts about both the girl and the web of desire and need he was walking into.

She fitted a pick on her thumb and began singing a song about flowers covered with emerald dew and a lover betrayed and left to pine in a place that was older than time. When she chorded the guitar, the whiteness of her palm curved around the neck, and she depressed a bass string just before striking it, then released it, creating a sliding note that resonated inside the sound hole. Nick was mesmerized by her voice, the way she lifted her chin when she sang, the muscles working in her throat.

“That’s beautiful,” he said. “You say these Carter guys were an influence on Woody Herman?”

“Not exactly,” she replied.

“I already got a band, but maybe come back in a couple of weeks. If it doesn’t work out with them-”

“You have an opening for a food server?” she asked, putting away her guitar.

“I got two more than I need. I had to hire the cook’s sisters, or she was gonna walk on me.”

The girl snapped the locks on her case and raised her eyes to his. “Thanks, you’ve been real nice,” she said.

An image was forming in his mind that turned his loins to water. “Look, I got a place next door. Slap my face if you want. The money’s good, the girls working for me don’t have to do anything they don’t want to, I throw drunks and profane guys out. I try to keep it a gentlemen’s club even if some bums get in sometimes. I could use a-”

“What are you saying?”

“That I got an opening or two. That maybe you’re in a tight spot and I can help you out till you find a singing job.”

“I’m not a dancer,” she said.

“Yeah, I knew that,” he said, his face small and tight and burning. “I was just letting you know my situation. I only got so many resources. I got kids of my own.” He was stuttering, and his hands were shaking under the desk, his words nonsensical even to himself.

She was getting up, reaching for the handle on her guitar case, the back of one gold thigh streaked with a band of light.

“Ms. Gaddis-”

“Just call me Vikki.”

“I thought maybe I was doing a good deed. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“I think you’re a nice man. I enjoyed meeting you,” she said. She smiled at him, and in that moment, in order to be twenty-five again, Nick would have run his fingers one at a time through a Skilsaw.

Now, as he sat amid trellises and latticework that were green and thick with grapevine grown by his grandfather, an honest and decent man who had sold shoestrings from door to door, he tried to convince himself the girl in the photo was not Vikki Gaddis. But it was, and he knew it, and he knew her face would live in his sleep the rest of his life if Hugo killed her. And what about the soldier? Nick had recognized the elongated blue and silver combat infantryman badge on his chest. Nick could feel tears welling into his eyes but couldn’t decide if they were for himself or for the Thai women machine-gunned by somebody named Preacher Collins or for Vikki Gaddis and her boyfriend.

He lay down in the middle of his lawn, his arms and legs spread in the shape of a giant X, a weight as heavy as a blacksmith’s anvil crushing his chest.

WHEN HACKBERRY LOOKED out his office window and saw a silver car with a mirror wax job coming hard up the street, blowing dust and newspaper into the air, the sun bouncing off the windshield like the brassy flash of a heliograph, he knew that either a drunk or an outsider who couldn’t read speed limit signs or government trouble was about to arrive in the middle of his afternoon, free curbside delivery.

The man who got out of the car was as tall as Hackberry, his starched white shirt form-fitting on his athletic frame, his shaved and polished head gleaming under an afternoon sun that looked like a yellow flame. A dark-skinned man with a haircut like a nineteenth-century Apache’s sat hunched over in the backseat, both arms pulled down between his legs, as though he were trying to clutch his ankles. The dark-skinned man’s eyes were slits, his lips purple with either snuff or bruises, the back of his neck pocked with acne scars.

Hackberry put on a straw hat and stepped outside into the shade of the sandstone building that served as his office and the jail. The man with the shaved head held up his ID. The lidless intensity in his eyes and the tautness in his facial muscles made Hackberry think of a banjo string wound tightly on a wood peg, the tension climbing into a tremolo. The man said, “Isaac Clawson, ICE. I’m glad you’re in your office. I don’t like to chase a local official around in his own county.”

“Why is Danny Boy Lorca on a D-ring?”

“You know him?” Clawson said.

“I just used his name to you, sir.”

“What I mean is, do you know anything about him?”

“About once a month he walks from the beer joint down to the jail and sleeps it off. He lets himself in and out.”

“He’s the drinking buddy of Pete Flores. He says he doesn’t know where Flores is.”

“Let’s have a talk with him,” Hackberry said. He opened the back door of the sedan and leaned inside. The smell of urine welled into his face. There was a skinned place on Danny Boy’s right temple, like a piece of fruit that had been rubbed on a carrot grater. There was a dark area in his wash-faded jeans, as though a wet towel had been pressed into his groin.

“Have you seen Pete Flores around?” Hackberry said.

“Maybe two weeks back.”

“Y’all were drinking a little mescal together?”

“He was eating in Junior’s diner on the four-lane. That’s where his girlfriend works at.”

“We think some guys are trying to hurt him, Danny. You’d be doing Pete a big favor if you helped us find him.”

“I ain’t seen him since what I just told you.” Danny Boy’s eyes slid off Hackberry’s and fastened on Clawson’s, then came back again.

Hackberry straightened up and closed the door. “I think he’s telling the truth,” he said.

“You psychic with these guys?”

“With him I am. He doesn’t have any reason to lie.”

Clawson took off his large octagonal glasses and wiped them with a Kleenex, staring down the street, a deep wrinkle between his eyes. “Can we go inside?”

“It’s full of cigarette smoke. What’d you do to Danny Boy?”

“I didn’t do anything to him. He’s drunk. He fell down. When I picked him up, he started to swing on me. But I didn’t do anything to him.” Clawson opened the back door and used a handcuff key to free Danny Boy from the D-ring inset in the floor, then wrapped his fingers under Danny Boy’s arm and pulled him from the backseat. “Get going,” he said.

“You want me to hang around, Sheriff?” Danny Boy said.

“Did I tell you to get out of here?” Clawson said. He pushed Danny Boy, then kicked him in the butt.

“Whoa,” Hackberry said.

“Whoa what?” Clawson said.

“You need to dial it down, Mr. Clawson.”

“It’s Agent Clawson.”

Hackberry was breathing through his nose. He saw Pam Tibbs at the office window. He turned to Danny Boy. “Go down to Grogan’s and put a couple on my tab,” he said. “The operational word is ‘couple,’ Danny.”

“I don’t need a drink. I’m gonna get something to eat and go back to my place. If I hear anything on Pete, I’ll tell you,” Danny Boy said.

Hackberry turned and started back toward his office, ignoring Clawson’s presence. He could hear the flag popping in the breeze and the flag chain tinkling against the metal pole.

“We’re not done,” Clawson said. “Last night somebody made two nine-one-one calls from a pay phone outside San Antonio. I’ll play you part of it.”

He removed a small recorder from his pants pocket and clicked it on. The voice on the recording sounded like that of a drunk man or someone with a speech defect. “Tell the FBI there’s a whack out on a girl name of Vikki Gaddis. They’re gonna kill her and a soldier. It’s about those Thai women that got murdered.” Clawson clicked off the recorder. “Know the voice?” he said.

“No,” Hackberry said.

“I think the caller had a pencil clenched between his teeth and was loaded on top of it. Can you detect an accent?”

“I’d say he’s not from around here.”

“Here’s another piece of information: One of our forensic guys went the extra mile on the postmortem of the Thai females. They had China white in their stomachs, balloons full of it, the purest I’ve ever seen. Some of the balloons had ruptured in the women’s stomachs prior to mortality. I wonder if you stumbled into a storage area rather than a graveyard.”

“Stumbled?”

“English lit wasn’t my strong suit. You want to be serious here or not?”

“I don’t buy that the place behind the church was a storage area. That makes no sense.”

“Then what does?”

“I’ve been told of your personal loss, sir. I think I can appreciate the level of anger you must have to deal with. But you’re not going to verbally abuse or put your foot on anybody in this county again. We’re done here.”

“Where do you get off talking about my personal life? Where do you get off talking about my daughter, you sonofabitch?”

Just then the dispatcher Maydeen stepped outside and lit a cigarette. She wore a deputy’s uniform and had fat arms and big breasts and wide hips, and her lipstick looked like a flattened rose on her mouth. “Hack doesn’t let us smoke in the building,” she said, smiling from ear to ear as she inhaled deep into her lungs.

PREACHER JACK COLLINS paid the cabdriver the fare from the airstrip to the office-and-condo building that faced Galveston Bay. But rather than go immediately into the building, he paused on his crutches and stared across Seawall Boulevard at the waves folding on the beach, each wave rilling with sand and yellowed vegetation and dead shellfish and seaweed matted with clusters of tiny crabs and Portuguese men-of-war whose tentacles could wrap around a horse’s leg and sting it to its knees.

There was a storm breaking on the southern horizon like a great cloud of green gas forked with lightning that made no sound. The air had turned the color of tarnished brass as the barometer had dropped, and Preacher could taste the salt in the wind and smell the shrimp that had been caught inside the waves and left stranded on the sand among the ruptured blue air sacs of the jellyfish. The humidity was as bright as spun glass, and within a minute’s time it glazed his forearms and face and was turned into a cool burn by the wind, not unlike a lover’s tongue moving across the skin.

Preacher entered a glass door painted with the words REDSTONE SECURITY SERVICE. A receptionist looked up from her desk and smiled pleasantly at him. “Tell Mr. Rooney Jack is here to see him,” he said.

“Do you have an appointment, sir?”

“What time is it?”

The receptionist glanced at a large grandfather clock, one whose face was inset with Roman numerals. “It’s four-forty-seven,” she said.

“That’s the time of my appointment with Mr. Rooney. You can tell him that.”

Her hand moved toward the phone uncertainly, then stopped.

“That was just my poor joke. Ma’am, these crutches aren’t getting any more comfortable,” Preacher said.

“Just a moment.” She lifted the phone receiver and pushed a button. “Mr. Rooney, Jack is here to see you.” There was a beat. “He didn’t give it.” Another beat, this one longer. “Sir, what’s your last name?”

“My full name is Jack Collins, no middle initial.”

After the receptionist relayed the information, there was a silence in the room almost as loud as the waves bursting against the beach. Then she replaced the receiver in the cradle. Whatever thoughts she was thinking were locked behind her eyes. “Mr. Rooney says to go on up. The elevator is to your left.”

“He tell you to call somebody?” Preacher asked.

“I’m not sure I know what you mean, sir.”

“You did your job, ma’am. Don’t worry about it. But I’d better not hear that elevator come up behind me with the wrong person in it,” Preacher said.

The receptionist stared straight ahead for perhaps three seconds, picked up her purse, and went out the front door, her dress switching back and forth across her calves.

When Preacher stepped out of the elevator, he saw a man in a beige suit and pink western shirt sitting in a swivel chair behind a huge desk, framed against a glass wall that looked out onto the bay. On the desk was a big clear plastic jar of green-and-blue candy sticks, each striped stick wrapped in cellophane. His hips swelled out at the beltline and gave the sense that he was melting in his swivel chair. He had sandy hair and a small Irish mouth that was downturned at the corners. His skin was dusted with liver spots, some of them dark, almost purple around the edges, as though his soul exuded sickness through his pores. “Help you?” he said.

“Maybe.”

Down on the beach, swimmers were getting out of the water, dragging their inner tubes with them, a lifeguard standing in his elevated chair, blowing a whistle, pointing his finger at a triangular fin whizzing through a swell at incredible speed.

“Can I sit down?” Preacher said.

“Yes, sir, go right ahead,” Arthur Rooney said.

“Should I call you Artie or Mr. Rooney?”

“Whatever you want.”

“Hugo Cistranos work for you?”

“He did. When I had an investigative agency in New Orleans. But not now.”

“I think he does.”

“Sir?”

“Do I need to speak louder?”

“Hugo Cistranos is not with me any longer. That’s what I’m saying to you. What’s the issue, Mr. Collins?” Artie Rooney cleared his throat as though the last word had caught in his larynx.

“You know who I am?”

“I’ve heard of you. Nickname is Preacher, right?”

“Yes, sir, some do call me that with regularity, friends and such.”

“We just moved into this office. How’d you know I was here?”

“Made a couple of calls. Know that song ‘I Get Around’ by the Beach Boys? I get around, albeit on crutches. A woman put a couple of holes in me.”

“Sorry to hear about that.”

“Some other people and I got stuck with a piece of wet work. Supposedly, it was initiated by a little fellow who runs a skin joint for middle-aged titty babies. Supposedly, this little fellow doesn’t want to come up with the money to pay his tab. His name is Nick Dolan. Know who I’m talking about?”

“I’ve known Nick for thirty-five years. He had a floating casino in New Orleans.”

Preacher chewed on a hangnail and removed a piece of skin from his tongue. “I got to thinking about this little fellow, the one with the titty-baby joint about halfway between Austin and San Antone. Why would a fellow like that have a bunch of Asian women shot to death?”

Artie Rooney had crossed one leg over his knee and propped one hand stiffly on the edge of his desk, his stomach swelling over his belt. “You’re talking about that big slaughter down by the border? I’m not up on that, Mr. Collins. To be frank, I’m a little lost here.”

“I’m not a mister, so don’t call me that again.”

“I didn’t mean to be impolite or insult you.”

“What makes you think you have the power to offend me?”

“Pardon?”

“You have a hearing problem? Why is it you think you’re so important I care about your opinion of me?”

Rooney’s eyes drifted to the elevator door.

“I wouldn’t expect the cav’ry if I were you,” Preacher said.

Rooney picked up his phone and pushed a button. After a few seconds, he replaced the receiver without speaking into it and leaned back in his chair. He rested his elbow on the arm of the chair, his chin on his thumb and forefinger, his pulse beating visibly in his throat. There was a bloodless white rim around the edge of his nostrils, as though he were breathing refrigerated air. “What’d you do with my secretary?”

“A little Mexican girl across the river said I might have to go to hell. You want me to tell you what I did?”

“To the girl? You did something to a little girl is what you’re telling me?” Rooney’s hand seemed to flutter at his mouth, then he lowered it to his lap.

“I think you worked some kind of scam on this Dolan fellow. I’m not sure what it is, exactly, but it’s got your shit-prints on it. You owe me a lot of money, Mr. Rooney. If I’m going to hell, if I’m already there, in fact, how much you reckon my soul is worth? Don’t put your hand on that phone again. You owe me a half million dollars.”

“I owe you what?”

“I’ve got a gift. I can always tell a coward. I can always tell a liar, too. I think you’re both.”

“What are you doing? Stay away from me.”

Out on the beach, a mother up to her hips in the water was scooping her child from a wave, running with it up the incline, her dress ballooning around her, her face filled with panic.

“Don’t get up. If you get up, that’s going to make it a whole lot worse,” Preacher said.

“What are you doing with that? For God’s sakes, man.”

“My soul is going to be in the flames because of you. You invoke God’s name now? Put your hand on the blotter and shut your eyes.”

“I’ll get you the money.”

“Right now, in your heart, you believe what you’re saying. But soon as I’m gone, your words will be ashes in the wind. Spread your fingers and press down real hard. Do it. Do it now. Or I’ll rake this across your face and then across your throat.”

With his eyes tightly shut, Artie Rooney obeyed the man who loomed above him on crutches. Then Preacher Jack Collins laid the edge of his barber’s razor across Rooney’s little finger and mashed down on the back of the razor with both hands.