Billy Bob and Hackberry Holland Ebook Boxed Set (52 page)

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

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

“Preacher Jack Collins,” Hackberry said.

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

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

“Good work, Pam. Let's go,” he said.

“What about Clawson?”

“What about him?”

“We're supposed to coordinate, right?”

Hackberry didn't reply.

“Right, Hack?” she said.

“I'm not totally confident about Clawson.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hackberry closed the cell phone and looked at Pam.

“
What?
” she said.

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

“Finish your thought,” she said.

“Remind me not to take your advice anymore.”

“Anything else?”

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Need a king or a pair of queens?”

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

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

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

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

“You hurt your eye?”

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

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

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

 

T
HERE HAD BEEN
an eight-vehicle pileup by an intersection of I-35 and I-10, a chemical tanker jackknifing and sloshing its load across six lanes of traffic. Hackberry had clamped his magnetized portable flasher on the roof of his truck cab and was trying to thread his way along the road's shoulder to an exit by a shopping center. He handed his cell phone to Pam. “Try Clawson again,” he said.

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

“For Clawson?”

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

“Hang on,” Hackberry said.

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

“You all right?” Hackberry said.

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

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

“Who?”

“The FBI agent.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Who told you that?”

“No one.”

He looked at her.

“I just knew,” she said.

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

 

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

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

Except for 206.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there was no response.

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

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

Again there was no response.

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

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