Billy Bob and Hackberry Holland Ebook Boxed Set (58 page)

 

A
T LEAST EIGHT
or nine boys had gotten up at once and headed toward the men's room, walking ahead of Hackberry, causing him to pause between a booth and a table while a youth minister tried to form the boys into a line. Hackberry glanced back at his booth. Pam had gotten up from the seat and picked up the check and was computing the tip, counting out four dollar bills and some change on the tabletop. She looked pretty, framed against the window, the tips of her hair touched by the late sun, her shoulders muscular inside her khaki shirt, her bottom a little too wide for her jeans, her chrome-plated .357 high up on
the right hip. When she realized he was staring at her, her cheeks colored and her expression took on an uncharacteristic vulnerability.

He winked and gave her the thumbs-up sign, but if asked, he couldn't have explained why.

The events and the images of the next few moments were kaleidoscopic in nature and seemed to lack causality, coherence, or rational sequence. The young boys crowding into the men's room were still unruly, but in the innocent way that all boys on a cross-country trip were unruly. An apple-cheeked bovine man in a western suit the color of tin was ladling meatballs off a platter onto the plates of his grandchildren. A workingman at the counter wiped beer foam off his chin and asked the waitress to change the television channel. A woman held up her water glass against the light and examined a dead fly floating in it. A minister in a lavender Roman collar was eating a steak, dipping each bite into a pool of ketchup that he had sprinkled with black pepper; his wife was telling him he was eating his food too fast. At the dessert bar, a teenage girl was upset because she had dropped and sunk the dipper in a container of hot fudge.

And Hackberry Holland, walking toward the restroom, squeezing between the diners, saw in the corner of his eye the man in the straw gardener's hat wrestling open a gym bag by his foot, ripping a thirty-inch-long object loose from a tangle of underwear and shirts and socks. As Hackberry stared in disbelief, as though watching a slow-motion film that had nothing to do with reality, he saw that the object was a cut-down pump shotgun, the hacksawed steel still bright from the cut, loose shotgun shells spilling out of the gym bag onto the floor.

His next thoughts flashed across his mind in under a second, in the way that a BB arches into space and disappears:

Where had he seen the man's face?

In a photo, maybe.

Except the face in the photo had an orange beard of the kind a Nordic seafarer might have.

Was this how it ended, with a flash from a shotgun muzzle and a burst of light inside the skull before the report ever reached his ears?

Hackberry tilted a table upward, spilling food and plates onto the
floor, and flung it at the man in the gardener's hat, who was raising the shotgun toward Hackberry's chest. The first discharge blew a shower of splinters and shreds of red-and-white-checkered cloth all over Hackberry's shoulder and left arm and down the side of his pants.

No one in the room moved. Instead, they looked stunned, shrunken, frozen inside clear plastic, as though a sonic boom had temporarily deafened them. Hackberry got his revolver free of its holster just as he heard the shooter jack another round into the chamber of his weapon. The second blast went high, over the top of the table. Glass caved out of the front window into the parking lot. Only then did people begin screaming, some trying to hide under tables or behind the booths. Someone kicked open a fire exit, setting off an alarm. The boys from the church bus had piled over one another into the men's room, their faces stretched tight with fear.

Hackberry was crouched behind the table and a wood post, a bent fork or spoon biting through the cloth of his trousers into his knee. He pointed his revolver through a space between the table and the wood post and let off two rounds in the direction of the shooter, the .45's frame kicking upward in his hand. He fired again and saw stuffing from a booth floating like chicken feathers in the gloom. He heard the shooter work the pump on his twelve-gauge and a spent shell casing clink and roll on a hard surface.

Hackberry hung on to the post and pulled himself erect, a tree of pain blooming in his back. He ran for the cover provided by the last booth in the shooter's row, letting off one round blindly at the shooter, his boots as loud as stones striking a wood surface.

The room became absolutely quiet, as though the air had been sucked out of it. Hackberry rose in a half-crouch and pointed his revolver at the place where the shooter had been. The gym bag was still on the floor. The shooter and the shotgun shells he had spilled from the bag were gone.

Hackberry straightened his back, his weapon still pointed in front of him, the hammer on full cock, the sight on the tip of the barrel trembling slightly with the tension of his grip on the frame. He glanced over his shoulder. Where was Pam? The window behind her booth was blown out, one vinyl seat of the booth and the wedges of glass protrud
ing from the window frame painted with red splatter. Hackberry wiped his mouth with his free hand and widened his eyes and tried to think clearly. What was the formal name for the situation? Barricaded suspect? The clinical language didn't come close to describing the reality.

“Give it up, partner. Nobody has to die here,” he said.

Except for a cough, the muted crying of a woman, and a sound like somebody prizing open a stuck window, the room remained silent.

“He went in the girls' bathroom,” a burr-headed boy in short pants said from under a table.

A latticework alcove had been built around the entrance to the women's restroom, obscuring the doorway. Hackberry walked at an angle toward the door, silverware and broken glass crunching under his boots, his eyes locked on the door through the spaces in the latticework.

Had Pam been hit? The second shotgun blast had traveled right across the booth where she had been counting out the tip on the tabletop.

“He's got a little girl in there. Don't go in there,” a voice said from behind an overturned chair.

It was the minister in the lavender Roman collar. He was bleeding from his cheek and neck; the heel of one hand sparkled with ground glass. His wife was on her knees beside him, gripping his arm, her body rounded into a ball.

“You saw him?” Hackberry asked.

“He grabbed the girl by the neck and pulled her with him,” the minister said.

“Can you get to the front door?” Hackberry asked.

“Yes, sir,” the minister replied. “I can.”

“When I start into the women's room, you stand up and take as many people with you as you can. Can you do that for me, sir?”

“You're going in there?”

“We'll bring the girl out of there safely. When you get out front, find my deputy. Her name is Pam Tibbs. Tell her exactly what you told me.”

“Who's the man with the shotgun?”

“His name is Eriksson. My deputy will recognize the name. Better get going, Reverend.”

“You said ‘we.'”

“Sir?”

“You said ‘we'll' get the girl out. Who's ‘we'?”

A moment later, Hackberry closed the distance between himself and the doorway while the minister and his wife began herding a group of twelve to fifteen people toward the front of the restaurant. Hackberry pressed his back against the wall, his revolver pointed upward. He could see the red sunset flowing through the destroyed front window and hear sirens in the distance. “Hear that sound, Eriksson?” he said.

There was a beat. “How'd you make me?”

“I didn't. If you hadn't shot at me, I would have walked past you.”

“You're lying.”

“Why would I lie?”

Eriksson had no answer. Hackberry remembered that originally, a second man had been sitting in Eriksson's booth, someone who had probably blown Dodge and left Eriksson to take the fall for both of them.

“Your partner screwed you, bub,” Hackberry said. “Why take his weight? Send the little girl out, and it'll be taken into consideration. You did security work in Iraq. That'll be a factor, too. Get a good defense lawyer, and with the right kind of post-traumatic-stress-disorder mambo, you might even skate. It beats eating a two-hundred-and-thirty-grain round from a forty-five.”

“You're gonna drive me out of this county. You're gonna get me into Mexico. Or I waste the girl.”

“Maybe I can arrange that.”

“No, you don't arrange anything. You do it.”

“How do you want to work that? Want me to bring a vehicle around back and load you and the girl up?”

“No, you put your piece on the floor, slide it to me with your foot, then you walk in with your fingers laced on the back of your neck.”

“That doesn't sound workable, Eriksson.”

“Maybe you'd like to see her brains floating in the toilet bowl.”

Hackberry heard the voice of a little girl crying. Or rather, the voice of a child whose fear had gone beyond crying into a series of hiccups
and constrictions of air in the nostrils and throat, like someone having a seizure. “Be stand-up. Let her go, partner,” Hackberry said.

“You want her? No problem. Kick the piece inside and come in after it. Otherwise, all bets are off. Think I'm jerking your johnson? Stick your head in here.”

Hackberry could hear a dronelike whirring sound in his ears, one he associated with wind blowing out of a blue-black sky across miles of snowy hills and ice splintering under the weight of thousands of advancing Chinese infantry.

“I'll make it easy for you,” Eriksson said. He opened the bathroom door slightly, allowing Hackberry a brief view of the restroom's interior. Eriksson was holding the little girl by the neck of her T-shirt while he screwed the cut-down pump into her shoulder bone. “I got nothing to lose,” he said.

“I believe you,” Hackberry said. He stepped backward, opened the cylinder to his revolver, and dumped his four spent rounds and two unfired ones into his palm and threw them clattering across the floor. He squatted, placed his revolver on the floor, and shoved it with one foot into the restroom.

“Walk in behind it,” Eriksson said.

Then Hackberry was in the enclosure with him, staring into the muzzle of the shotgun.

“Go on, little girl,” Eriksson said. “I wasn't gonna hurt you. I just had to say that.”

“Yes, you were. You hurt me bad,” she said, cupping her hand to one shoulder.

“Get out of here, you little skank,” Eriksson said. He bolted the door behind her, his attention never leaving Hackberry. “Slickered you, motherfucker.”

Hackberry let his eyes become dead and unseeing, let them drift off Eriksson's face to a spot on the wall. Or perhaps to a patch of red sky that should not have been visible inside a women's restroom.

“Did you hear me?” Eriksson asked.

“You're a smart one,” Hackberry said.

“You got that right.”

Then Eriksson seemed to realize something was wrong in his environment, that he had not seen or taken note of something, that in spite of his years of vanquishing his enemies and shaving the odds and orchestrating events so that he always walked away a winner, something had gone terribly wrong. “Get on your cell,” he said.

“What for?”

“What do you mean, what for? Tell your people to stay away from the building. Tell them to bring a car to the back.”

“You're not getting a car.”

“I'll get a car or you'll catch the bus, whichever you prefer.”

“You're leaving here in cuffs.”

Eriksson took his own cell phone from his pocket and tossed it to Hackberry. It bounced off Hackberry's chest and fell to the floor. “Pick it up and make the call, Sheriff,” Eriksson said.

“I said you're a smart one. A smart man is a listener. Listen to what I say and don't turn around. No, no, keep your eyes on me. You do not want to turn around.”

“Are you senile? I'm holding a shotgun in your face.”

“If you turn around, you'll lose your head,” Hackberry said. “Look straight ahead. Kneel down and place your weapon on the floor.”

Eriksson's lips parted. They were dry, caked slightly with mucus. His hands tightened on the twelve-gauge. He crimped his lips, wetting them before he spoke. “This has got a hair trigger. No matter what happens, you're gonna have a throat full of bucks.”

“Believe what I tell you, Eriksson. Don't move, don't back away from me, don't turn around. If you do any of those things, you will die. I give you my word on that. No one wants to see that happen to you. But it's your choice. You lower your weapon by the barrel with your left hand and place it on the floor and step away from it.”

“I think you're a mighty good actor, Sheriff, but I also think you're full of shit.”

Eriksson stepped backward, out of Hackberry's reach, turning his line of vision toward a frosted back window that had been wedged open with a tire tool. For just a moment, the aim of his shotgun angled away from Hackberry's chest. Outside, a huge cloud of orange dust gusted across the sun.

Eriksson's translucent blue eyes were charged with light. His face seemed to twitch just before he saw Pam Tibbs standing slightly beyond the window ledge, her khaki shirt speckled with taco sauce, her chrome-plated revolver aimed in front of her with both hands. That was when she squeezed the trigger, driving a soft-nosed .357 round through one side of his head and out the other.

P
REACHER
J
ACK
C
OLLINS
lived at several residences, none of which carried his name on a deed or a rental agreement. One of them was located south of old Highway 90, within sight of the Del Norte Mountains, twenty miles deep into broken desert terrain that looked composed of crushed stone knitted together by the roots of scrub brush and mesquite and cactus that bloomed with bloodred flowers.

On the mountain behind his one-bedroom stucco house was a series of ancient telegraph poles whose wires hung on the ground like strands of black spaghetti. Behind the poles was the gaping opening of a rock-walled root cellar that had been shored up with wood posts and crossbeams that either had collapsed or that insects had reduced to the weightless density of cork.

One starlit night, Preacher had sat in the entrance and watched the desert take on the gray and blue and silver illumination that it seemed to draw down into itself from the sky, as though the sky and the earth worked together to both cool the desert and turn it into a pewter artwork. Then he had realized that a breeze was blowing into his face and flowing over his arms and shoulders and into the excavation at his back.
The root cellar was not a root cellar after all. Nor was it a mine. It was a cave, deep and spiraling, one that had probably been formed by water millions of years ago, one that led to the other side of the mountain or a cavern far beneath it. Perhaps early settlers had framed up the walls and ceilings with timbered support, but Preacher was convinced no human hand had contributed to its creation.

He spent many evenings sitting on a metal chair in front of the cave, wondering if the wind echoing inside it spoke to him and if indeed the desert was not an ancient vineyard made sterile by man's infidelity to Yahweh. Paradoxically, that thought comforted him. The sinfulness of the world somehow gave him a greater connection to it, made him more acceptable in his own eyes and simultaneously reduced the level of his own iniquity. Except Preacher had one problem he could not rid himself of: He had filled the ground with the bodies of Oriental women and watched while Hugo's bulldozer had scalloped up the earth and pushed the backfill over them. He told himself he had been acting as an agent of God, purging the world of an abomination, perhaps even preempting the moral decay and diseases that had awaited them as prostitutes on the streets of a corrupt nation.

But Preacher was having little success with his rationalization for the mass execution of the helpless and terrified women who waited for him nightly in his sleep. When Bobby Lee Motree arrived at Preacher's house in the desert, Jack was delighted by the distraction.

He set up two metal chairs in front of the cave and opened cold bottles of Coca-Cola for the two of them and watched while Bobby Lee drank his empty, his throat pumping, one eye fastened curiously on Preacher. Bobby Lee was wearing a muscle shirt and his top hat and his brown jeans that had yellow canvas squares stitched on the knees. He was full of confidence and cheer at being back in Preacher's good graces; he unloaded his burden, telling Preacher how Liam got popped by the female deputy sheriff in the restaurant and how that rat bastard Artie Rooney had told Hugo to smoke everybody—the soldier and his girl, the Jewish guy and his wife and maybe even the Jewish guy's kids, and finally, Preacher himself.

“If you cain't trust Artie Rooney, who can you trust? The standards of our profession have seriously declined,” Preacher said.

“I was thinking the same thing,” Bobby Lee replied.

“That was a joke.”

“Yeah, I knew that. I can always tell when you're joking.”

Preacher let the subject slide. “Tell me again how this Holland fellow spotted Liam. I didn't quite get all that.”

“I guess he recognized him, that's all.”

“Even though Liam had shaved off his beard and was sitting in a crowded restaurant and the sheriff had never seen him and had no reason to be looking for Liam there?”

“Search me. Weird stuff happens.”

“But the sheriff didn't make you?”

“I was in the can, taking a dump.”

“How'd you get out during all that shooting if you were in the can?”

“It was a Chinese fire drill. I ran outside with the crowd.”

“And just strolled on off, a fellow with no car, a fellow everybody saw sitting with Liam just a few minutes earlier?”

“Most of them were pouring the wee-wee out of their shoes. Why should they worry about me?”

“Maybe you were just lucky.”

“I told you the way it was.”

“Young people believe they're never going to die. So they've got confidence that old men like me don't have. That's where your luck comes from, Bobby Lee. Your luck is an illusion produced by an illusion.”

Bobby Lee's obvious sense of discomfort was growing. He shifted in his chair and glanced at the stars and the sparkle of the desert and the greenish cast at the bottom of the sky. “Is that hole behind us one of those pioneer storage places where they kept preserves and shit?”

“Maybe it goes down to the center of the earth. I'm going to find out one day.”

“Sometimes I just can't track what you're saying, Jack.”

“My uncle was in the South Pacific. He said he dynamited a whole mountain on top of the Japs who wouldn't surrender and were hiding in caves. He said you could hear them at night, like hundreds of bees buzzing under the ground. I bet if you put your ear to the ground, you might still hear them.”

“Why do you talk about stuff like that?”

“Because I'm doubting your truthfulness, and you're starting to piss me off.”

“I wouldn't try to put the glide on you. Give me some credit,” Bobby Lee said, his eyes round, unblinking, the pupils dilated like drops of ink in the dark.

“Bobby Lee, you either gave up Liam or this fellow Holland is a special kind of lawman, the kind who doesn't quit till he staples your hide on the barn door. Which is it?”

“I didn't give up Liam. He was my friend,” Bobby Lee replied, propping his hands on his knees, tilting his face up at the sky. His unshaved jaw looked as though grains of black pepper and salt had been rubbed into the pores. Preacher looked at him for a long time, until Bobby Lee's face began to twitch and his eyes glistened. “You want to keep hurting and insulting me, go ahead and do it. I came out here to see you because you're my friend. But all you do is run me down,” Bobby Lee said.

“I believe you, boy,” Preacher said.

Bobby Lee cleared his throat and spat. “Why do you do it?” he asked.

“Do what?”

“Our kind of work. We're button men. We push people's off button and shut down their motors. A pro does it for money. It's not supposed to be personal. You're a pro, Preacher, but with you, it's not the money. It's something nobody ever asks you about. Why do you do it?”

“Why are you asking me?”

“'Cause you're the only man I could ever relate to.”

“You see the glow in the land? It's the bone in the soil that does that. Inside all that alluvial soil and lava flow and sedimentary rock, there's millions of dead things letting off energy, lighting the way for the rest of us.”

“Go on.”

Preacher picked a mosquito off his neck and squeezed it between his thumb and finger. He wiped the blood on a piece of Kleenex. “That's all. You asked a question and I answered it.”

“I don't get it. Lighting the way, what?”

“Don't fret yourself, boy. I need to know everything about this fellow Holland. I want to know why he was down by Big Bend. I want to know how he recognized Liam.”

“I'm one guy. You got us into all this, Jack. How am I supposed to fix everything?”

Preacher didn't respond. In the wind, his face looked as serene and transfixed as though it had been bathed in warm water, his lips parted slightly, his teeth showing. In his eyes was a black reflection that made even Bobby Lee swallow, as though Preacher saw a presence on the horizon that no one else did. “You're not mad at me, are you?” Bobby Lee said, trying to smile.

“You? You're like a son to me, Bobby Lee,” Preacher answered.

 

B
OBBY
L
EE DROVE
away from the stucco house before first light, and Preacher prepared breakfast for himself on a propane stove and ate from a tin plate on his back steps. As a red glow fingered its way across the plain from the east, Preacher mounted his crutches and worked his way down the incline toward a mesa that was still locked in shadow. He crossed the opening to an arroyo and stumped through a depression of soft baked clay that cracked and sank beneath his weight with each step he took. He thought he could see petroglyphs cut in the layered rock above his head, and he was convinced he was traversing an alluvial flume that probably had irrigated verdant fields when an agrarian society had lived in harmony with the animals and a knife blade hammered out of primitive iron drew no blood from them or the people who had been sent to dwell east of Eden.

But Preacher Jack's thoughts about a riparian paradise brought him no peace. When he looked behind him, the funnel-shaped indentations of his crutches in the dried-out riverbed reminded him of coyote tracks. Even the drag of his footprints was serpentine and indistinct, as though his very essence were that of a transient and weightless creature not worthy of full creation.

He wished to think of himself as a figure emblazoned retroactively on biblical legend, but the truth was otherwise. He had been a burden to his mother the day he was born, as well as a voyeur to her trysts. Now he lusted for the woman who had bested him both physically and intellectually and, in addition, had managed to pump one .38 round into his calf and one through the top of his foot. The memory of her scent, the heat
in her skin and hair, the smear of her saliva and lipstick on his skin caused a swelling in his loins that made him ashamed.

She had not only eluded him but indirectly had gotten Liam Eriksson killed and involved a sheriff named Holland in the case, probably the kind of rural hardhead a pro didn't mess with or, if necessary, you paid somebody else to pop.

Preacher turned in a circle and began thudding his way back toward his house. The hills and mesas were pink in the sunrise, the air sweet, the leaves of the mesquite brushing wetly against his trousers and wrists and hands. He wanted to breathe the morning into his chest and cast out the funk and depression that seemed to screw him into the earth, but it was no use; he had never felt so alone in his life. When he closed his eyes, he thought he saw a boxcar on a rail siding, his mother sitting on a stool inside the open door, cutting carrots and onions into a pot in which she would make a soup that she would heat on an open fire that evening. In the dream, his mother lifted her face into the sunlight and smiled at him.

Maybe it was time to put aside doubt and self-recrimination. A man could always become captain of his soul if he tried. A man didn't have to accept the hand fate had dealt him. Moses didn't. Neither did David. Wasn't it time to continue his journey into a biblical past and to become a son of whom his mother could be proud, regardless of deeds he had performed on behalf of Artie Rooney, regardless of the nightmares in which a line of Oriental women tried to hold up their palms against the weapon that jerked sideways in his grasp, almost as though it possessed a will stronger than his own?

The answer lay in the Book of Esther. The story had been written twenty-three hundred years before he was born, and it had waited all these centuries for him to step inside it and take on the role that should have been his, that was now being offered to him by an invisible hand. He drew the freshness of the morning into his lungs and felt a pang in his chest as sharp as a piece of broken glass.

 

A
T FIVE A.M
. Nick Dolan woke to the sound of raindrops striking the banana fronds below his bedroom window. Briefly, he thought he was at
his grandfather's house off Napoleon Avenue in New Orleans. His grandfather had lived in a shotgun house with a peaked tin roof and ceiling-high windows flanged by ventilated shutters that could be latched during the hurricane season. There was a pecan tree in the backyard with a rope swing, and the ground under its branches was soft and moldy and green with flattened pecan husks. Even in the hottest part of the day, the yard was breezy and stayed in deep shade and the neighborhood children gathered there each summer afternoon at three o'clock to await the arrival of the Sno-Ball truck.

The grandfather's house was a safe place, far different from Nick's neighborhood in the Ninth Ward, where Artie Rooney and his brothers and their friends had made life a daily torment for Nick.

Nick sat on the side of the bed and cupped his hand lightly on Esther's hip. She was turned toward the wall, her dark hair and paleness touched with the shadows the moonlight created through the window. He slipped her nightgown up her thigh and hooked his finger over the elastic of her panties and pulled them down far enough so he could kiss her lightly on the rump, something he always did before congress with her. He could feel the nocturnal intensity of her body heat through her gown and hear the steady, undisturbed sound of her breathing against the wall. The touch of his hand or his lips seemed to neither awaken nor arouse her, and he wondered if her deep slumber was feigned or if indeed she had dreamed herself back into a time when Nick had not exchanged off their happiness for success in the skin trade.

He put on his slippers and robe and ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts and drank a glass of cold milk in the kitchen and, at six
A.M
., disarmed the burglar alarm and retrieved the newspaper from the front yard. The morning was cool and damp and smelled of water sprinklers and Nick's closely cropped St. Augustine grass that his Mexican gardeners had mowed late yesterday and the night-blooming flowers Esther constantly fertilized with coffee grounds and bat guano and fish blood and black dirt bagged from a swamp outside Lake Charles, all of which created a fecund odor Nick associated with a Louisiana graveyard that lay so deep in shadow it was never penetrated by sunlight.