Rain Gods (25 page)

He reached inside his SUV and drank from a can of warm soda. Was he coming down with something? No such luck. His world was coming apart. He had always admired Preacher for his professionalism and invisibility, and for the way he had become a legend, a one-man Murder, Inc., without ever going inside the system. But Preacher had gone along with Hugo on the mass mow-down of the Asians, and now he’d popped a federal agent. Somebody would have to go down for it. Hugo? That was a laugh. Preacher? Jack would eat a Gatling gun before he’d allow anyone to take him into custody. Who did that leave?

The answer wasn’t one Bobby Lee liked to think about. The rest of the team consisted of him and Liam Eriksson, and Liam was already on Jack’s S-list for stealing the disability check and trying to cash it while he and his hooker girlfriend were drunk. Liam and Bobby Lee were basically working stiffs, making a score here and there, putting away a few bucks for a better life, waiting for the proper time to hang it up. They weren’t religious crazoids like Jack, or guys like Hugo who got off on capping people. For Liam and Bobby Lee, it was just a job. But working stiffs were disposable and replaceable. If anyone disagreed with that, he just needed to check out the audience at an ultimate-fighter match.

Bobby Lee remembered when he did his first hit, at age twenty, out on Alligator Alley between Fort Lauderdale and Naples, a five-thou whack on a Cuban who’d raped the daughter of a Mobbed-up guy from the Jersey Shore. At first Bobby Lee thought it might bother him to pop a guy he had nothing against, but it didn’t. He bought the hit a couple of drinks in Lauderdale, told him he had a fishing camp in the Glades, then showed him this big grassy bay in the moonlight and parked two .22 hollow-points,
pow, pow
, that fast, behind the guy’s ear, and suddenly the guy was facedown in the water, his arms outstretched, his suit coat puffed with air like he was studying the bottom of the bay, the night air throbbing with bullfrogs.

But what should Bobby Lee do now? Deep-six the brothers-in-arms stuff and blow Dodge on Preacher? That thought didn’t sit well, either. If Bobby Lee was to remain a pro back in Florida, where he planned to re-enroll at Miami-Dade, doing an occasional contract job when he needed money, he had to keep his reputation intact. Also, bailing out on Preacher was a good way to ensure a lifetime of looking over his shoulder.

Bobby Lee opened his cell phone again and hit the redial button.

“Where you been?” Preacher’s voice said.

“All over most of two counties.”

“Think about what you just said. It’s a contradiction in terms.”

“What?”

“What did you find?”

“Nothing. But I got an idea.”

“What do you mean, ‘nothing’?”

“What I said. I couldn’t find a Siesta motel. That’s where the guy Junior Whatever said the girl and the soldier were staying.”

“Call me back on a landline.”

“Jack, the CIA isn’t following us around. They pull stuff out of the air when they’re after the rag heads.” Bobby Lee stopped, his frustration with Preacher building. He wanted to throw the cell phone down on the asphalt and stomp it into junk. “You still pissed at Liam ’cause he tried to cash the soldier’s check?”

“What do you think?”

“I say give Liam a break. The guy’s out there, he’s trying.”

“Out where?”

This time Bobby Lee ignored Preacher’s constant attempts to correct his language and somehow turn it against him. “Look, I’ll call you back later. I’ve got a plan.”

“You’ve been wandering around on the border for two days. That’s a plan?”

“You ever know a junkie who was farther than one day away?”

“What’s your point?”

“There’s no difference between a junkie and a drunk. A rat goes to its hole. The soldier is a juicer and drifts in and out of A.A., at least that’s the word. Hugo says he’s got a pink scar on his face as thick as an earthworm. I’ll find him. I guarantee it. I called the A.A. hotline and got an area schedule. You still there, Jack?”

Had the service simply gone down, or had Preacher hung up? Bobby Lee hit the speed dial, but his call went immediately to voice mail. He closed and opened his eyes, the mountain in front of him like a dark volcanic cone cooling against the evening sun.

THERE WERE FEW twelve-step groups in the area, or at least few that met more often than once a week, and the following day Pete Flores felt he was lucky to hitch a ride to one called the Sundowners that met in a fundamentalist church thirty miles down the road from the motel where he and Vikki were staying. The church house was a white-frame building with a small false bell tower on the apex of the roof and a blue neon cross mounted above the entranceway. In back were a mechanic’s shed and, next to it, a cemetery whose graves were strewn with plastic flowers and jelly glasses green with dried algae. Even with the windows wide open, the air inside the building was stifling, the wood surfaces as warm to the touch as a cookstove. Pete had arrived early at the meeting, and rather than sit in the heat, he went outside and sat on the back steps and looked at the strange chemical-green coloration in the western sky, the sun still as bright as an acetylene torch on the earth’s rim. The sedimentary layers of the mesalike formations were gray and yellow and pink above the dusk gathering on the desert floor. Pete felt as though he were sitting at the bottom of an enormous dried-out riparian bowl, one shaped out of potter’s clay in a prehistoric time, the land giving off an almost feral odor when rain tried to restore it to life.

The man who sat down next to Pete on the step was wearing an immaculate white T-shirt and freshly pressed strap overalls. He smelled of soap and aftershave lotion, and his dark hair was boxed on the back of his neck. His thick half-moon eyebrows were neatly clipped, the cleft in his chin shiny from a fresh shave. There was a bald spot in the center of his head. When he stared southward at the desert, his mouth was a gray slit without expression or character, his eyes dulled over. He pulled a cigarette out of his pack with his lips, then shook another one loose and offered it to Pete.

“Thanks, I never took it up,” Pete said.

“Good choice,” the man said. He lit his cigarette and blew the smoke from the side of his mouth deferentially. “I’m new at this meet. How is it?”

“Don’t know. This is my first time here, too.”

“You got some sobriety in?”

“A few days, that’s about it. I’ve got a twenty-four-hour chip.”

“Twenty-four hours can be a bitch.”

“You work here’bouts?” Pete asked.

“I was hauling pipe between Presidio and Fort Stockton, up to last month, anyway. I got a service-connected disability, but my boss was a pretty hard-nosed character. According to him, time in the Sandbox was for jerks.”

“You were in Iraq?”

“Two tours.”

“My tank got blown up in Baghdad,” Pete said.

The man’s eyes drifted to the long welted scar that ran like a pink raindrop down the side of Pete’s face. “You start drinking when you came home?”

Pete studied the deepening color in the sky, the hills that seemed humped against a fire burning just beyond the earth’s rim. “It runs in my family. I don’t think the war had much to do with it,” he said.

“That’s a stand-up way to look at it.”

“How much sobriety you have?”

“A couple of years, more or less.”

“You have a two-year chip?” Pete said.

“I’m not big on chips. I do the program my own way.”

Pete folded his hands and didn’t reply.

“You got wheels?” the man said.

“I hitched a ride with a guy who smelled like a beer truck. I asked him to come in with me, but he said Jesus’s first miracle was turning water into wine, and his followers weren’t hypocrites about it. I couldn’t quite fit all that together.”

“Want to get some coffee and a piece of pie after the meet? I’m springing,” the man in overalls said.

During the meeting, Pete forgot about his conversation with the man he’d met on the back steps. A woman was talking about going on a dry drunk and experiencing flashbacks that returned her to the inside of a blackout. Her voice, like that of a benighted soul forced to witness light, became threaded with tension as she told the group she might have killed someone with her automobile. The room was quiet when she finished speaking, the people in the pews and folding chairs staring at their feet or into space, their faces wan, each knowing the speaker’s story could have been his or her own.

After the meeting, the man in overalls helped stack chairs and wash out cups and the coffeemaker. He glanced in the direction of the woman who thought she might have committed vehicular homicide. He lowered his voice. “That one is about to talk herself into Huntsville pen,” he said to Pete.

“What you hear and who you see here stays here. That’s the way it’s supposed to work,” Pete said.

“Anybody who believes that has a lot more trust in people than I do. Let’s get something to eat, and I’ll take you home.”

“You don’t know how far I live.”

“Believe me, I got nothing better to do. My girlfriend boosted my truck and took off with a one-legged Bible salesman,” the man in overalls said. He stared across the row of pews at the woman who had spoken of a dry drunk earlier; his forehead creased with furrows. The woman stood at a window, her attention fixed on the darkness outside, her hands resting on the sill as though they weren’t attached to her arms. “Goes to show you, doesn’t it?” he said.

“Show you what?” Pete said.

“That woman over there, the one confessed to killing somebody who might not exist. She looks like she just figured out she’s created a bigger mess than the one she was already in.”

Pete didn’t answer. Ten minutes later he drove to a restaurant with the man in overalls, who said his name was Bill, and ordered a piece of cake and a glass of iced tea.

“You got a girl?” Bill said.

“I like to think I do,” Pete replied.

“She’s in the program, too?”

“No, she’s normal. I never could figure why she got involved with the likes of me.”

“Where y’all living?”

“A low-rent joint up the road.”

Bill seemed to wait for the next words Pete would speak.

“I’ve been thinking about something,” Pete said. “That woman back yonder at the meet?”

“The wet-brain?”

“I wouldn’t call her that.”

Bill picked up the check and studied it, then looked irritably in the direction of the waitress.

“She was willing to confess to something maybe she didn’t do,” Pete continued. “Or if she did do it, she was willing to confess to it and maybe go to prison. For her, it didn’t make any difference. She just wants to be forgiven for whatever she’s done wrong in her life. That takes guts and humility I don’t reckon I have.”

“That broad can’t add,” Bill said, getting up with the check in hand. “I’ll meet you outside. We need to haul freight. I got to get some shut-eye.”

Pete waited in the parking lot, chewing on a plastic soda straw, looking at the stars, Venus winking above a black mountain in the west. What had Bill said earlier about a two-year sobriety chip? He hadn’t bothered to accept it? That one didn’t quite slide down the pipe. That would be like turning down the Medal of Honor because the ceremony conflicted with an evening of color-matching your socks.

“Ready to roll?” Bill said, exiting the café.

Pete removed the soda straw from his mouth and looked at Bill in the glow of a neon beer sign.

“Problem?” Bill said.

“No, let’s boogie,” Pete said.

“You still haven’t told me where you live.”

“At the red light, turn east and keep going till you run out of pavement.”

“I thought you said you lived up the road, not east,” Bill said, trying to smile.

“I guess I’m not that sharp when it comes to the cardinal points of the compass. Actually, our place is so far back in the sticks, we got to bring the sunshine in on a truck,” Pete replied. “That’s a fact.”

Bill was quiet as they drove eastward through hardpan countryside dotted with mesquite and old tires and scrap metal that sparkled like mica under the moon. He put a mint on his tongue and sucked on it and looked sideways at Pete as the SUV hit chuckholes that jarred the frame. “How much farther?”

“Another five or six miles.”

“What the hell do you do out here?”

“I’m shaving and treating fence posts for a fellow.”

“That’s interesting. I didn’t know there was that much wood around here.”

“It’s what I do.”

“How about your girl?”

“She’s got a little Internet business.”

“Selling what? Lizard turds?”

“She does right well with it.”

Bill drove past another mile marker. Set back between two hills was a lighted house with a gasoline truck parked in the yard and a windmill in back. Horses stood motionlessly in a railed pen where the grass was nubbed down to the dirt.

“Excuse me,” Bill said, reaching across Pete.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s my Beretta. You see that jackrabbit go across the road? Hang on.”