"McCammon, Robert R. - Stinger" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCammon Robert R)

“I want. Tell him to get out here pronto.” She hung up before he could reply. Tania had come in and offered the woman a Bloody Mary on one of the last sterling silver trays. Celeste took it, stirred up the hot peppers with a celery stick, and took most of it down in a couple of swallows. Tania had added more Tabasco than usual today, but Celeste didn’t wince. “Who do I have to jaw with today?” She ran the glass’s frosty rim over her high, lined forehead.
“No one. Your schedule’s clear.”
“Thank God and jingle my spurs! Bunch of damned bloodsuckers gonna let me rest a spell, huh?”
“You have appointments with Mr. Weitz and Mr. O’Connor on Monday morning,” Tania reminded her.
“That’s Monday. I might be dead by then.” She finished off her drink and plunked the glass back on the silver tray. The thought of returning to bed entered her mind, but she was too keyed up now. The last six months had been one legal headache after another, not to mention the damage done to her soul. Sometimes she felt like God’s punching bag, and she knew she’d done a lot of down-and-dirty things in her life, but she was paying for her sins in spades.
“Is there anything else?” Tania asked, her dark eyes steady and impassive.
“No, that’s it.” But Celeste changed her mind before Tania could reach the massive, polished redwood door. “Wait a minute. Hold on.”
“Yes, seсora?”
“I didn’t mean to jump down your throat awhile ago. It’s just… you know, times bein’ what they are.”
“I understand, seсora.”
“Good. Listen, anytime you and Miguel want to unlock the bar for yourselves, might as well go ahead.” She shrugged. “Ain’t no sense lettin’ the liquor go to waste.”
“I’ll remember that, Mrs. Preston.”
Celeste knew she wouldn’t. Neither Tania nor her husband drank, and anyway somebody had to stay clearheaded around here, if just to keep the human vultures away. Her flinty gaze locked with Tania’s. “You know, in thirty-four years you’ve always called me either ‘Mrs. Preston’ or ‘seсora.’ Haven’t you once wanted to call me ‘Celeste’?”
Tania hesitated. Shook her head. “Not once, seсora.”
Celeste laughed; it was the hearty laughter of a woman who was no stranger to the hard life, who once had been proud of the rodeo dirt under her fingernails and knew that winning and losing were two sides of the same coin. “You’re a card, Tania! I know you’ve never liked me worth a buzzard’s fart, but you’re all right.” Her smile faded. “I appreciate your stayin’ on these last few months. You didn’t have to.”
“Mr. Preston was always very kind to us. We wanted to repay the debt.”
“You have.” Her eyes narrowed slightly. “But tell me one thing, and tell me true: would the first Mrs. Preston have handled this shit mess any better?”
The other woman’s expression was flat and without emotion. “No,” she said finally. “The first Mrs. Preston was a beautiful, gracious woman—but she didn’t have your courage.”
Celeste grunted. “Yeah, and she wasn’t crazy, either. That’s why she hightailed it out of this hellhole forty years ago!”
Tania abruptly veered back to familiar ground: “Will there be anything else, seсora?”
“Nope. But I’m expectin’ the sheriff pretty soon, so listen up.”
Her back straight and stiff, Tania left the bedroom. Her footsteps clicked away on the oak floor in the long corridor outside.
Celeste listened, realizing how empty a house without furniture sounded. There were a few pieces left, of course, like the bed and her dressing table and the dining-room table downstairs, but not much. She walked across the room, took a thin black cheroot from a silver filigreed case. The French crystal lighter had already gone to the auction house, so Celeste lit her cigar with a pack of matches that advertised the Bob Wire Club on Highway 67. Then she went out again to the balcony, where she exhaled the pungent smoke and lifted her face toward the brutal sun.
Going to be another god-awful hot one, she thought. But she’d lived through worse. And would again. All this tangled-up mess with the lawyers, the state of Texas, and the Internal Revenue Service was going to pass like a cloud in a high wind, and then she’d get on with her life.
“My life,” she said, and the lines around her mouth etched deep. She’d come a long way from a bayside shack in Galveston, she mused. Now she was standing on the balcony of a thirty-six-room Spanish-style hacienda on a hundred acres of land—even if the house was without furniture and the land was rocky desert. In the garage was a canary-yellow Cadillac, the last of the six cars. On the mansion’s walls were empty spaces where Miro, Rockwell, and Dali paintings used to hang; those were among the first to be auctioned, along with the French antique furniture and Wint’s collection of almost a thousand stuffed rattlesnakes.
Her bank account was frozen tighter than an Eskimo’s balls, but a regiment of Dallas lawyers was working on the problem and she knew that any day now she’d get a call from that office with the seven names; they’d say, “Mrs. Preston? Good news, hon! We’ve tracked down the missing funds, and the IRS has agreed to take their back taxes in monthly payments. You’re out of the woods! Yes, ma’am, old Wint took care of you after all!”
Old Wint, Celeste knew, had been slicker than owl shit. He’d danced around government safety regulations and tax codes, corporate laws and bank presidents like a Texas whirlwind, and the stroke that had kicked him out of this world on the second day of December, at the age of eighty-seven, had left her to pay the band.
She looked east, toward Inferno and the mine. Over sixty years ago, Winter Thedford Preston had come south from Odessa with a mule called Inferno, searching for gold in the scrub lands. The gold had eluded him, but he’d found a crimson mountain that the Mexicali Indians had told him was made of sacred, healing dust. Wint had a knack for metallurgy—though his formal education had ended at the seventh grade—and his nose had not picked up the scent of sacred dust but of rich copper ore. Wint had started his mining company with a single clapboard shack, fifty or so Mexicans and Indians, a couple of trucks, and a whole lot of shovels. The first day of digging had turned up a dozen skeletons, and it was then that Wint realized the Mexicalis had been burying their dead in the mountain for over a hundred years.
And then one day a Mexican with a pickax had uncovered a sparkling vein of high-grade ore a hundred feet wide. That was the first of many. The new Texas companies that were stringing telephone wires, electric lines, and water pipes across the state came knocking at Wint’s door. And just beyond the mountain of ore a few tents sprang up, then clapboard and adobe houses, followed by stone structures, churches, and schools. Dirt roads were covered with gravel, then pavement. Celeste recalled that Wint had told her he’d looked over his shoulder one day and seen a town where there used to be tumbleweeds. The townspeople, most of them mine workers, had elected him mayor, and under the influence of tequila Wint had christened the town Inferno and vowed to build a statue of his faithful old mule at its center.
But, though there’d been plenty of fits and starts, Inferno had never grown much beyond a one-mule town. It was too hot and dusty, too far from the big cities, and when the water pipeline ruptured, people got thirsty in a mighty big hurry. The copper mine had remained the only real industry. But folks kept coming in, the Ice House plugged into the pipeline and froze water into blocks, the church bells rang on Sunday mornings, the shopkeepers made money, the telephone company strung lines and trained operators, the high school lettered the football and basketball teams, and a concrete bridge replaced the shaky wooden one that spanned the Snake River. The first nails were driven into the boards of Bordertown. Walt Travis was elected sheriff, and in his third month was shot dead on the street that was thereafter named for him. The next man stuck with the job until he was beaten within a finger of St. Peter’s handshake and woke up on a northbound train. Gradually, year after year, Inferno sank its roots. But just as gradually, the Preston Copper Mining Company was chewing away the red mountain where the dead Indians of a hundred years slept.
Celeste Street used to be called Pearl Street, after Wint’s first wife. Between wives, it was known as Nameless Street. Such was the power of Wint Preston’s influence.
She took one last pull on the cheroot, crushed it out on the railing, and flicked it into space. “We had some high old times, didn’t we?” she said softly. But they’d fought like cats and dogs too, ever since Celeste had met him when she was singing with a cowboy band at a little dive in Galveston. Celeste hadn’t minded; she had a holler like a cement mixer and could cuss Satan into church. The truth was that she’d fallen in love with Wint over the years, in spite of his womanizing and drinking and gambling. In spite of the fact that he kept her in the dark about his business affairs for more than thirty years. And when the machines had begun scraping bottom less than three years ago and frantic dynamiting uncovered no new veins, Wint Preston had seen his dream dying. What Celeste realized now was that Wint had gone nutty; he’d started pulling money out of his accounts, selling his stocks and bonds and gathering cash in a maniacal frenzy. But what he’d done with almost eight million dollars remained a mystery. Maybe he’d opened up new accounts under false names; maybe he’d put all that cash into tin boxes and buried them in the desert. In any case, the money of a lifetime was gone, and when the IRS had swooped down demanding a huge chunk of back taxes and penalties, there was nothing to pay with.
The lawyers had the mess now. Celeste knew full well that she was simply a caretaker, en route back to the dives of Galveston.
She saw the sheriff’s blue-and-gray patrol car turning off Cobre Road and coming slowly along the blacktop. She gripped the railing with both hands and waited, a tough one-hundred-and-ten-pound figure backed by a hollow three-thousand-ton house. She stood without moving as the car made the driveway’s circle and stopped.
The car’s door opened, and a man who more than doubled her weight got out in sweat-saving slow motion. The back of his pale blue shirt was drenched, as was the sweatband of his beige cowboy hat. His belly flopped over his jeans, and he wore a gunbelt and lizard-skin boots.
“You took your damned time, didn’t you?” Celeste called sharply. “If the house had been on fire, I’d be standin’ in ashes right now!”
Sheriff Ed Vance stopped, looked up, and found her on the balcony. He was wearing sunglasses with mirrored lenses, just like his favorite bad-ass in the movie Cool Hand Luke. Last night’s dinner of enchiladas and refried beans gurgled in his bulging belly. He showed his teeth in a tight grin. “If the house had been on fire,” he said, his drawl as sugary as hot molasses, “I hope you would’ve had the good sense to call the fire department, Miz Preston.” She said nothing, just stared holes through him. “Deputy Chaffin gave me a call,” he continued. “Said you was gettin’ buzzed by helicopters.” He made a big show of inspecting the cloudless sky. “Nary a one around here.”
“There were three. They flew over my property, and I’ve never heard such a noise in all my life. I want to know where they came from and what’s goin’ on.”
He shrugged his thick shoulders. “Don’t seem like much is goin’ on anywhere, if you ask me. Seems like a pretty peaceful day.” His grin widened; now it was more of a grimace. “Up till now, that is.”
“They went that way.” Celeste pointed toward the southwest.
“Well, maybe if I hurry I can head ’em off at the pass. Just what is it you expect me to do, Miz Preston?”
“I expect you to earn your pay, Sheriff Vance!” she replied coldly. “That means bein’ on top of what goes on around here! I’m tellin’ you that three helicopters almost knocked me out of my bed, and I want to know who they belonged to! Does that spell it out any clearer for you?”
“A mite.” The grimace remained locked on his square, heavily jowled face. “’Course, they’re probably in Mexico by now.”
“I don’t care if they’re in Timbuktu! Those damned things could’ve crashed into my house!” Vance’s obstinacy and slowness infuriated her; if it had been her decision, Vance would never have been reelected sheriff, but he’d ingratiated himself to Wint over the years and had easily beaten the Hispanic candidate. She saw clear through him, though, and knew that Mack Cade pulled his strings; and, like it or not, she realized Mack Cade was now Inferno’s ruling power.
“Better calm down. Take a nerve pill. That’s what my ex-wife used to do when—”
“She saw you?” Celeste interrupted.
He laughed, hollowly and without mirth. “No call to get nasty, Miz Preston. Don’t suit a lady like you.” Showed your true stripe, didn’t you, bitch? he thought. “So what is it you’re sayin’?” he prodded. “You want to file a disturbin’ the peace charge against some unknown persons in three helicopters, point of origin unknown and destination unknown?”
“That’s right. Is it too much of a job for you?”
Vance grunted. He couldn’t wait for the woman to be tossed out on her ass; then he was going to start digging up those cashboxes old Wint must’ve hidden. “I think I can handle it.”
“I hope you can. That’s what you’re paid for.”