"Rain Gods" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burke James Lee)2NICK DOLAN’S SKIN joint was halfway between Austin and San Antonio, a three-story refurbished Victorian home with fresh white paint on it, set back in oak trees and pines, the balcony and windows strung with Christmas-tree lights that stayed up year-round. From the highway, it looked like a festive place, the gravel parking lot well lit, the small Mexican restaurant next door joined to the main building by a covered walkway, indicating to passersby that Nick wasn’t selling just tits and ass, that this was a gentleman’s place, that women were welcome, even families, if they were road-tired and wanted a fine meal at a reasonable price. Nick had given up his floating casino in New Orleans and had left the city of his birth because he didn’t like trouble with the vestiges of the old Mob or paying off every politician in the state who knew how to turn up his palm, including the governor, who was now in a federal prison. Nick didn’t argue with the world or the venal nature of men or the iniquity that most of them seemed born in. His contention was with the world’s hypocrisy. He sold people what they wanted, whether it was gambling or booze, ass on the half shell, or the freedom to fulfill all their fantasies inside a safe environment, one where they would never be held accountable for the secret desires they hid from others. But whenever a groundswell of moral outrage began to crest on the horizon, Nick knew who was about to get smacked flat on the beach. However, he had another problem besides the hypocrisy of others: He had been screwed at birth, given a dumpy fat boy’s body to live inside, one with flaccid arms and a short neck and duck feet, and bad eyesight on top of it, so that he had to wear thick, round glasses that made him look like a goldfish staring out of a bowl. He dressed in elevator shoes, sport coats that had padded shoulders, and expensive and tasteful jewelry; he paid a minimum of seventy-five dollars for his shirts and ties. His twin daughters went to private school and took piano, ballet, and riding lessons; his son was about to become a freshman at the University of Texas. His wife played bridge at the country club, worked out every day at a gym, and did not want to hear details about the sources of Nick’s income. She also paid her own bills from money she made in the stock and bond market. Most of the romance in their marriage had disappeared long ago, but she didn’t nag and was a good mother, and by anyone’s measure, she would be considered a person of good character, so who was Nick to complain? You played the cards you got dealt, duck feet or not. Nick didn’t argue or contend with the nature of the world. He was boisterous and assumed the role of the diffident fool if he had to. He didn’t put moves on his girls and didn’t deceive himself about the nature of their loyalties. Born-again Christians were always talking about “honesty.” Nick’s “honest” view of himself and his relationship to the world was as follows: He was an overweight, short, balding, late-middle-aged man who knew his limits and kept his boundaries. He lived in a Puritan nation that was obsessed with sex and endlessly tittering about it, like kids just discovering their twangers in the YMCA swimming pool. If anyone doubted that fact, he told himself, they should click on their television sets during family hours and check out the crap their children were watching. According to Nick, the only true sin in this country was financial failure. Respectability you bought with your checkbook. But right now Nick had a problem that never should have come into his life, that he had done nothing to deserve, that his years of abuse at the hands of schoolyard bullies in the Ninth Ward of Orleans Parish should have preempted as payment for any sins he had ever committed. The problem had just walked into the club and taken a seat at the bar, ordering a glass of carbonated water and ice with cherry juice, eyeballing the girls up on the poles, the skin of his face like a leather mask, his lips thick, always suppressing a grin, the inside of his head constructed of bones that didn’t seem to fit right. The problem’s name was Hugo Cistranos, and he scared the living shit out of Nick Dolan. If Nick could just walk out of the front of the club into the safety of his office, past the tables full of college boys and divorced working stiffs and upscale suits pretending they were visiting the club for a lark. He could call somebody, cut a deal, apologize, offer some kind of restitution, just get on the phone and do it, whatever it took. That was what businessmen did when confronted with insurmountable problems. They talked on the phone. He wasn’t responsible for the deeds of a maniac. In fact, he wasn’t even sure what the maniac had done. Just walk into the office, he told himself. Ignore the way Hugo’s eyes bored into the side of his face, his neck, his back, peeling off his clothes and skin, picking the few specks of his dignity off his soul. Ignore the proprietary manner, the smirk that silently indicated Hugo owned Nick and knew his thoughts and his weaknesses and could reach out whenever he wished and expose the frightened little fat boy who’d had his lunch money taken from him by the black kids in the schoolyard. The memory of those days in the Ninth Ward caused a surge of heat to bloom in Nick’s chest, a flicker of martial energy that made him close one hand in a fist, surprising him at the potential that might lie inside the fat boy’s body. He turned and looked Hugo full in the face. Then, with his eyelids stitched to his forehead, Nick approached him, his lighted cigarette held away from his sport coat, his mouth drying up, his heart threading with weevil worms. The girls up on the poles, their bodies sprayed with glitter, their faces pancakelike with foundation, became smoke-wreathed animations whose names he had never known, whose lives had nothing to do with his own, even though every one of them courted his favor and always called him Nick in the same tone they would use when addressing a protective uncle. Nick Dolan was on his own. He rested his right hand on the bar but did not sit down, the ash from his cigarette falling on his slacks. Hugo grinned, his eyes following the trail of smoke from Nick’s cigarette down to the yellow nicotine stain layered between his index and middle finger. “You still smoke three decks a day?” Hugo said. “I’m starting to wear a patch,” Nick said, holding his eyes on Hugo’s, wondering if he had just lied or told the truth and sounded small and foolish and plaint, regardless. “Marlboros will put you in a box. The chemicals alone.” “Everybody dies.” “The chemicals hide the smell of the nicotine so you won’t be thinking about the damage it’s doing to your organs. Spots on the lungs, spots on the liver, all that. It goes on in your sleep and you don’t even know it.” “I’m about to go home. You want to see me about something?” “Yeah, you could call it something. Want to go in your office?” “The cleaning woman is vacuuming in there.” “Makes sense to me. Nothing like running a vacuum cleaner in a nightclub during peak hours. Tell me the name of the cleaning service so I don’t call them up by mistake. I’ll walk outside with you. You ought to see the sky. Dry lightning is leaping all over the clouds. Have your smoke out in the fresh air.” “My wife is waiting dinner on me.” “That’s funny, since you’re notorious for always closing the joint yourself and counting every penny in the till.” “There a second meaning in that?” Hugo drank from his carbonated water and chewed a cherry on the back of his teeth, his expression thoughtful. “No, there’s no second meaning there, Nicholas.” His tongue was bright red. He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and looked at the smear of color on it. “I hired some extra personnel that I need your advice about. A kid that’s proving to be a pain in the ass.” He leaned forward and squeezed Nick’s shoulder, his face suffused with warmth and intimacy. “I think it’s gonna rain. You’ll like the fresh smell in the air. It’ll get all that nicotine out of your clothes.” Outside, the air was as Hugo had described it, scented with the possibility of a thunderstorm and the smell of watermelons in a field on the far side of live oaks at the back of Nick’s property. Nick walked in front of Hugo into a space between a Buick and Hugo’s big black SUV. Hugo propped one arm on the fender of his vehicle, blocking Nick’s view of the club. He wore a sport shirt and pleated white slacks and shined Italian shoes. In the electric glow from the overhead lamps, his propped forearm was taut and pale and wrapped with green veins. “Artie Rooney is light nine chippies,” Hugo said. “I don’t know anything about this,” Nick said. Hugo scratched the back of his neck. His hair was ash-blond, streaked with red, like iodine, gelled and combed straight back so that his high forehead had a polished look resembling the prow of a ship. “‘Wipe the slate clean.’ What do those words mean to you, Nicholas?” “It’s Nick.” “This question still stands, Nick.” “They mean ‘forget it.’ The words mean ‘pull the plug.’ They don’t mean go apeshit.” “Let me see if I got your vision of things straight. We kidnap Rooney’s Thai whores, put at least one of his coyotes in a hole, then turn a bunch of hysterical slopes loose on a dirt road so I can either ride the needle or spend the next forty years in a federal facility?” “What’s that you said about a coyote?” Nick felt something blink in his mind, a dysfunctional shutter snapping open and closing, a malfunction in his brain or in his subconscious, an impaired mechanism that for a lifetime had not stopped him from speaking or given him the right words to say until it was too late, leaving him vulnerable and alone and at the mercy of his adversaries. Why had he asked a question? Why had he just exposed himself to more knowledge of what Hugo had done on a dark road to a truckload of helpless Asian women, maybe girls as well? Nick felt as though his ectoplasm were draining through the soles of his shoes. “I’m at a loss on this, Hugo. I got no idea what we’re talking about here,” he said, his eyes sliding off Hugo’s face, his words like wet ash in his throat. Hugo looked away and pulled on an earlobe. His mouth was compressed, his mirth leaking from his nose like air escaping a rubber seal. “You’re all the same,” he said. “Who’s the ‘you’?” “Monkey see no evil. You hire others to do it for you. You owe me ninety large, Nicholas, ten grand for each unit I had to take off Artie’s hands and dispose of. You also owe me seven grand for transportation costs. You owe me another five large for employee expenses. The vig is a point and a half a week.” “ “Then there’s this other issue, a kid I hired out of a wino bar.” “What kid?” “Pete Rumdum. What difference does it make? He got off the leash.” “No, I’m not part of this. Let me by.” “It gets a little more complicated. I’ve been to the rathole he lives in. A girl was there. She saw me. So now she’s a factor. Do I have your attention?” Nick was stepping backward, shaking his head, trying to remove himself from the closed space that seemed to be crushing the light out of his eyes. “I’m going home. I’ve known Artie Rooney for years. I can work this out. He’s a businessman.” Hugo took out his pocket comb and ran it through his hair with one hand. “Artie Rooney offered me his old Caddy to put you on a crash diet. Enforced total abstinence. Fifteen to twenty pounds a day weight loss guaranteed. Inside your own box, get it? Know why he doesn’t like you, Nicholas? Because he’s a real mick and not a fraud who changes his name from Dolinski to Dolan. I’ll drop by tomorrow to get my cash. I want it in fifties, no consecutive numbers on the bills.” The words were going too fast. “Why’d you turn Artie Rooney down on the hit?” Nick said, because he had to say something. “I already got a Caddy.” Two minutes later, when Nick walked back into his nightclub, the pounding music of the four-piece band was not nearly as loud as the thundering of Nick’s heart and the rasping of his lungs as he tried to suck oxygen past the cigarette he held in his mouth. “Nick, your face is white. You get some bad news?” the bartender said. “Everything is great,” Nick replied. When he sat on the bar stool, his head reeling, his duck feet were so swollen with hypertension that he thought his shoes would burst their laces. BEFORE HE FINALLY went to bed, Hackberry Holland had gone into the shower stall as his only salutary refuge from his experience behind the church, washing his hair, scrubbing his skin until it was red, holding his face in the hot water as long as he could stand it. But the odor of disinterred bodies had followed him into his sleep, trailing with him through the next day into the following twilight, into the onset of darkness, the hills flickering with electricity, the horn of an eighteen-wheeler blowing far down the highway like a bugle from a forgotten war. Federal agents had done most of the work at the murder scene, setting up a field mortuary and flood lamps and satellite communications that probably involved Mexican authorities as well as their own departmental supervisors in D.C. They were polite to him, respectful in their perfunctory fashion, but it was obvious they thought of him as a curiosity if not simply a bystander or witness. At dawn, when all the exhumed bodies had been bagged and removed and the agents were wrapping up the site, a man in a suit, with white hair and threadlike blue and red capillaries in his cheeks, approached Hackberry and shook hands in farewell, his smile forced, as though he was preparing to ask a question that was not intended to offend. “I understand you were an attorney for the ACLU,” he said. “At one time, many years ago.” “Quite a change in career choices.” “Not really.” “I didn’t tell you something. One of our agents found some bones that have been in the ground a long time.” “Maybe they’re Indian,” Hack said. “They’re not that old.” “Maybe the shooter has used this site before. The dozer was brought in on a truck. It went out the same way. Maybe this is a very organized guy.” But the FBI agent in charge of the exhumation, whose name was Ethan Riser, was not listening. “Why did you stay out here digging up all these bodies by yourself? Why didn’t you call in sooner?” he said. “I was a POW during the Korean War. I was at Pak’s Palace, plus a couple of other places.” The agent nodded, then said, “Forgive me if I don’t make the connection.” “There were miles of refugees on the roadways, almost all of them headed south. The columns were infiltrated by North Korean soldiers in civilian clothes. Sometimes our F-80s were ordered to kill everybody on the road. We had to dig their graves. I don’t think that story ever got reported.” “You’re saying you don’t trust us?” the agent said, still smiling. “No, sir, I wouldn’t dream of saying that.” The agent stared at the long roll of the countryside, the mesquite leaves lifting like green lace in the breeze. “It must be like living on moonscape out here,” he said. Hackberry did not reply and walked back to his truck, pain from an old back injury spreading into the lower regions of his spine. IN THE LATE 1960s, he had tried to help a Hispanic friend from the service who had been beaten into a pile of bloody rags on a United Farm Workers picket line and charged with assaulting a law officer. At the time Hackberry was four fingers into a bottle of Jack Daniel’s by midafternoon every day of the week. He was also a candidate for Congress and deep in the throes of political ambition and his own cynicism, both of which poorly masked the guilt and depression and self-loathing he had brought back with him from a POW camp located in a place the North Koreans called No Name Valley. At the jail where his friend would eventually be murdered, Hackberry met Rie Velásquez, who was also a United Farm Workers organizer, and he was never the same again. He had thought he could walk away from his friend’s death and from his meeting with the girl named Rie. But he was wrong on both counts. His first encounter with her was immediately antagonistic, and not because of her ideals or her in-your-face attitude. It was her lack of fear that bothered him, and her indifference to the opinions of others, even to her own fate. Worse, she conveyed the impression that she was willing to accept him if he didn’t ask her to take him or his politics seriously. She was intelligent and university-educated and stunning in appearance. He manufactured every reason possible to see her, dropping by her union headquarters, offering her a ride, all the while trying to marginalize her radicalism and dismiss and hold at bay her leftist frame of reference, as though accepting any part of it would be like pulling a thread on a sweater, in this instance unraveling his own belief system. But he never confronted the issue at hand, namely that the working poor she represented had a legitimate cause and that they were being terrorized by both growers and police officers because they wanted to form a union. Hackberry Holland’s political conversion did not take place at a union meeting or at Mass inside a sympathetic Catholic church, or involve seeing a blinding light on the road to Damascus. An irritable lawman accomplished the radicalization of Hackberry Holland by swinging a blackjack across his head and then trying to kick him to death. When Hackberry awoke on the concrete floor of a county lockup, his head inches from a perforated drain cover streaked with urine, he no longer doubted the efficacy of revolutionaries standing at the jailhouse door to sign up new members for their cause. Rie had died of uterine cancer ten years ago, and their twin sons had left Texas, one for a position as an oncologist at the Mayo in Phoenix, the other as a boat skipper in the Florida Keys. Hackberry sold the ranch on the Guadalupe River where they had raised the children, and moved down by the border. If he’d been asked why he had given up the green place he loved for an existence in a dust-blown wasteland and a low-paying electoral office in a county seat whose streets and sidewalks and buildings were spiderwebbed with heat cracks, Hackberry would have had no explanation, or at least not one he would discuss with others. The truth was, he could not rise in the morning from his bed surrounded by the things she had touched, the wind blowing the curtains, pressurizing the emptiness of the house, stressing the joists and studs and crossbeams and plaster walls against one another, filling the house with a level of silence that was like someone clapping cupped palms violently on his eardrums. He could not wake to these things and Rie’s absence and the absence of his children, whom he still saw in his mind’s eye as little boys, without concluding that a terrible theft had been perpetrated upon him and that it had left a lesion in his heart that would never heal. A Baptist preacher had asked Hackberry if he was angry at God for his loss. “God didn’t invent death,” Hackberry answered. “Then who did?” “Cancer is a disease produced by the Industrial Age.” “I think you’re an angry man, Hack. I think you need to let go of it. I think you need to celebrate your wife’s life and not mourn over what you cain’t change.” Now, in the blue glow of early dawn and the fading of the stars in the sky, he tried to eat breakfast on his gallery and not think about the dreams he’d had just before waking. No, “dreams” wasn’t the right word. Dreams had sequence and movement and voices inside them. All Hackberry could remember before opening his eyes into the starkness of his bedroom was the severity of the wounds in the bodies of the nine women and girls he had found buried by a bulldozer behind the church. How many people were aware of what a.45-caliber round could do to human tissue and bone? How many had ever seen what a.45 machine-gun burst could do to a person’s face or brain cavity or breasts or rib cage? There was a breeze out of the south, and even though his St. Augustine grass was dry and stiff, it had a pale greenish aura in the early dawn, and the flowers in his gardens were varied and bright with dew. He didn’t want to think about the victims buried behind the church. No, that wasn’t correct, either. He didn’t want to think about the terror and the helplessness they had experienced before they were lined up and murdered. He didn’t want to brood on these things because he had experienced them himself when he had been forced to stand with his fellow POWs on a snowy stretch of ground in zero-degree weather and wait for a Chinese prison guard to fire his burp gun point-blank into their chests and faces. But because of the mercurial nature of their executioner’s bloodlust, Hackberry was spared and made to watch while others died, and sometimes he wished he had been left among the dead rather than the quick. He believed that looking into the eyes of one’s executioner in the last seconds of one’s life was perhaps the worst fate that could befall a human being. That parting glimpse into the face of evil destroyed not only hope but any degree of faith in our fellow man that we might possess. He did not want to contend with those good souls who chose to believe we all descend from the same nuclear family, our poor, naked, bumbling ancestors back in Eden who, through pride or curiosity, transgressed by eating forbidden fruit. But he had long ago concluded that certain kinds of experiences at the hands of our fellow man were proof enough that we did not all descend from the same tree. Or at least these were the thoughts that Hackberry’s sleep often presented to him at first light, as foolish as they might seem. He drank the coffee from his cup, covered his plate with a sheet of waxed paper, and set it inside his icebox. As he backed out of the driveway in his pickup truck and headed down the two-lane county road, he did not hear the telephone ringing inside his house. He drove into town, parked behind the combination jail and office that served as his departmental headquarters, and entered the back door. His chief deputy, Pam Tibbs, was already at her desk, wearing jeans and cowboy boots and a short-sleeve khaki shirt and a gun belt, her face without expression. Her hair was thick and mahogany in color, curly at the tips, with a bit of gray that she didn’t dye. Her most enig matic quality lay in her eyes. They could brighten suddenly with goodwill or warmth or intense thought, but no one could be quite sure which. She had been a patrolwoman in Abilene and Galveston and had joined the department four years ago in order to be near her mother, who had been in a local hospice. Pam had a night-school degree from the University of Houston, but she spoke little of her background or her private life and gave others the sense they should not intrude upon it. Hackberry’s recent promotion of her to chief deputy had not necessarily been welcomed by all of her colleagues. “Good morning,” Hackberry said. Pam held her eyes on his without replying. “Something wrong?” he said. “An Immigration and Customs Enforcement guy by the name of Clawson just left. His business card is on your desk.” “What does he want?” “Probably your ass.” “Pardon?” “He wants to know why you didn’t call in for help when you found the bodies,” she replied. “He asked you that?” “He seems to think I’m the departmental snitch.” “What’d you tell him?” “To take a walk.” Hackberry started toward his office. Through the window he could see the flag straightening on the metal pole in the yard, the sun behind clouds that offered no rain, dust gusting down a broken street lined by stucco and stone buildings that had been constructed no later than the 1920s. “I heard him talking on his cell outside,” Pam said at his back. When he turned around, her eyes were fixed on his, one tooth biting down on the corner of her lip. “Will you just say it, please?” “The guy’s a prick,” she replied. “I don’t know who’s worse, you or Maydeen. Will y’all stop using that kind of language while you’re on the job?” “I heard him talking outside on his cell. I think they know the identity of the witness who called in the shots fired. They think you know his identity, too. They think you’re protecting him.” “Why would I protect a nine-one-one caller?” “You have a cousin name of William Robert Holland?” “What about him?” “I heard Clawson use the name, that’s all. I got the impression Holland might be your relative, that maybe he knows the nine-one-one caller. I was hearing only half of the conversation.” “Don’t go anywhere,” Hackberry said. He went into his office and found the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent’s business card centered squarely in the middle of his desk blotter. A cell phone number was written across the top; the area code was 713, Houston. He punched in the number on his desk phone. “Clawson,” a man’s voice said. “This is Sheriff Holland. I’m sorry I missed you this morning. What can I help you with?” “I tried your home, but your message machine wasn’t on.” “It doesn’t always work. What is it you want to know?” “A significant lapse of time occurred between your discovery of the bodies out by the church and your call to your dispatcher. Can you clear me up on that?” “I’m not quite sure what the question is.” “You wanted to dig them up by yourself?” “We’re short on manpower.” “Are you related to a former Texas Ranger by the name of-” “Billy Bob Holland, yeah, I am. He’s an attorney. So am I, although I don’t practice anymore.” “That’s interesting. We need to have a chat, Sheriff Holland. I don’t like getting to a crime scene hours after local law enforcement has tracked it up from one end to the other.” “Why is ICE involved in a homicide investigation?” Hackberry asked. He could hear the chain rattling on the flagpole, a trash can clattering drily on a curbstone. “Do you have the identity of the nine-one-one caller?” “I’m not at liberty to discuss that right now.” “Excuse me, sir, but I have the impression that you consider a con versation a monologue in which other people answer your questions. Don’t come bird-dogging my deputies again.” “What did you say?” Hackberry replaced the receiver in the phone cradle. He walked back into the outer office. Pam Tibbs looked up from her paperwork, a slice of sunlight cutting her face. Her eyes were a deep brown, bright, fixed on his, waiting. “You drive,” he said. THE AIR WAS muggy and warm when she parked the cruiser in the abandoned Pure filling station across from the stucco shell of the old church. Hackberry got out on the passenger side and looked at the phone booth on the perimeter of the concrete. The clear plastic panels were sprayed and scratched with graffiti, the phone box itself unbolted and removed. The sun had gone behind a cloud, and the hills had turned as dark as a bruise. “The feds took the box?” Pam said. “They’ll dust it and all the coins inside and keep us out of the loop at the same time.” “Who owns the land behind the church?” “A consortium in Delaware. They bought it from the roach paste people after the Superfund cleaned it up. I don’t think they’re players, though.” “Where’d the killers get the dozer to bury the bodies? They had to have some familiarity with the area. There were no prints on the shell casings?” “Nope.” “Why would anyone kill all these women? What kind of bastard would do this?” “Somebody who looks like your postman.” The sun came out of the clouds and flooded the landscape with a jittering light. Her brow was moist with perspiration, her skin browned and grainy. There were thin white lines at the corners of her eyes. For some reason, at that moment, she looked older than her years. “I don’t buy that stuff.” “What stuff?” “That mass killers live in our midst without ever being noticed, that they’re just normal-looking people who have a screw torqued too tight in the back of their heads. I think they have neon warning signs hung all over them. People choose not to see what’s at the end of their noses.” Hackberry watched the side of her face. There was no expression on it. But in moments like these, when Pam Tibbs’s speech would rise slightly in intensity, a heated strand of wire threaded through her words, he would remain silent, his eyes deferential. “Ready?” he said. “Yes, sir,” she said. They fitted on polyethylene gloves and began walking down opposite sides of the road, searching through the grass and scattered gravel and empty snuff containers and desiccated paper litter and broken glass and discarded rubbers and beer cans and whiskey and wine bottles. A quarter mile from the phone booth, they traded sides of the road and retraced their steps back to the booth, then continued on for two hundred yards in the opposite direction. Pam Tibbs descended into a grassy depression and picked up a clear flat-sided bottle that had no label. She hooked one finger through the bottle’s lip and shook it gently. “The worm is still inside,” she said. “Have you seen that shape of bottle before?” he asked. “Out at Ouzel Flagler’s place. Ouzel always tries to keep it simple. No tax stamps or labels to create undue paperwork,” she replied. She dropped the bottle in a large Ziploc bag. OUZEL FLAGLER RAN an unlicensed bar in a plank shed next to the 1920s brick bungalow he and his wife lived in. The bungalow had settled on one side and cracked through the center, which caused the big windows on either side of the porch to stare out at the road like a cross-eyed man. Behind the house was a wide arroyo, outcroppings of yellow rock jutting from the eroded slopes. The arroyo bled into a flat plain that shimmered with heat, backdropped in the distance by purple mountains. Ouzel’s acreage was dotted with junked construction equipment and old trucks that he hauled from other places and neither sold nor maintained. Why he collected acres of junk rusting into the creosote brush was anybody’s guess. His longhorns were rheumy-eyed and spavined, their ribs as pronounced as wagon spokes, their nostrils and ears and anuses auraed with gnats. Deer and coyotes got tangled in the collapsed and broken fence wire that surrounded his cedar posts. His mescal probably came from Mexico, right up the arroyo behind his house, but no one was sure, and no one cared. Ouzel’s mescal was cheap and could knock the shoes off a horse, and no one, at least in the last few years, had died from it. The crystal meth transported through his property was another matter. People who were sympathetic with Ouzel believed he had made a deal with the devil when he’d gotten into the sale of illegal mescal; they believed his new business partners were stone killers and that they had drawn Ouzel deep into the belly of the beast. But it was Ouzel’s burden to carry and certainly not theirs. He peered out of the screen door on the shed. He was wearing an incongruous white dress shirt with puffed sleeves and patriotic tie and pressed slacks. But Ouzel’s affectations were poor compensation for his pot stomach and narrow shoulders and the purple chains of vascular knots from Buerger’s disease in his neck and upper chest that gave him the appearance of a carrion bird humped grotesquely on a perch. The dust drifted off the sheriff’s cruiser and crusted on the screen. Ouzel stepped outside, forcing a smile on his face, hoping to talk in the sunlight and wind, not inside, where he had not yet cleaned up last night’s bottles. “Need your help, Ouzel,” Hackberry said. “Yes, sir, anything I can do,” Ouzel replied, looking innocuously at the mescal bottle the sheriff held up inside a Ziploc bag. “I can probably lift some prints off this and run them through AFIS and end up with diddly-squat for my trouble. Or you can just tell me if a guy named Pete bought some mescal from you. Or I can lift the prints and find out that both your and Pete’s prints are on the bottle, which means I’ll have to come back here and talk with you about the implications of lying to an officer of the law in a homicide investigation.” “Y’all want a soda or something?” Ouzel asked. “The worm in that bottle is still moist, so I doubt it was in the ditch more than a couple of days. Both of us know this bottle came from your bar. Help me on this, Ouzel. What we’re talking about here is a lot more weight than you’re ready to deal with.” “Those Oriental women at Chapala Crossing? That’s why you come out here?” “Some of them were girls. They were machine-gunned, then buried by a bulldozer. At least one of them may have still been alive.” Ouzel’s stare broke. “They were alive?” “What happened to your hand?” Hackberry said. “This?” Ouzel said. He touched the tape and gauze wound around his wrist and fingers. “Kid at the market slammed the car door on it.” “What’s his name?” Pam said. “Ma’am?” “My nephew works at the IGA. You’re saying maybe my nephew crushed your fingers and didn’t tell anybody about it?” “It was in Alpine.” A heavy woman in a sundress that barely covered her huge dugs came out the back door, looked at the cruiser, and went back inside. “Have the feds been here?” Hackberry said. “No, sir, no feds.” “But somebody else was here, weren’t they?” Hackberry said. “No, sir, just neighborly people dropping by, that sort of thing. Nobody is bothering me.” “Those men will kill both you and your wife. If you’ve met them, you know what I say is true.” Ouzel gazed at his property and at all the paint-blistered road graders and dozers and front-end loaders and farm tractors and chemical tankers leaking fluid into his land. “It’s a mess out here, ain’t it?” he said. “Who’s Pete?” Hackberry asked. “I sold a pint of mescal to a kid name of Pete Flores. He’s part Mexican, I think. He said he was in Iraq. He come in one day with no shirt on. My wife went and got him a shirt of mine.” “You have a dress code?” Pam said. “You meet up with him, take a look at his back. Get you a barf bag when you do it, too.” “Where’s he live?” Hackberry asked. “Don’t know and don’t care.” “Tell me who hurt your hand.” “It’s going to be a hot, windy one, Sheriff, with little likelihood of rain. Wish it wasn’t that way, but some things here’bouts don’t ever change.” “You’d better hope we don’t have to come back out here,” Pam said. Hackberry and Pam got back in the cruiser. Ouzel started to walk away, then heard Hackberry roll down the window on the passenger side of the cruiser. “Is any of the equipment on your property operational?” Hackberry asked. “No, sir.” “Can you tell me why you keep all this junk here?” Ouzel scratched his cheek. “With some places, I guess anything is an improvement.” |
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