James Burke - Rain Gods

But something in the door mirror had caught her attention. She put down the phone and turned around in the seat and looked back toward the twin bluffs, then got out of the cruiser with the binoculars and focused them on a vehicle that had come to a stop by the twin bluffs. “Better take a look,” she said.

“At what?”

“It’s a Grand Cherokee,” she said. “It’s flying an American flag on a staff attached to the back bumper.”

“Nick Dolan?”

“I can’t tell. It looks like he’s lost.”

“Forget him.”

“Flores and Gaddis are probably with him.”

“We’re going in, babe. Under a black flag. You got me?”

“No, I didn’t hear that.”

“Yes, you did. Collins has killed scores of people in his life. What’s in the pump?”

“All double-aught bucks,” Pam said.

“Load your pockets with them, too.”

PREACHER WAS EATING his second brownie when the first cramp hit him. The sensation, or his perception of its significance, was not instantaneous. At first he felt only a slight spasm, not unlike an irritant unexpectedly striking the stomach lining. Then the pain sharpened and spread down toward the colon, like a sliver of jagged tin seeking release. He clenched his buttocks together, still unsure what was happening, faintly embarrassed in front of the woman, trying to hide the discomfort distorting his face.

The next spasm made his jaw drop and the blood drain from his head. He leaned forward, trying to catch his breath, sweat breaking on his upper lip. His stomach was churning, the interior of the tent going out of focus. He swallowed drily and tried to see the woman clearly.

“Are you sick?” she said.

“You ask if I’m sick? I’m poisoned. What’s in this?”

“What I said. Chocolate and flour and-”

A bilious metallic taste surged into his mouth. The constriction in his bowels was spreading upward, into his lower chest, like chains wrapping around his ribs and sternum, squeezing the air out of his lungs. “Don’t lie,” he said.

“I ate the brownies, too. There’s nothing wrong with them.”

He coughed violently, as though he had eaten a piece of angle iron. “There must be peanut butter in them.”

“You have a problem with peanut butter?”

“You bitch.” He pulled open the tent flap to let in the cold air. “You treacherous bitch.”

“Look at you. A grown man cursing others because he has a stomachache. A man who kills women and young girls calls other people names because a brownie has upset him. Your mother would be ashamed of you. Where did you grow up? In a barnyard?”

Preacher got to his feet and held on to the tent pole with one hand until the earth stopped shifting under his feet. “What right do you have to talk of my mother?”

“What right, he asks? I’m the mother you took from her husband and her children. The mother you took to be your concubine, that’s who I am, you miserable gangster.”

He stumbled out into the wind and cold air, his hair soggy with sweat under his hat, his skin burning as though it had been dipped in acid, one hand clenched on his stomach. He headed for his tent, where the Thompson lay on top of his writing table, the drum fat with cartridges, a second cartridge-packed drum resting beside it. That was when he saw a sheriff’s cruiser coming up the dirt track and, in the far distance, a second vehicle that seemed part of an optical illusion brought on by the anaphylactic reaction wrecking his nervous system. The second vehicle was a maroon SUV with an American flag whipping from a staff attached to the back bumper. Who were these people? What gave them the right to come on his land? His anger only exacerbated the fire in his entrails and constricted his lungs as though his chest had been touched by the tendrils of a jellyfish.

“Angel! Molo!” he called hoarsely.

“¿Qué pasa, Señor Collins?”

“ ¡Maten los! ” he said.

“ ¿Quién? ”

“ Todos que estan en los dos vehiculos. ”

The two Mexican killers were standing outside their tent. They turned and saw the approaching cruiser. “ ¿Nosotros los matamos todos? Hombre, esta es una pila de mierda ,” Angel said. “ Chingado, son of a beech, you sure you ain’t a marijuanista, Señor Collins? Oops, siento mucho, solamente estoy bromeando .”

But Preacher was not interested in what the Mexicans had to say. He was already inside his tent, gathering up the Thompson, stuffing the extra ammunition pan under his arm, convinced that the voice he had sought in the wind and in the fire and even in an earthquake would speak to him now, with the Jewish woman, inside the cave.

“A GUY JUST came out of a tent,” Pam said, leaning forward on the steering wheel, taking her foot off the gas. “Dammit, I can’t see him now. The trash pile is in the way. Wait a second. Two other guys are talking to him.”

The visual angle from the passenger seat was bad. Hackberry handed her the binoculars. She fitted them to her eyes and adjusted the focus, breathing audibly, her chest rising and falling irregularly. “They look Hispanic,” she said. “Maybe they’re construction workers, Hack.”

“Where’s the other guy?”

“I don’t know. He’s gone. He must have gone back in one of the tents. We need to dial it down.”

“No, it’s Collins.”

She removed the binoculars from her eyes and looked hard and long at him. “You thought you heard a bugle. I think you’re seeing and hearing things that aren’t there. We can’t be wrong on this.”

He dropped open the glove box and removed a Beretta nine-millimeter. He pulled back the slide and chambered a round and set the butterfly safety. “I’m not wrong. Pull to the back of the trash pile. We get out simultaneously on each side of the vehicle and stay spread apart. If you see Collins, you kill him.”

“Listen to me, Hack-”

“No, Collins doesn’t get a chance to use his Thompson. You’ve never seen anyone shot with a weapon that has that kind of firepower. We kill him on sight and worry about legalities later.”

“I can’t accept an order like that.”

“Yes, you can.”

“I know you, Hack. I know the thoughts you have before you think them. You want me to protect myself at all costs, but you’ve got your own agenda with this guy.”

“We left Dr. Freud back there on the road,” he said. He stepped out on the hardpan just as the sun broke over the hill, splintering like gold needles, the bottom of the hill still deep in shadow.

He and Pam Tibbs walked toward the pile of house debris, dividing around it, their eyes fixed on the four tents, their eyes watering in the wind and the smoke blowing from a fire that smelled of burning food or garbage.

But because of the angle, they had lost sight of the two Hispanic men, who had gone back in their tent or were behind the vehicles. As Hackberry walked deeper into the shadows, the sunlight that had fractured on the ridgeline disappeared, and he could see the tents and the pickup truck and the SUV and the mountainside in detail, and he realized the mistake he had made: You never allow your enemy to become what is known as a barricaded suspect. Even more important, you never allow your enemy to become a barricaded suspect with a hostage.

Pam Tibbs was to his left, the stock of her cut-down pump Remington twelve-gauge snugged against her shoulder, her eyes sweeping from right to left, left to right, never blinking, her face dilated as though she were staring into an ice storm. He heard her footsteps pause and knew she had just seen Collins at the same moment he had, pushing a woman ahead of him up a footpath that led to the opening in the mountainside.