James Burke: Rain Gods

“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.”

VIKKI GADDIS CALLED the diner at the truck stop on her cell and told her boss she couldn’t work that night and in fact was quitting, and could she please get her wages, maybe in cash, because she would be en route to El Paso, which was a lie, when the banks opened in the morning.