James Burke - Rain Gods

“Give me my knife.”

“Just a second, man.”

Pete pressed the release button on the latch, but nothing happened. “What’s the deal?” he said.

“Deal?”

“The belt is stuck.”

“I got my hands full, buddy,” the driver replied.

“Who are you?”

“Give it a break, will you? I got a situation here. Do you believe this asshole?”

An SUV had pulled off the road beyond the Sno-Ball stand and was now backing up.

“What the fuck?” the driver of the pickup said.

The SUV was accelerating, its bumper headed toward the pickup, the tires swerving through the gravel. The driver of the pickup dropped his gearshift into reverse and mashed on the accelerator, but it was too late. The trailer hitch on the SUV plowed into the truck’s grille, the steel ball on the hitch and the triangular steel mount plunging deep into the radiator’s mesh, ripping the fan blades from their shaft, jolting the pickup’s body sideways.

Pete jerked at the safety belt, but it was locked solid, and he realized he’d been had. But the events taking place around him were even more incongruous. The driver of the SUV had cut his lights and leaped onto the gravel, holding an object close to his thigh so it could not be seen from the road. The man moved hurriedly to the driver’s door of the pickup, jerked it open, and, in one motion, thrust himself inside and grabbed the driver by the throat with one hand and, with the other, jammed a blue-black.38 snub-nose revolver into the driver’s mouth. He fitted his thumb over the knurled surface of the hammer and cocked it back. “I’ll blow your brains all over the dashboard, T-Bone. You’ve seen me do it,” he said.

T-Bone, the driver of the pickup, could not speak. His eyes bulged from his head, and saliva ran from both sides of his mouth.

“Blink your eyes if you got the message, moron,” the man from the SUV said.

T-Bone lowered his eyelids and opened them again. The driver of the SUV slid the revolver from T-Bone’s mouth and lowered the hammer with his thumb and wiped the saliva off the steel onto T-Bone’s shirt. Then, for no apparent reason other than unbridled rage, he hit him in the face with it.

T-Bone pressed the flat of his hand to the cut below his eye. “Hugo sent me. The broad is at the Fiesta motel,” he said. “We couldn’t find the Fiesta ’cause we were looking for the Siesta. We had the wrong name of the motel, Bobby Lee.”

“You follow me to the next corner and turn right. Keep your shit-machine running for three blocks, then we’ll be in the country. Don’t let this go south on you.” Bobby Lee Motree’s eyes met Pete’s. “It’s called a Venus flytrap. Rapists use it. It means you’re screwed. But ‘screwed’ and ‘bullet in the head’ aren’t necessarily the same thing. You roger that, boy? You’ve caused me a mess of trouble. You can’t guess how much trouble, which means your name is on the top of the shit list right now. Start your engine, T-Bone.”

T-Bone turned the ignition. The engine coughed and blew a noxious cloud of black smoke from the exhaust pipe. Something tinkled against metal, and antifreeze streamed into the gravel as the engine caught, then steam and a scorched smell like a hose or rubber belt cooking on a hot surface rose from the hood. Pete sat silent and stiff against the seat, pushing himself deeper into it so he could get a thumb under the safety strap and try to work it off his chest. His Swiss Army knife was on the floor, the red handle half under the driver’s foot. A car went by, then a truck, the illumination of their headlights falling outside the pool of shadow under the chinaberry tree.

“My piece is under the seat,” T-Bone said.

“Go ahead.”

“I need to talk to Hugo.”

“Hugo doesn’t have conversations with dead people. That’s what you’re gonna be unless you do what I say.”

T-Bone bent over, his gaze straight ahead, and lifted a.25 auto from under the seat. He kept it in his left hand and laid it across his lap so it was pointed at Pete’s rib cage. A thin whistling sound like a teakettle’s was building inside the hood. “I didn’t mean to get in your space, Bobby Lee. I was doing what Hugo told me.”

“Say another word, and I’m going to seriously hurt you.”

Pete remained silent as T-Bone followed Bobby Lee’s SUV out of town and up a dirt road bordered by pastureland where black Angus were clumped up in an arroyo and under a solitary tree by a windmill. Pete’s left hand drifted down to the latch on the safety belt. He worked his fingers over the square outline of the metal, pushing the plastic release button with his thumb, trying to free himself by creating enough slack in the belt to go deeper into the latch rather than pull against it.

“You’re wasting your time. It has to be popped loose with a screwdriver from the inside,” T-Bone said. “By the way, I ain’t no rapist.”

“Were you at the church?” Pete asked.

“No, but you were. Way I see it, you got no kick coming. So don’t beg. I’ve heard it before. Same words from the same people. It ain’t their fault. The world’s been picking on them. They’ll do anything to make it right.”

“My girlfriend is innocent. She wasn’t part of anything that happened at that church.”

“A child is created from its parents’ fornication. Ain’t none of us innocent.”

“What were you told to do to us?”

“None of your business.”

“You’re not on the same page as the guy in the SUV, though, are you?”

“That’s something you ain’t got to worry about.”

“That’s right. I don’t. But you do,” Pete said.

Pete saw T-Bone wet his bottom lip. A drop of blood from the cut under his eye slipped down his cheek, as though a red line were being drawn there with an invisible pencil. “Say that over.”

“Why would Hugo send you after us and not tell Bobby Lee? Bobby Lee is working on his own, isn’t he? How’s the guy named Preacher fit into all this?”

T-Bone glanced sideways, the shine of fear in his eyes. “How much you know about Preacher?”

“If Bobby Lee is working with him, where’s that leave you?”

T-Bone sucked in his cheeks as though they were full of moisture. But Pete guessed that in reality, his mouth was as dry as cotton. The dust from the SUV was corkscrewing in the pickup’s headlights. “You’re a smart one, all right. But for a guy who’s so dadburned smart, it must be strange to find yourself in your current situation. Another thing I cain’t figure out: I talked with your girlfriend at the steak house. How’d a guy who looks like a fried chitling end up with a hot piece of ass like that?”

Up ahead, the brake lights on the SUV lit up as brightly as embers inside the dust. To the south, the ridges and mesas that flanged the Rio Grande were purple and gray and blue and cold-looking against the night sky.

Bobby Lee got out of his vehicle and walked back to the truck, his nine-millimeter dangling from his right hand. “Cut your lights and turn off your engine,” he said.

“What are we doing?”

“There’s no ‘we.’” Bobby Lee’s cell phone hung from a cord looped over his neck.

“I thought we were working together. Call Hugo. Call Artie. Straighten this out.”

Bobby Lee screwed the muzzle of a nine-millimeter against T-Bone’s temple. The hammer was already cocked, the butterfly safety off.

“You use your nine on your-”

“That’s right, I do,” Bobby Lee said. “A fourteen-rounder, manufactured before the bunny huggers got them banned. Hand me your piece, butt-first.”

T-Bone lifted his hand to eye level, his fingers clamped across the frame of his.25. Bobby Lee took it from him and dropped it in his pocket. “Who’s down here with you?”