James Burke - Rain Gods

He traced the double muzzles of the derringer across her temple and hairline and along her cheek. She closed her eyes, and for a moment she thought she heard the electronic laughter from the television set subsumed by a train engine blowing through a tunnel, its whistle screaming off the walls, a lighted dining car filled with revelers disappearing into the darkness.

When she opened her eyes, she saw a cell phone in his hand, saw his thumb touch a single button, saw the phone go out of her line of vision toward his ear. “Cut him loose,” he said.

Then the room was quiet again, and she felt the hot wind of the desert puffing through the door and saw an eighteen-wheeler driving by on the state highway, its trailer outlined with strings of festive lights, the stars winking above the hills.

EVEN BEFORE THE sun had broken the edge of the horizon, Hackberry Holland knew the temperature would reach a hundred degrees by noon. The influence of the rainstorm and the promise it had offered had proved illusory. The heat had lain in abeyance through the night, collecting in stone and warm concrete and sandy river bottoms that boiled with grasshoppers; at dawn it had come alive again, rising with the sun inside a warm blanket of humidity that shimmered on the fields and hills and made the eyes water when you stared too long at the horizon.

At seven-thirty A.M. Hackberry raised the flag on the pole in front of his office, then went inside and tried again to reach Ethan Riser. He did not know what had happened to Pete Flores since Pete had called from a phone booth and told Hackberry he remembered one letter and two numbers from Jack Collins’s car tag, or at least the tag of the tan Honda that Flores had showered rocks on. Hackberry had given the Texas DMV the single letter and two digits and asked that they run every combination possible through the computer until they found a match with a Honda. He had also called Riser and told him of the call from Flores.

The DMV had come back with 173 possibles. Riser not only did not get back to him; he had stopped returning Hackberry’s calls altogether. Which raised another question: Was Riser like too many of his colleagues, cooperative and helpful as long as the locals were useful, then down the road and gone after he got what he needed?

Or maybe Riser had been told by his superiors to stay away from Hackberry and worry less about local problems and concentrate on putting Josef Sholokoff out of business.

On occasion, federal agencies practiced a form of triage that went beyond the pragmatic into a marginal area that was one step short of ruthless. Psychopaths were sprung from custody without their victims or the prosecution’s witnesses being notified. People who had trusted the system with their lives discovered they had been used and discarded as casually as someone flicking away a cigarette butt. Most of these people usually had the power and social importance of fish chum.

By ten A.M. Hackberry had left two messages with Riser. He opened his desk drawer and removed a thick brown envelope that contained the eight-by-ten crime-scene photos taken behind the church at Chapala Crossing. Besides their morbid subject matter, the photos contained a second kind of peculiarity: None of the uniformed deputies, the paramedics, the federal personnel, or the forensic team from Austin wore any expression. In photo after photo, their faces were empty of emotion, their mouths down-hooked at the corners, as though they were playing roles in a film that was not supposed to make use of sound or any display of feeling. The only photography he could compare it with was the black-and-white news footage taken during the mass burials at the death camps liberated by American forces in early 1945.

He returned the photos to the drawer.

What had happened to Pete Flores and Vikki Gaddis? What was the next move Preacher Jack Collins would make? What kind of cage could contain the evil that had perpetrated the slaughter at Chapala Crossing?

AT TWO-THIRTY THAT afternoon Danny Boy Lorca was driving his converted army-surplus flatbed truck up the two-lane from the Mexican border, the wind as hot as a blowtorch through the window, the unmuffled roar of the engine shaking the cab, his fuel gauge ticking on empty. He saw the hitchhikers in the distance, standing on the roadside between two low hills whose sides had been scorched by a wildfire. There was no other traffic on the road. The outlines of the two hitchhikers were warping in the heat, the glaze on the road like a pool of tar. As he drew closer, he realized one of the hitchhikers was a woman. A guitar case rested by her foot. Her denim shirt was pasted to her skin with perspiration. The man next to her wore a coned-up straw hat and a shirt he had sawed off at the armpits. The top of one arm was wrinkled with scar tissue that looked like the material in an overheated lampshade.

Danny Boy pulled to the side of the road, glancing warily in the rearview mirror. “Y’all came back,” he said through the passenger window.

“Will you give us a ride?” the woman asked.

Danny Boy never answered questions whose answer seemed obvious, in the same way he did not say hello or goodbye to people when their actions or presence were obvious.

Pete Flores swung a duffel bag onto the truck bed and placed Vikki’s guitar case between it and the cab. He opened the passenger door, blowing on his hand after he did, waiting for Vikki to get inside. “Wow,” he said, looking at his hand. “How long has your truck been in the sun?”

“It’s a hunnerd and seven,” Danny Boy said.

“Thank you for stopping,” Vikki said.

Pete climbed inside and shut the door. He started to offer his hand, but Danny Boy was concentrating on the wide-angle mirror.

“You know the cops are looking for you? Federal agents and state people and Sheriff Holland, too. A federal agent got killed.”

“I reckon they found us,” Pete said.

Danny Boy pulled back onto the road, his shirt open on his leathery chest, his neck beaded with dirt rings. “Maybe this ain’t the best place for y’all.”

“We don’t have any other place to go,” Pete said.

“If it was me, I’d get on a freight and go to Canada and follow the harvest, maybe. A cook on them crews can make good money. I’d find a place that ain’t been ruined and settle down.”

Pete stuck his arm out the window, turning his palm into the airflow so it would vane up his arm and inside his shirt. “We’re working on it,” he said.

“Them people you got mixed up with? They’re out there.”

“Which people? Out where?” Vikki asked.

“They’re out there at night. They come up the arroyos. They ain’t wets, either. They go past my place. I see them in the field.”

“Those are harmless farmworkers,” Pete said.

“No, they ain’t. See the sky. We had one night of hard rain, the way it used to be. But we didn’t get no more. Them rain gods were giving us a chance. But they ain’t coming back while all these drug dealers and killers are here. There’s a hole in the earth, and down inside it is the place where all the corn came from. That’s where all power comes from. Don’t nobody know where the hole is anymore.”

Vikki looked sideways at Pete.

“Tell her,” Danny Boy said.

“Tell her what?”

“That I ain’t drunk.”

“She knows that. Danny Boy is okay, Vikki.” Pete gazed out the window, the wind climbing up his bare arm, puffing inside his shirt. “That’s Ouzel Flagler’s place. I wish I hadn’t been there when some bad hombres came in.”

“That’s where you met them guys?”

“Probably. I’m not sure. I was in a blackout most of the day. I know I bought mescal from Ouzel that day. Ouzel’s mescal always leaves its mark, like an earth grader has rolled over your head.”