James Burke - Rain Gods

His phone rang again. The caller ID was blocked. “See if that’s Ethan Riser,” Hackberry called through the doorway. He heard Maydeen take the call in the other room. A moment later, she was standing in the doorway. “Better pick up,” she said.

“Who is it?”

“Same asswipe-pardon me-same dude who called yesterday and said you two were the opposite sides of the same coin.”

Hackberry lifted the receiver and put it to his ear. “Collins?” he said.

“Good morning,” the voice said.

“I’m getting pretty tired of you.”

“I watched you through binoculars yesterday afternoon.”

“Revisiting our murderous handiwork, are we?”

“I’m afraid your thinking is muddled once again, Sheriff. I didn’t murder anybody. They tried to set me up. They also threw down on me first. I wasn’t even armed. An associate was carrying my weapon for me.”

“An associate? That’s a great term. The guy with the raincoat on his arm?”

“The security camera caught that?”

“You left the camera intact deliberately, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t give it a lot of thought.”

“Why’d you kidnap Mrs. Dolan?”

“What makes you think I did?”

“Because you left a witness.”

Hackberry heard Collins breathe in, as though sucking air across his teeth while he thought of a clever response.

“I don’t think I did,” he said.

“You thought wrong. You’ll get to meet him at your trial. I have to ask you something, bub.”

“‘Bub’?”

Hackberry leaned forward in his chair, one elbow on the desk blotter, rubbing one temple with his fingers. Both Maydeen and Pam were watching from his office door. “I don’t know you well, but you seem like a man with a code. In your way, maybe you’re a man of honor. Why do you want to do so much injury to Mrs. Dolan? She has three children and a husband who need her. Set her free, partner. If you have an issue with me, that’s fine. Don’t punish the innocent.”

“Who are you to lecture me?”

“A drunkard and a whoremonger with no moral authority at all, Mr. Collins. That’s the man you’re talking to. Let Esther Dolan go. She’s not a character out of the Bible. She’s flesh and blood and is probably afraid she’ll never see her husband or children again. You want that on your conscience?”

“Esther knows she’s safe with me.”

“Where’s Hugo Cistranos?”

“Oh, you’ll find him. Just watch the sky. It takes two or three days, but you’ll see them circling.”

“And you don’t think she’s afraid?”

There was a long beat.

“Good try. I’ve always heard the inculcation of guilt is a papist trait.”

“I have an envelope filled with photos of the nine terrified women and girls you machine-gunned and buried. Did they scream when they died? Did they beg in a language you couldn’t understand? Did they dissolve into a bloody mist while you sprayed them with a Thompson? Am I describing the scene accurately? Correct me if I haven’t. Please tell me in your own words what it was like to shoot nine defenseless human beings who were so desperate for a new life they’d allow their stomachs to be filled with balloons of heroin?”

He could hear Collins breathing hard. Then the line went dead.

Maydeen filled a cup with coffee in the other room and brought it to him on a saucer. Both she and Pam watched him without speaking.

“Y’all got something to do?” he said.

“We’re going to get him,” Pam said.

“I’ll believe it when it happens,” he said, picking up the fax sheets from his desk blotter again, his thumbs crimping the edges of the paper to the point of tearing them.

AS THE MORNING passed, a seemingly insignificant detail from his conversation with Jack Collins had burrowed itself into his memory and wouldn’t leave him alone. It was the sound of Collins breathing. No, that wasn’t it. It was the way Collins breathed and the image the sound conjured up from the Hollywood of years gone by. Collins seemed to draw his air across his teeth. His mouth became a slit, his speech laconic and clipped, his face without expression, like a man speaking not to other people but to a persona that lived inside him. Perhaps speaking like a man who had a nervous twitch, who was wrapped too tight for his own good, who was at war with the Fates.

A man with dry lips and a voice that rasped as if his larynx had been fried by cigarettes and whiskey or clotted with rust. A man who wore his hair mowed on the sides and combed straight back on top, a man who wore a hat and clothes from another era, his narrow belt hitched tightly into his ribs and his unpressed slacks tucked into western boots, perhaps like a prospector of years past, his whole demeanor that of tarnished frontier gentility.

Hackberry re-sorted the fax sheets and found the third page in the transmission. He stared at one listing as though seeing it for the first time. How dumb does one lawman get, particularly one who considered himself a student of his own era? “Come in here, Pam,” he said.

She stood in the doorway. “What’s up?”

“Take a look at the names on this page.”

“What about them?”

“Which one of them sticks in your mind?”

“None.”

“Look again.”

“I’m a blank.”

He put his thumb on the edge of one name. She stood behind him, leaning down, one arm propped on his desk, her arm touching his shoulder.

“F. C. Dobbs. What’s remarkable about that?” she said.

“You remember the name Fred C. Dobbs?”

“No.”

“Did you see The Treasure of the Sierra Madre ?”

“A long time ago.”

“Humphrey Bogart played the role of a totally worthless panhandler and all-around loser whose clothes are in tatters and his lips are so chapped they’re about to crack. When he thinks he’s about to be slickered, he grimaces at the camera and says, ‘Nobody is putting anything over on Fred C. Dobbs.’”

“Collins thinks he’s a character in a film?”

“No, Collins is a chameleon and a clown. He’s a self-educated guy who believes a library card makes him more intelligent than an MIT graduate. He likes to laugh at the rest of us.”

“Maybe F. C. Dobbs is a real person. Maybe it’s just coincidence.”

“There are no coincidences with a guy like Jack Collins. He’s the thing that’s wrong with all the rest of us. He just has more of it and nowhere to leave it.”

“There’s no physical address for Dobbs, just a post office box in Presidio County?” she said.

“So far.”

“Give Maydeen and me a few minutes,” she said.

But it was almost quitting time before Pam and Maydeen got off the phones. In the meantime, Hackberry had his hands full with Nick Dolan, who had called three times, each time more angry and irrational.

“Mr. Dolan, you have my word. As soon as I learn anything about your wife, I’ll call you first,” Hackberry said.

“That’s what the FBI says. I look like a douche bag? I sound like a douche bag? I am a douche bag? I’m stupid here? Tell me which it is,” Nick said.

“We’ll find her.”

“They were following me around. They were bugging my phones. But they couldn’t protect my wife.”

“You need to take that up with the FBI, sir.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m sitting in my office, the place you just called up for the third time.”

“No, like where are you on the map?”

“You don’t need to be here, Mr. Dolan.”

“I’m supposed to play with my joint while this crazoid kidnaps my wife?”

“Stay home, sir.”

“I’m getting in my car now. I’m on my way.”

“No, you’re not. You’re-”

Dead connection.