James Burke - Rain Gods

Pam Tibbs tapped on the doorjamb. She had a legal pad folded back in her left hand. “This is what we’ve got. A man using the name F. C. Dobbs had a Texas driver’s license two years ago but doesn’t have one now. His rent on his post office box in Presidio has lapsed. Ten years ago a man named Fred Dobbs, no middle initial, bought five hundred acres of land down toward Big Bend at a tax sale. There were four big parcels strung all over the place. He sold them six months later.”

Hackberry fiddled with his ear. “Who owned the land before Dobbs?”

Pam looked back at her notes. “A woman named Edna Wilcox. I talked to the sheriff in Brewster. He said the Wilcox woman had been married to a railroad man who died of food poisoning. He said she died of a fall and didn’t leave any heirs.”

“What happened to Dobbs?”

“The clerk of court didn’t know, and neither did the sheriff.”

“So we’ve got a dead end?” Hackberry said.

“The state offices are closing now. We can start in again tomorrow. Was that Nick Dolan calling again?”

“Yeah, he said he’s on his way here.” Hackberry leaned back in his swivel chair. Rain was blowing against the window, and the hills surrounding the town were disappearing inside the grayness of the afternoon. “Who did Fred Dobbs, no middle initial, sell the land to?”

Pam turned the page on her legal pad and studied her notes. “I don’t know if I wrote it down. Wait a minute, here it is. The buyer was Bee Travis.”

Hackberry knitted his fingers behind his head. “T-R-A-V-I-S, you’re sure that’s the right spelling?”

“I think so. There was static on the line.”

Hackberry clicked his nails on the desk blotter and looked at his watch. “Call the clerk of court again before the courthouse closes.”

“Has anyone ever talked to you about OCD problems?” She looked at his expression. “Okay, sorry, I’m on it.”

Two minutes later, she came back into his office. “The first name is actually the initial B , not ‘Bee’ with a double e . The last name is Traven, not Travis. I wrote it down wrong.” She glanced away, then looked back at him and held her gaze on his face, her chest rising and falling.

But he wasn’t thinking about her chagrin. “Collins sold the land to himself. He laundered his name and laundered the deed.”

“I’m not following you at all.”

“B. Traven was a mysterious eccentric who wrote the novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre .”

“Sell that one to Ethan Riser.”

“I’m not even going to try. Sign out a cruiser and pack your overnight bag.”

She went to the door and closed it, then returned to his desk. She leaned on the flats of both her hands, her breasts hanging down heavily inside her shirt. “Think about what you’re doing. If anybody could figure out Collins’s aliases, it would be someone with your educational background. You don’t think he knows that? If he’s there now, it’s because he wants you to find him.”

“Maybe he’ll get his wish.”

THAT’S HAIL,” PREACHER said to the woman sitting on the cot across from him. “Hear it? It’s early this year. But at this altitude, you cain’t ever tell. Here, I’ll open the flap. Look outside. See, it looks like mothballs bouncing all over the desert floor. Look at it come down.”

The woman’s face was gray, her eyes dark and angry, her black hair pulled straight back. In the gloom of the tent, she looked more Andalusian than Semitic. She wore a beige sundress and Roman sandals, and her face and shoulders and underarms were still damp from the wet cloth she had washed herself with.

“A plane will be here tomorrow. The wind is too strong for it to land today,” he said. “The pilot has to drop in over those bluffs. It’s hard to do when the wind is out of the north.”

“You’ll have to drug me,” she said.

“I just ask you to give me one year. Is that a big price, considering I protected your family and spared your husband’s life when Arthur Rooney wanted him dead? You know where Arthur Rooney is today, maybe at this very moment?”

He waited for her to reply, but the only sound in the tent was the clicking of hailstones outside.

“Mr. Rooney is under the waves,” he said. “Not quite to the continental shelf, but almost that far.”

“I wouldn’t give you the parings from my nails. I’ll open my veins before I let you touch me. If you fall asleep, I’ll cut your throat.”

“See, when you speak like that, I know you’re the one.”

“One what?”

“Like your namesake in the Book of Esther. She was born a queen, but it took Xerxes to make her one.”

“You’re not only a criminal, you’re an idiot. You wouldn’t know the Book of Esther from a telephone directory.”

Bobby Lee Motree bent inside the open tent flap, wearing a denim jacket, his top hat tied down with a scarf. He held a tin plate in each hand. Both plates contained a single sandwich, a dollop of canned spinach, and another one of fruit cocktail.

“Molo picked up some stuff at the convenience store,” Bobby Lee said. “I seasoned the spinach with some bacon bits and Tabasco. Hope y’all like it.”

“What the hell is that?” Preacher said, looking down at his plate.

“What it looks like, Jack. Fruit cocktail, spinach, and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches,” Bobby Lee said.

Preacher threw his plate outside the tent into the dirt. “Go to town and buy some decent food. You clean that shit out of the icebox and bury it.”

“You eat sandwiches every day. You eat in cafés where the kitchen is more unsanitary than the washroom. Why are you always on my case, man?”

“Because I don’t like peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Is that hard to understand?”

“Hey, Molo, Preacher says your food sucks!” Bobby Lee shouted.

“You think this is a joke?” Preacher said.

“No, Jack, I’m just indicating maybe you don’t know who your friends are. What do I have to do to prove myself?”

“For starters, don’t serve me shit to eat.”

“Then get your own damn food. I’m tired of being somebody’s nigger.”

“I’ve told you about using language like that in my presence.”

Bobby Lee flipped the tent flap shut and walked away without securing it to the tent pole, his hobnailed boots crunching on the hailstones. Preacher heard him talking to the Mexican killers, most of his words lost in the wind. But part of one sentence came through loud and clear: “His Highness the child in there…”

At first Esther Dolan had set down her plate on the table, evidently intending not to eat. But as she had listened to the exchange between Bobby Lee and the man they called Preacher, her dark eyes had grown steadily more thoughtful, veiled, turned inward. She picked up the plate and set it in her lap, then used the plastic knife to cut her sandwich into quarters. She bit off a corner of one square and chewed it slowly, gazing into space, as though disconnected from any of the events taking place around her.

Preacher tied the flap to the tent pole and sat down heavily on his cot. He drank the coffee from his cup, his fedora snugged low on his brow, the crown etched with a thin chain of dried salt.

“You should eat something,” she said.

“My main meal is always at evening. And it’s a half meal at that. Know why that is?”

“You’re on a diet?”

“A horse always has a half tank in him. He has enough fuel in his stomach to deal with or elude his enemies, but not too much to slow him down.”

She feigned attention to his words but was clearly not listening. Bobby Lee had put a paper napkin under her plate. She slipped it out and set one of the sandwich squares on it. “Take this. It’s high in both protein and sugar.”