The marines packed snow on the barrels of their.30-caliber machine guns, running the snow up and down the superheated steel with their mittens. When the barrels burned out, they sometimes had to unscrew and change them with their bare hands, leaving their flesh on the metal.
The ditch was littered with shell casings, the BAR man hunting in the snow for his last magazine, the breech of every M-1 around Hack locking open, the empty clip ejecting with a clanging sound. When the marines were out of ammunition, Hackberry remembered the great silence that followed and the hissing of shrapnel from airbursts in the snow and then the bugles blowing again.
Now, as he gazed through the windshield of the cruiser, he was back in the ditch, and the year was 1950, and for a second he thought he heard a series of dull reports like strings of Chinese firecrackers popping. But when he rolled down the window, the only sound he heard was wind. “Stop the car,” he said.
“What is it?”
“There’s something wrong with that scene. The old man said the Mexicans working here were illegals. But the vehicles are new and expensive. Undocumented workers don’t set up a permanent camp where they work, either.”
“You think Collins is actually there?”
“He shows up where you least expect him. He doesn’t feel guilty. He thinks it’s the rest of us who have the problem, not him.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Call the locals for backup, then call Ethan Riser.”
“I say leave the feds out of it. They’ve been a cluster-fuck from the jump. Where you going?”
“Just make the calls, Pam,” he said.
He walked twenty yards farther up the dirt track. The wind was blowing harder and should have felt colder, but his skin was dead to the touch, his eyes tearing slightly, his palms so stiff and dry that he felt they would crack if he folded them. He could see a haze of white smoke hanging on the ground near the tents. A redheaded turkey vulture flew by immediately over Hackberry’s head, gliding so fast on extended wings that its shadow broke apart on a pile of boulders and was gone before Hackberry could blink.
An omen in a valley that could have been a place of bones, the kind of charnel house one associated with dead civilizations? Or was it all just the kind of burned-out useless terrain that no one cared about, one that was disposable in the clash of cultures or imperial societies?
He could feel a pressure band tightening on the side of his head, a cold vapor wrapping around his heart. At what point in a man’s life did he no longer have to deal with feelings as base as fear? Didn’t acceptance of the grave and the possibility of either oblivion or stepping out among the stars without a map relieve one of the ancestral dread that fouled the blood and reduced men to children who called out their mother’s name in their last moments? Why did age purchase no peace?
But he no longer had either the time or luxury of musing upon abstractions. Where were the men who lived in the tents? Who was cooking food inside a fire ring no different from those our ancestors cooked on in this same valley over eleven thousand years ago?
The cave located up the mountainside from the camp looked like a black mouth, no, one that was engorged, strung with flumes of green and orange and gray mine tailings or rock that had simply cracked and fallen away from constant exposure to heat and subfreezing temperatures.
It was the kind of place where something had gone terribly wrong long ago, the kind of place that held on to its dead and the spiritual vestiges of the worst people who had lived inside it.
Hackberry wondered what his grandfather, Old Hack, would have to say about a place like this. As though Old Hack had decided to speak to him inside the wind, he could almost hear the sonorous voice and the cynical humor for which his grandfather was infamous: “I suspect it has its moments, Satchel Ass, but truth be known, it’s the kind of shithole a moral imbecile like John Wesley Hardin would have found an absolute delight.”
Hackberry smiled to himself and hooked his coat behind the butt of his holstered revolver. He walked back toward the cruiser, where Pam Tibbs was still sitting behind the steering wheel, finishing her call to Ethan Riser.
But something in the door mirror had caught her attention. She put down the phone and turned around in the seat and looked back toward the twin bluffs, then got out of the cruiser with the binoculars and focused them on a vehicle that had come to a stop by the twin bluffs. “Better take a look,” she said.
“At what?”
“It’s a Grand Cherokee,” she said. “It’s flying an American flag on a staff attached to the back bumper.”
“Nick Dolan?”
“I can’t tell. It looks like he’s lost.”
“Forget him.”
“Flores and Gaddis are probably with him.”
“We’re going in, babe. Under a black flag. You got me?”
“No, I didn’t hear that.”
“Yes, you did. Collins has killed scores of people in his life. What’s in the pump?”
“All double-aught bucks,” Pam said.
“Load your pockets with them, too.”
PREACHER WAS EATING his second brownie when the first cramp hit him. The sensation, or his perception of its significance, was not instantaneous. At first he felt only a slight spasm, not unlike an irritant unexpectedly striking the stomach lining. Then the pain sharpened and spread down toward the colon, like a sliver of jagged tin seeking release. He clenched his buttocks together, still unsure what was happening, faintly embarrassed in front of the woman, trying to hide the discomfort distorting his face.
The next spasm made his jaw drop and the blood drain from his head. He leaned forward, trying to catch his breath, sweat breaking on his upper lip. His stomach was churning, the interior of the tent going out of focus. He swallowed drily and tried to see the woman clearly.
“Are you sick?” she said.
“You ask if I’m sick? I’m poisoned. What’s in this?”
“What I said. Chocolate and flour and-”
A bilious metallic taste surged into his mouth. The constriction in his bowels was spreading upward, into his lower chest, like chains wrapping around his ribs and sternum, squeezing the air out of his lungs. “Don’t lie,” he said.
“I ate the brownies, too. There’s nothing wrong with them.”
He coughed violently, as though he had eaten a piece of angle iron. “There must be peanut butter in them.”
“You have a problem with peanut butter?”
“You bitch.” He pulled open the tent flap to let in the cold air. “You treacherous bitch.”
“Look at you. A grown man cursing others because he has a stomachache. A man who kills women and young girls calls other people names because a brownie has upset him. Your mother would be ashamed of you. Where did you grow up? In a barnyard?”
Preacher got to his feet and held on to the tent pole with one hand until the earth stopped shifting under his feet. “What right do you have to talk of my mother?”
“What right, he asks? I’m the mother you took from her husband and her children. The mother you took to be your concubine, that’s who I am, you miserable gangster.”
He stumbled out into the wind and cold air, his hair soggy with sweat under his hat, his skin burning as though it had been dipped in acid, one hand clenched on his stomach. He headed for his tent, where the Thompson lay on top of his writing table, the drum fat with cartridges, a second cartridge-packed drum resting beside it. That was when he saw a sheriff’s cruiser coming up the dirt track and, in the far distance, a second vehicle that seemed part of an optical illusion brought on by the anaphylactic reaction wrecking his nervous system. The second vehicle was a maroon SUV with an American flag whipping from a staff attached to the back bumper. Who were these people? What gave them the right to come on his land? His anger only exacerbated the fire in his entrails and constricted his lungs as though his chest had been touched by the tendrils of a jellyfish.