“You want me to hang around, Sheriff?” Danny Boy said.

“Did I tell you to get out of here?” Clawson said. He pushed Danny Boy, then kicked him in the butt.

“Whoa,” Hackberry said.

“Whoa what?” Clawson said.

“You need to dial it down, Mr. Clawson.”

“It’s Agent Clawson.”

Hackberry was breathing through his nose. He saw Pam Tibbs at the office window. He turned to Danny Boy. “Go down to Grogan’s and put a couple on my tab,” he said. “The operational word is ‘couple,’ Danny.”

“I don’t need a drink. I’m gonna get something to eat and go back to my place. If I hear anything on Pete, I’ll tell you,” Danny Boy said.

Hackberry turned and started back toward his office, ignoring Clawson’s presence. He could hear the flag popping in the breeze and the flag chain tinkling against the metal pole.

“We’re not done,” Clawson said. “Last night somebody made two nine-one-one calls from a pay phone outside San Antonio. I’ll play you part of it.”

He removed a small recorder from his pants pocket and clicked it on. The voice on the recording sounded like that of a drunk man or someone with a speech defect. “Tell the FBI there’s a whack out on a girl name of Vikki Gaddis. They’re gonna kill her and a soldier. It’s about those Thai women that got murdered.” Clawson clicked off the recorder. “Know the voice?” he said.

“No,” Hackberry said.

“I think the caller had a pencil clenched between his teeth and was loaded on top of it. Can you detect an accent?”

“I’d say he’s not from around here.”

“Here’s another piece of information: One of our forensic guys went the extra mile on the postmortem of the Thai females. They had China white in their stomachs, balloons full of it, the purest I’ve ever seen. Some of the balloons had ruptured in the women’s stomachs prior to mortality. I wonder if you stumbled into a storage area rather than a graveyard.”

“Stumbled?”

“English lit wasn’t my strong suit. You want to be serious here or not?”

“I don’t buy that the place behind the church was a storage area. That makes no sense.”

“Then what does?”

“I’ve been told of your personal loss, sir. I think I can appreciate the level of anger you must have to deal with. But you’re not going to verbally abuse or put your foot on anybody in this county again. We’re done here.”

“Where do you get off talking about my personal life? Where do you get off talking about my daughter, you sonofabitch?”

Just then the dispatcher Maydeen stepped outside and lit a cigarette. She wore a deputy’s uniform and had fat arms and big breasts and wide hips, and her lipstick looked like a flattened rose on her mouth. “Hack doesn’t let us smoke in the building,” she said, smiling from ear to ear as she inhaled deep into her lungs.

PREACHER JACK COLLINS paid the cabdriver the fare from the airstrip to the office-and-condo building that faced Galveston Bay. But rather than go immediately into the building, he paused on his crutches and stared across Seawall Boulevard at the waves folding on the beach, each wave rilling with sand and yellowed vegetation and dead shellfish and seaweed matted with clusters of tiny crabs and Portuguese men-of-war whose tentacles could wrap around a horse’s leg and sting it to its knees.

There was a storm breaking on the southern horizon like a great cloud of green gas forked with lightning that made no sound. The air had turned the color of tarnished brass as the barometer had dropped, and Preacher could taste the salt in the wind and smell the shrimp that had been caught inside the waves and left stranded on the sand among the ruptured blue air sacs of the jellyfish. The humidity was as bright as spun glass, and within a minute’s time it glazed his forearms and face and was turned into a cool burn by the wind, not unlike a lover’s tongue moving across the skin.

Preacher entered a glass door painted with the words REDSTONE SECURITY SERVICE. A receptionist looked up from her desk and smiled pleasantly at him. “Tell Mr. Rooney Jack is here to see him,” he said.

“Do you have an appointment, sir?”

“What time is it?”

The receptionist glanced at a large grandfather clock, one whose face was inset with Roman numerals. “It’s four-forty-seven,” she said.

“That’s the time of my appointment with Mr. Rooney. You can tell him that.”

Her hand moved toward the phone uncertainly, then stopped.

“That was just my poor joke. Ma’am, these crutches aren’t getting any more comfortable,” Preacher said.

“Just a moment.” She lifted the phone receiver and pushed a button. “Mr. Rooney, Jack is here to see you.” There was a beat. “He didn’t give it.” Another beat, this one longer. “Sir, what’s your last name?”

“My full name is Jack Collins, no middle initial.”

After the receptionist relayed the information, there was a silence in the room almost as loud as the waves bursting against the beach. Then she replaced the receiver in the cradle. Whatever thoughts she was thinking were locked behind her eyes. “Mr. Rooney says to go on up. The elevator is to your left.”

“He tell you to call somebody?” Preacher asked.

“I’m not sure I know what you mean, sir.”

“You did your job, ma’am. Don’t worry about it. But I’d better not hear that elevator come up behind me with the wrong person in it,” Preacher said.

The receptionist stared straight ahead for perhaps three seconds, picked up her purse, and went out the front door, her dress switching back and forth across her calves.

When Preacher stepped out of the elevator, he saw a man in a beige suit and pink western shirt sitting in a swivel chair behind a huge desk, framed against a glass wall that looked out onto the bay. On the desk was a big clear plastic jar of green-and-blue candy sticks, each striped stick wrapped in cellophane. His hips swelled out at the beltline and gave the sense that he was melting in his swivel chair. He had sandy hair and a small Irish mouth that was downturned at the corners. His skin was dusted with liver spots, some of them dark, almost purple around the edges, as though his soul exuded sickness through his pores. “Help you?” he said.

“Maybe.”

Down on the beach, swimmers were getting out of the water, dragging their inner tubes with them, a lifeguard standing in his elevated chair, blowing a whistle, pointing his finger at a triangular fin whizzing through a swell at incredible speed.

“Can I sit down?” Preacher said.

“Yes, sir, go right ahead,” Arthur Rooney said.

“Should I call you Artie or Mr. Rooney?”

“Whatever you want.”

“Hugo Cistranos work for you?”

“He did. When I had an investigative agency in New Orleans. But not now.”

“I think he does.”

“Sir?”

“Do I need to speak louder?”

“Hugo Cistranos is not with me any longer. That’s what I’m saying to you. What’s the issue, Mr. Collins?” Artie Rooney cleared his throat as though the last word had caught in his larynx.

“You know who I am?”

“I’ve heard of you. Nickname is Preacher, right?”

“Yes, sir, some do call me that with regularity, friends and such.”

“We just moved into this office. How’d you know I was here?”

“Made a couple of calls. Know that song ‘I Get Around’ by the Beach Boys? I get around, albeit on crutches. A woman put a couple of holes in me.”

“Sorry to hear about that.”

“Some other people and I got stuck with a piece of wet work. Supposedly, it was initiated by a little fellow who runs a skin joint for middle-aged titty babies. Supposedly, this little fellow doesn’t want to come up with the money to pay his tab. His name is Nick Dolan. Know who I’m talking about?”

“I’ve known Nick for thirty-five years. He had a floating casino in New Orleans.”

Preacher chewed on a hangnail and removed a piece of skin from his tongue. “I got to thinking about this little fellow, the one with the titty-baby joint about halfway between Austin and San Antone. Why would a fellow like that have a bunch of Asian women shot to death?”