Clawson looked at his watch. “I’ve had about all of this I can take,” he said. “It’s against my better judgment, but I’m going to kick your man loose. I’ll be back. You can count on it.”

“Turn around, you pompous motherfucker,” Pam Tibbs said.

“Say that again?” Clawson said.

“You learn some manners or you’re going to wish you were cleaning chamber pots in Afghanistan,” Pam said.

Hackberry put on his hat and walked away, forming a pocket of air in one jaw.

ACROSS THE HIGHWAY, at an open-air watermelon stand, a man wearing black jeans and unpolished black hobnailed boots and wideband suspenders and a Grateful Dead T-shirt, the fabric washed so many times it was ash-gray, sat at a plank table in ninety-six-degree shade, the wind popping the canvas tarp above his head. A top hat rested crown-down beside him on the bench. He carved the meat out of his watermelon rind with his pocketknife and slipped each chunk off the back of the blade into his mouth, watching the scene by the side of Isaac Clawson’s vehicle play itself out.

When the people across the highway had gone their separate ways, he put on his hat and walked away from the watermelon stand to use his cell phone. His swollen lats and long upper torso and short legs gave him the appearance of a tree stump. A moment later, he returned to the table, wadded up his melon rinds in damp newspaper, and stuffed the newspaper and the rinds in a trash barrel. A cloud of blackflies swarmed out of the barrel into his face, but he seemed to give them little notice, as though perhaps they were old friends.

8

THE SALOON WAS old, built in the nineteenth century, the original stamped-tin ceiling still in place, the long railed bar where John Wesley Hardin and Wild Bill Longley drank still in use. Preacher Jack Collins sat in the back against a wall, behind the pool table, under a wood-bladed fan. Through a side window he could see a clump of banana trees, their fronds beaded with drops of moisture that looked as heavy and bright as mercury. He watched the waiter bring his food from a service window behind the bar. Then he shook ketchup and salt and pepper and Louisiana hot sauce on the fried beef patty and the instant mashed potatoes and the canned string beans that constituted his lunch.

He raised his eyes slightly when the front door opened and Hugo Cistranos entered the saloon and walked out of the brilliant noonday glare toward Preacher’s table. But Preacher’s expression was impassive and showed no recognition of the events taking place around him, not even the arrival of his food at the table or the fact that Hugo had stopped at the bar and ordered two draft beers and was now setting them on the table.

“Hot out there,” Hugo said, sitting down, sipping at his beer, pushing the second glass toward Preacher.

“I don’t drink,” Preacher said.

“Sorry, I forgot.”

Preacher continued eating and did not ask Hugo if he wanted to order.

“You eat here a lot?” Hugo said.

“When they have the special.”

“That’s the special you’re eating now?”

“No.”

Hugo didn’t try to sort it out. He looked at the empty pool table under a cone of light, the racked cues, a hard disk of pool chalk on a table, the cracked red vinyl in the booths, a wall calendar with a picture of the Alamo on it that was three years out of date, the day drinkers humped morosely over their beer glasses at the bar. “You’re an unusual kind of guy, Jack.”

Preacher set his knife on the edge of his plate and let his eyes rove over Hugo’s face.

“What I mean is, I’m glad you’re willing to work with me on this problem I’m having with Nick Dolan,” Hugo said.

“I didn’t say I would.”

“Nobody wants you to do anything you don’t want to, least of all me.”

“A sit-down with the owner of a skin joint?”

“Dolan wants to meet you. You’re the man, Jack.”

“I have a hole in my foot and one in my calf. I’m a gimp. Sitting down with a gimp is going to make him pay the money he owes you? You cain’t handle that yourself?”

“We’re gonna take fifty percent of his nightclub and his restaurant. Ten percent of it will be yours, Jack. That’s for the late payment I owed you. Later, we’ll talk about the escort services Nick owns in Dallas and Houston. Five minutes after we sit down, his signature is going to be on that reapportionment of title. He’s a sawed-off fat little Jew putting on a show for his wife. Believe me, you’ll make him shit his pants. Let’s face it, you know how to give a guy the heebie-jeebies, Jack.”

Hugo salted his beer and drank from the foam. He wore a Rolex and a pressed sport shirt with a diamond design on it. His hair had just been barbered, and his cheeks were glowing with aftershave. He did not seem to notice the tightness around Preacher’s mouth.

“Where’s the sit-down?” Preacher asked.

“A quiet restaurant somewhere. Maybe in the park. Who cares?”

Preacher cut a piece of meat and speared string beans onto the tines of his fork and rolled the meat and string beans in his mashed potatoes. Then he set down the fork without eating from it and looked at the row of men drinking at the bar, slumped on their stools, their silhouettes like warped clothespins on a line.

“He plans to pop both of us,” Preacher said.

“Nicholas Dolan? He’ll probably have to wear adult diapers for the sit-down.”

“You got him scared, and you want him even more scared?”

“With Nick Dolan, it’s not a big challenge.”

“Why do cops use soft-nose ammunition?” Preacher asked.

“How should I know?”

“Because a wounded or scared enemy is the worst enemy you can have. The man who kills you is the one who’ll rip your throat out before you know he has his hand on you. The girl who blinded me with wasp spray and pumped two holes in me? Would you say that story speaks for itself?”

“Thought I’d let you in on a good deal, Jack. But everything I say seems to be the wrong choice.”

“We’re going to talk to Dolan, all right. But not when he’s expecting it, and not because you want to take control of his business interests. We’ll talk to Dolan because you screwed things up. I think you and Arthur Rooney have been running a scam of some kind.”

“Scam? Me and Arthur? That’s great.” Hugo shook his head and sipped from his beer, his eyes lowered, his lashes long like a girl’s.

“I paid him a visit,” Preacher said.

A smile flickered on Hugo’s face, the skin whitening around the edges of his mouth. “No kidding?”

“He’s got a new office there in Galveston, right on the water. You haven’t talked to him?” Preacher picked up his fork and slipped the combination of meat and string beans and potatoes into his mouth.

“I broke off my connections with Artie a long time ago. He’s a welcher and a pimp, just like Dolan.”

“I got the impression maybe you weren’t ’jacking the Asian women for Dolan. You just let Dolan think that way so you could blackmail him and take over his businesses. It was yours and Rooney’s gig from the jump.”

“Jack, I’m trying to get your money to you. What do I have to do to win your faith? You’re really hurting my feelings here.”

“What time does Dolan close his nightclub?”

“Around two A.M.”

“Take a nap. You look tired,” Preacher said. He started to eat again, but his food had gone cold, and he pushed his plate away. He picked up his crutches and began getting to his feet.

“What did Artie tell you? Give me a chance to defend myself,” Hugo said.

“Mr. Rooney was trying to find his finger on the floor. He didn’t have a lot to say at the time. Pick me up at one-fifteen A.M.”

PETE FLORES DID not dream every night, or at least he did not have dreams every night that he could remember. Regardless, each dawn he was possessed by the feeling he had been the sole spectator in a movie theater where he had been forced to watch a film whose content he could not control and whose images would reappear later, in the full light of day, as unexpectedly as a windowpane exploding without cause.