“Go toward the house, Mr. Dolan,” Preacher said.

“It ends here, doesn’t it?” Nick said.

But no one spoke in reply. He heard Hugo doing something in the luggage area of the SUV, shaking out a couple of large vinyl garbage bags and spreading them on the carpet.

“My family won’t know what happened to me,” Nick said. “They’ll think I deserted them.”

“Shut up,” Bobby Lee said.

“Don’t talk to him that way,” Preacher said.

“He keeps sassing you, Jack.”

“Mr. Dolan is a brave man. Don’t treat him as less. That’s far enough, Mr. Dolan.”

Nick felt the skin on his face shrink, the backs of his legs begin to tremble uncontrollably, his sphincter start to give way. In the distance he could see a bank of poplars at the edge of an unplowed field, wind flowing through Johnson grass that had turned yellow with drought, the brief tracings of a star falling across the sky. How did he, a kid from New Orleans, end up here, in this remote, godforsaken piece of fallow land in South Texas? He closed his eyes and for just a second saw his wife standing under the colonnade at the corner of St. Charles and Canal, raindrops in her hair, the milky whiteness of her complexion backlit by the old iron green-painted streetcar that stood motionless on the tracks.

“Esther,” he heard himself whisper.

He waited for the gunshot that would ricochet a.25-caliber round back and forth inside his brainpan. Instead, all he heard was the cow bawling in the dark.

“What did you say?” Preacher asked.

“He didn’t say anything,” Bobby Lee said.

“Be quiet. What did you say, Mr. Dolan?”

“I said Esther, the name of my wife, a woman who will never know what happened to her husband, you cocksucker.”

Nick could hear the tin roof on the farmhouse lift and clatter in the wind.

“What’s wrong, Jack?” Bobby Lee said.

“You swear to God that’s your wife’s name?” Preacher said.

“I wouldn’t cheapen her name by swearing to a man like you about it.”

“Don’t let him talk to you like that, Jack.”

Nick could hear Preacher breathing through his nose.

“Give me his piece. I’ll do it,” Bobby Lee said.

“Bring the vehicle around,” Preacher said.

“What are you doing?” Bobby Lee asked. He was taller than Preacher, and his top hat was silhouetted against the moon, giving him the appearance of even greater height.

“I’m doing nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“We leave this man alone.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Esther told King Xerxes if he killed her people, he’d have to kill her, too. That’s how she became the handmaiden of God. You don’t know that?”

“No, and I don’t waste my time on that biblical claptrap, either.”

“That’s because you’re uneducated. Your ignorance isn’t your fault.”

“Jack, this guy knows too much.”

“You don’t like what I’m doing?” Preacher said.

“This is a wrong move, man.”

Nick could hear the wind and a sound like grasshoppers thudding against the side of the farmhouse. Then Bobby Lee said, “All right, to hell with it.”

Nick heard Bobby Lee’s footsteps going away, then the voices of Bobby Lee and Hugo merging together by the SUV. Preacher inched forward on his crutches until Nick could smell the grease in his hair.

“You take care of your wife,” Preacher said. “You take care of your kids. You never come near me again. Understood?”

But Nick’s mouth was trembling so bad, from either fear or release from it, that he couldn’t speak.

Preacher threw Nick’s.25 auto into the pond, the rings from the splash spreading outward, rippling through the cattails. As Preacher worked his way back toward the SUV, his shoulders were pushed up by his crutches, close to his neck, as if he were a scarecrow whose sticks had collapsed. Nick stared dumbly at his three abductors as though they were caught forever inside a black-and-white still taken from a 1940s noir movie-the giver of death in silhouette, stumping his way across the baked earth, Hugo and Bobby Lee looking at Nick with faces that seemed aware that a new and dangerously complex presence had just come aborning in their lives.

9

JUNIOR VOGEL HAD told his cook he was going to have lunch with his wife. But he did not show up at his house, nor did he come home that evening. Junior was a temperate man, a member of the Kiwanis, a deacon in his church, and was not given to erratic behavior. That night his wife called 911. By dawn his wife was convinced he had been abducted.

At 7:16 A.M. a trucker carrying a load of baled hay reported what he thought was a wrecked vehicle at the bottom of a steep arroyo, just off a two-lane road eight miles south of Junior’s house. The guardrail on the road shoulder was broken, and the mesquite growing out of the rocks on the other side had been bark-skinned or stripped of leaves by the vehicle’s descent.

Hackberry Holland and Pam Tibbs parked the cruiser in a turnout and threaded their way down the arroyo, slag and gravel sliding from under their boots, the dust rising into their faces. The wrecked pickup truck looked like it had rolled, crumpling the cab’s roof, blowing out the windshield, coming to rest on a wash bed of dry rocks coated with butterflies trying to find moisture.

The driver was still behind the wheel. The airbags had not inflated.

Hackberry worked his way between a boulder and the driver’s door. The driver was round-shouldered and slumped forward, his uncut hair extending over his collar. From the back, he looked as though he had fallen asleep. The morning was still cool, and the pickup was in shadow, but the odor that had collected inside the cab was already eye-watering.

Pam came around the front of the vehicle from the other side, pulling on polyethylene gloves, staring past the dashboard and the shards of glass that sparkled on top of it. Junior Vogel’s eyes seemed to stare at the dashboard, too, except they contained no expression, and his brow was tilted forward as though he were involved with a final introspective thought. A blowfly crawled across one of his flared sideburns.

“The airbags are turned off. Junior had grandchildren, didn’t he?” Pam said.

“Yep.”

“Think he fell asleep at the wheel?” she said.

“Could be. But he went missing in the middle of the day.”

Pam looked up the side of the arroyo at the broken guardrail. “There’s no curve up there, either. Maybe he dropped a tie-rod.”

“The turnoff to his place is almost ten miles back. What was he doing down here?” Hackberry said.

Above them, an ambulance pulled to the side of the road. Two paramedics got out and looked down from the guardrail, their faces small and round against a blue sky.

“The driver is dead. There’re no passengers. Give us a few minutes, will you, fellows?” Hackberry called up.

“Yes, sir,” one of them said.

Holding his breath and a wadded-up handkerchief to his mouth, Hackberry reached inside the vehicle to turn off the ignition. Except it was already turned off. A rabbit’s foot dangled from the key chain.

“Look at this, Hack,” Pam said. She was standing behind the vehicle now. “There’s a big dent in the bumper. There’s no dust on the dent at all. The rest of the bumper is filmed with dried mud.”

“You think somebody plowed into the back of Junior and put him through the rail?” Hackberry said.

“Junior was a master at passive-aggressive behavior,” she replied. “Two weeks after he was put in charge of the picnic committee at his church, half the congregation was ready to convert to Islam.”

“The ignition key is turned off,” Hackberry said. He had stepped back from the cab but was still holding the handkerchief to his mouth.

“It looks to me like he probably died of a broken neck,” Pam said. “He could have stayed conscious long enough to turn off the key to prevent a fire. I would if I was in his situation.”