“You stop it, Pam. I’ll throw you in the horse tank. I swear to God I’ll do it,” he said.

They were back in the shade, the wind rustling through the mulberry tree, the lawn suddenly cool and smelling of the damp soil he had turned over with a spading fork at sunrise. He felt the stiffness go out of her back and her hands relax on top of his.

“You finished?” he said.

She didn’t answer.

“Did you hear me?”

“I’m done. Let me go,” she said.

He set her down and put his hands on her shoulders, turning her toward him. “You just dropped both of us in the cook pot,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Go in the house. I’m going to try to square it.”

“Not on my account.”

“Pam, this is one time you shut up and do what I say.”

She closed and opened her eyes as though awakening from a dream. Then she walked to the table and sat down on the bench and propped her hands on her knees and stared into space, her hair tousling in the breeze.

Hackberry went inside, took a first-aid kit and a handful of dish towels from a kitchen closet, and went back out front. Clawson was sitting in the passenger seat of his car, the door open, his feet on the gravel driveway; he was talking into a cell phone. The handkerchief wadded up in his left hand was almost entirely red. He closed the cell phone and dropped it on the seat.

“Did you call for the paramedics?” Hackberry said.

“No, I called my wife. I’m supposed to meet her in Houston tonight.”

“I’ll take you to emergency receiving.”

“You were a navy corpsman, Sheriff. Do what you need to do. This didn’t happen. I slipped on the metal stairs at the motel.”

Hackberry waited for him to go on.

“You heard me,” Clawson said.

“That’s the way you want it?”

“We take down the guys who killed those Asian women and Junior Vogel. Nothing gets in the way of that objective. You tell your deputy what I said.”

“No, you tell her.”

“Bring her out here,” Clawson said.

“You don’t take her to task.”

Clawson cleared his throat and pressed his handkerchief to a deep cut that was bleeding through his eyebrow. “No problem.”

“Let’s take a look at your head, partner,” Hackberry said.

10

NICK DOLAN SWALLOWED a tranquilizer and a half glass of water, took Esther into his office, and closed the door behind him. With the dark velvet drapes closed and the air-conditioning set to almost freezing levels, there was an insularity about his office that made Nick feel not only isolated and safe but outside of time and place, as though he could rewind the video and erase all the mistakes he had made in his journey from the schoolyard playground in the Lower Ninth Ward to the day he bought into an escort service and the attendant association with people like Hugo Cistranos.

He told Esther everything that had happened during his abduction-the ride in the SUV down the highway to the empty farmhouse, Preacher Jack Collins sitting next to him, the New Orleans button man Hugo Cistranos and the strange kid in a top hat sitting in front, the moon wobbling under the surface of a pond whose banks glistened with green cow scat. Then he told Esther how the man called Preacher had spared him at the last moment because of her name.

“He thinks I’m somebody out of the Bible?” she said.

“Who knows what crazy people think?” Nick said.

“There’s something you’re leaving out. Something you’re not talking about.”

“No, that’s it. That’s everything that happened.”

“Stop lying. What did these men do in your name?”

“They didn’t do it in my name. I never told them to do what they did.”

“You make me want to hit you, to beat my fists bloody on you.”

“They killed nine women from Thailand. They were prostitutes. They were being smuggled across the border by Artie Rooney. They machine-gunned them and buried them with a bulldozer.”

“My God, Nick,” she said, her voice breaking in her throat.

“I didn’t have anything to do with this, Esther.”

“Yes, you did.” Then she said it again. “Yes, you did.”

“Hugo was supposed to deliver the women to Houston. That’s all it was.”

“All it was? Listen to yourself. What were you doing with people who smuggle prostitutes into the country?”

“We’ve got a half-interest in a couple of escort agencies. It’s legal. They’re hostesses. Maybe some other stuff goes on, but it’s between adults, it’s a free country. It’s just business.”

“You’ve been running escort services?” When he didn’t reply, she said, “Nick, what have you done to us?” She was weeping quietly in the leather chair now, her long hair hanging in her face. Her discomposure and fear and disbelief, and the black skein of her hair separating her from the rest of the world, made him think of the women lined up in front of Preacher’s machine gun, and his lips began to tremble.

“You want me to fix you a drink?” he said.

“Don’t say anything to me. Don’t touch me. Don’t come near me.”

He was standing over her, his fingers extended inches from the crown of her head. “I didn’t want anybody hurt, Esther. I thought maybe I’d get even with Artie for a lot of the things he did to me when I was a kid. It was dumb.”

But she wasn’t hearing him. Her head was bent forward, her face completely obscured, her back shaking inside her blouse. He took a box of Kleenex from his desk and set it on her lap, but it fell from her knees without her ever noticing it was there. He stood in the darkened coldness of his office, the jet of frigid air from the wall duct touching his bald pate, his stomach sagging over his belt, the smell of nicotine rife on his fingers when he rubbed his hand across his mouth. If he had ever felt smaller in his life, he could not remember the instance.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and started to walk away.

“What do these gangsters plan to do now?”

“There was a witness, a soldier who was in Iraq. Him and his girlfriend could be witnesses against Hugo and the kid in the top hat and this guy Preacher.”

“They’re going to kill them?”

“Yeah, if they find them, that’s what they’ll do.”

“That can’t happen, Nick,” she said, raising her head.

“I called the FBI when I was drunk. It didn’t do any good. You want me to go to prison? You think that will stop it? These guys will kill those kids anyway.”

She stared into space, her eyes cavernous. Through the floor, she and Nick could hear the children turning somersaults on the living room carpet, sending a thud down through the walls into the foundation of the house. “We can’t have this on our souls,” she said.

THE MOTEL WAS a leftover from the 1950s, a utilitarian structure checkerboarded with huge red and beige plastic squares, the metal-railed upstairs walkways not unlike those in penitentiaries, all of it located in a neighborhood of warehouses and bankrupt businesses and joyless bars that could afford no more than a single neon sign over the door.

The swimming pool stayed covered with a plastic tarp year-round, and the apron of grass around the building was yellow and stiff, the fronds of the palm trees rattling drily in the wind. On the upside of things, hookers did not operate on its premises, nor did drug dealers cook meth in the rooms. The sodium halide lamps in the parking lot protected the cars of the guests from roving bands of thieves. The rates were cheap. Arguably, there were worse rental lodgings in San Antonio. But there was one undeniable characteristic about the motel and the surrounding neighborhood that would not go away: The rectangularity of line and the absence of people gave one the sense that he was stand ing inside a stage set, one that had been created for the professional sojourner.