“Yes, sir, I had some trouble when I was younger.”

“But the Aryan Brotherhood is for life, correct?”

“No, sir, not for me, it isn’t. I put all that behind me.”

“You were in Huntsville?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Give me the key to two-oh-nine. Don’t pick up that phone while we’re here. If it rings, let it ring off the wall. If you’ve lied to me, you’ll wish you were in lockdown back at the Walls.”

The clerk had to sit down when Hackberry and Pam went out of the office.

ISAAC CLAWSON HAD always subscribed to the belief that a person’s life was governed by no more than two or three choices that usually seemed of little consequence at the time one made them. He had also wondered how many thoughts a man could experience in under a second, at least if his adrenaline level didn’t blow his circuits first.

But was this moment in his life really one that presented him a viable choice? What was the governing principle for any lawman caught in his situation with an armed adversary? That one was easy. You never surrendered your weapon. You hung tough, you kept your enemy talking, you brassed it out, you created an electric storm of “spray-and-pray fire” no sane person would choose to walk into. If all that failed, you ate the bullet.

What were Shakespeare’s words? “By my troth, I care not; we owe God a death, and let it go which way it will, he who dies this year is quit for the next.” Yes, that was it. By accepting your mortality, you walked right through its shadow into the light on the far side.

But the lesson of Shakespeare and the principles Isaac Clawson had learned at Quantico and as many as five other training programs weren’t entirely applicable here. If he was executed in room 209, his killer would walk free and kill again and again. In fact, there would probably be no prosecutable evidence to link Clawson’s death to Preacher Jack Collins. Clawson had been acting alone, confirming his colleagues’ perception that he was a driven man teetering on the edges of nervous collapse. Maybe some of his colleagues and superiors might even be glad Jack Collins had rid them of an agent no one felt at ease with.

If Isaac had just one more season to run, he could find Jack Collins and the others who had murdered the Thai women and girls and take them off the board one by one, each of them in some way payback for the death of his daughter. Even his worst detractors conceded that no one at ICE was more dedicated and successful in hunting down the traffickers in misery who were metastasizing on America’s southern border.

“Last chance, hoss,” the voice said behind him.

“You think you can pop a federal agent and just blow town? They’ll have to pick you up with tweezers.”

“Looks to me like they’ve done a piss-poor job of it so far.”

“You’re the one they call Preacher?”

“You violated the Fourth Amendment. A man’s rental lodging is the same as his home. Y’all don’t abide by your own Constitution. That’s why you’re not deserving of respect. I say y’all are hypocrites, sir. I say a pox on your house.”

Isaac Clawson spun in a half-circle, swinging his semiautomatic at arm’s length, the rain blowing through the door into his face. The figure he saw standing against the wall to one side of the door seemed out of context, unrelated to the events transpiring around him. It was the cleaning woman, or what he had thought was a woman, in a head scarf and a smock, a two-barrel nickel-plated derringer aimed with her left hand, her right hand supporting herself heavily on a chair back as though she were in pain.

Isaac was sure he squeezed off a round. He must have. His finger had tightened inside the trigger guard. He had not flinched; his eyes were wide open. He should have heard the report and felt the solid kick against the heel of his hand and seen the barrel jump with the recoil, the ejected casing tinkling on the floor.

Instead, he had seen a pinpoint of brightness leap from the muzzle of the derringer. The bright circle of light made him think of fire leaking through a metal surface that had been superheated beyond its tolerance, its stress level giving way to the roaring furnace it tried to contain.

He felt a finger touch his brow, and he saw hands reaching toward him from a cool fire that somehow had been rendered harmless, as though the flames had been robbed of their heat and could have no more effect on living tissue than waving shadows could, and he knew that this time he had done something right, that he could pull his daughter and her fiancé from the burning automobile and undo the cruelty and suffering the world had visited upon them.

But as he reached for his daughter’s hands, he realized his life would always be defined by inadequacy and failure. It was his daughter’s hands that grasped his, not the other way around, extending out of a white radiance, slipping up higher on his wrists, seizing them with superhuman strength, pulling him into a place where resistance and rage and even the desire to make choices seemed to have dissolved into nothingness a million years ago.

Isaac’s eyes were open wide when he struck the floor. Preacher Jack Collins looked at him briefly, fitted his hands on the cleaning cart, and worked his way down the walkway to the stairs at the far end of the building.

11

NO MATTER HOW many pain pills Artie Rooney ate, the throbbing in his hand wouldn’t quit. Nor could he rid himself of the well of fear that was eating its way through the bottom of his stomach. Nor could he get the name of Jack Collins out of his head. It hovered behind his eyes; he woke with it in the morning; it was in his food; it was in his coupling with his whores.

And now it was in his conversation with Hugo Cistranos, here, inside his elegant beachfront office, his helplessness as palpable as the smell of fear that rose from his armpits. He couldn’t believe that only weeks ago, Jack Collins had been a name without a face, the mention of which would have caused him to yawn.

“Jack wants a half million from you?” Hugo said, slumped comfortably in a white leather chair, dressed in golf slacks and a print shirt and Roman sandals, his red-streaked hair glistening with gel.

“He blames me for the loss of his soul,” Artie said.

“Jack doesn’t have one. How can he blame you for losing it?”

“Because he’s crazy?”

Hugo studied the backs of his hands. “You just sat there and let Jack cut off your finger? That’s hard to believe, Artie.”

“He was going to cut my throat. He held the razor right by my eye.”

Hugo’s expression became philosophical. “Yeah, I guess Jack’s capable of that. Must have been terrible. How’d you explain it at the hospital?”

Artie got up from his desk, cradling his injured hand. A hurricane was building in intensity by the hour, three hundred miles southeast of Galveston. Through the enormous glass wall that fronted the beach, he could see a band of greenish cobalt along the southern horizon, and the slick leathery backs of stingrays in the swells and waves threading into yellow froth inside the wind. He wanted to put a bullet in Hugo Cistranos.

“You didn’t tell anybody what happened, huh?” Hugo said. “That was probably the right choice. Must be hard accepting all this-I mean, a religious creep like that walking into your office and turning your desk into a chopping block. Gives me the willies thinking about it.”

“Collins is onto us,” Artie said.

“Who’s this ‘us’ you’re talking about?”

“You set up the scam, Hugo. It was your idea to kidnap the Russian’s whores. You got Nick Dolan to think he was boosting the girls from me, and you got him to believe the mow-down was on him, too. From the beginning, this whole nightmare has had your name all over it.”