She rose from her chair, her hands crimped on her purse. “My husband is a good man,” she said. “I’ll never allow you to hurt him. You threaten my family again, and I’ll make your life awful.”
“Right. Sorry you have to run,” Artie said, taking another pain pill from the tin box.
“You hurt the soldier or his girlfriend, we’re calling the FBI,” Nick said. “I know what you can do to me, Artie. It doesn’t matter. I’m not gonna have the blood of those kids on my conscience.”
“How do you like that, you cheap gangster?” Esther said. “You were talking about doing swirlies on people? Think about yourself in a prison cell full of sexual degenerates. I hope you’re in there a thousand years.”
After they were gone, Artie opened the door to his conference room. Hugo was smoking a cigarette, gazing at the waves crashing on the beach.
“You get an earful?” Artie asked.
“Enough,” Hugo replied. He mashed out his cigarette in an ashtray on the conference table. “How do you want to play it?”
“I got to tell you?”
“I’m lots of things, but omniscient isn’t one of them.”
“Hose everybody who needs to go. That means the soldier and his broad, that means Preacher Jack Collins, that means anybody who can dime us. That means that fat little kike and his wife and, if necessary, his kids. When I say ‘hose,’ I mean slick down to the tile from one end of the building to the other. I’m getting through loud and clear here?”
“No problem, Artie.”
“If you’re working in close?”
Hugo waited.
“Put one in Esther’s mouth,” Artie said. “I want her to know where it came from, too.”
YEARS AGO, IN a Waycross, Georgia, public library, Bobby Lee Motree happened to see a book titled My Grandfather Was the Only Private in the Confederate Army. He was puzzled by the title and, flipping through the pages, tried to figure out what it meant. Then he stopped thinking about the matter altogether, in part because Bobby Lee’s interest in history was confined largely to his claim that he was a descendant of perhaps the greatest military strategist in American history, a claim based on the fact that his first and second names were respectively Robert and Lee, as were those of his father, a petty thief and part-time golf caddie who was killed while sleeping on a train trestle.
Now, during a sunset that seemed somehow to be a statement about his life, he stood by his vehicle, not far from a jagged mountain whose bare slopes were turning darker and darker against the sky. The wind was hot and smelled of creosote and dust and road-patch tar that had dissolved into licorice during the day. In the distance, he saw a trio of buzzards circling high above the hardpan, their outstretched wings stenciled against a yellow sun that reminded him of light trapped behind a dirty window shade. He opened a cell phone and punched in a number.
Then he hesitated and removed his thumb from the send button. Bobby Lee wasn’t feeling well. He could see torn pieces of color floating behind his eyelids, as though his power to think were deteriorating, as though his uncontrolled thoughts had become his greatest enemy.
He reached inside his SUV and drank from a can of warm soda. Was he coming down with something? No such luck. His world was coming apart. He had always admired Preacher for his professionalism and invisibility, and for the way he had become a legend, a one-man Murder, Inc., without ever going inside the system. But Preacher had gone along with Hugo on the mass mow-down of the Asians, and now he’d popped a federal agent. Somebody would have to go down for it. Hugo? That was a laugh. Preacher? Jack would eat a Gatling gun before he’d allow anyone to take him into custody. Who did that leave?
The answer wasn’t one Bobby Lee liked to think about. The rest of the team consisted of him and Liam Eriksson, and Liam was already on Jack’s S-list for stealing the disability check and trying to cash it while he and his hooker girlfriend were drunk. Liam and Bobby Lee were basically working stiffs, making a score here and there, putting away a few bucks for a better life, waiting for the proper time to hang it up. They weren’t religious crazoids like Jack, or guys like Hugo who got off on capping people. For Liam and Bobby Lee, it was just a job. But working stiffs were disposable and replaceable. If anyone disagreed with that, he just needed to check out the audience at an ultimate-fighter match.
Bobby Lee remembered when he did his first hit, at age twenty, out on Alligator Alley between Fort Lauderdale and Naples, a five-thou whack on a Cuban who’d raped the daughter of a Mobbed-up guy from the Jersey Shore. At first Bobby Lee thought it might bother him to pop a guy he had nothing against, but it didn’t. He bought the hit a couple of drinks in Lauderdale, told him he had a fishing camp in the Glades, then showed him this big grassy bay in the moonlight and parked two.22 hollow-points, pow, pow, that fast, behind the guy’s ear, and suddenly the guy was facedown in the water, his arms outstretched, his suit coat puffed with air like he was studying the bottom of the bay, the night air throbbing with bullfrogs.
But what should Bobby Lee do now? Deep-six the brothers-in-arms stuff and blow Dodge on Preacher? That thought didn’t sit well, either. If Bobby Lee was to remain a pro back in Florida, where he planned to re-enroll at Miami-Dade, doing an occasional contract job when he needed money, he had to keep his reputation intact. Also, bailing out on Preacher was a good way to ensure a lifetime of looking over his shoulder.
Bobby Lee opened his cell phone again and hit the redial button.
“Where you been?” Preacher’s voice said.
“All over most of two counties.”
“Think about what you just said. It’s a contradiction in terms.”
“What?”
“What did you find?”
“Nothing. But I got an idea.”
“What do you mean, ‘nothing’?”
“What I said. I couldn’t find a Siesta motel. That’s where the guy Junior Whatever said the girl and the soldier were staying.”
“Call me back on a landline.”
“Jack, the CIA isn’t following us around. They pull stuff out of the air when they’re after the rag heads.” Bobby Lee stopped, his frustration with Preacher building. He wanted to throw the cell phone down on the asphalt and stomp it into junk. “You still pissed at Liam ’cause he tried to cash the soldier’s check?”
“What do you think?”
“I say give Liam a break. The guy’s out there, he’s trying.”
“Out where?”
This time Bobby Lee ignored Preacher’s constant attempts to correct his language and somehow turn it against him. “Look, I’ll call you back later. I’ve got a plan.”
“You’ve been wandering around on the border for two days. That’s a plan?”
“You ever know a junkie who was farther than one day away?”
“What’s your point?”
“There’s no difference between a junkie and a drunk. A rat goes to its hole. The soldier is a juicer and drifts in and out of A.A., at least that’s the word. Hugo says he’s got a pink scar on his face as thick as an earthworm. I’ll find him. I guarantee it. I called the A.A. hotline and got an area schedule. You still there, Jack?”
Had the service simply gone down, or had Preacher hung up? Bobby Lee hit the speed dial, but his call went immediately to voice mail. He closed and opened his eyes, the mountain in front of him like a dark volcanic cone cooling against the evening sun.
THERE WERE FEW twelve-step groups in the area, or at least few that met more often than once a week, and the following day Pete Flores felt he was lucky to hitch a ride to one called the Sundowners that met in a fundamentalist church thirty miles down the road from the motel where he and Vikki were staying. The church house was a white-frame building with a small false bell tower on the apex of the roof and a blue neon cross mounted above the entranceway. In back were a mechanic’s shed and, next to it, a cemetery whose graves were strewn with plastic flowers and jelly glasses green with dried algae. Even with the windows wide open, the air inside the building was stifling, the wood surfaces as warm to the touch as a cookstove. Pete had arrived early at the meeting, and rather than sit in the heat, he went outside and sat on the back steps and looked at the strange chemical-green coloration in the western sky, the sun still as bright as an acetylene torch on the earth’s rim. The sedimentary layers of the mesalike formations were gray and yellow and pink above the dusk gathering on the desert floor. Pete felt as though he were sitting at the bottom of an enormous dried-out riparian bowl, one shaped out of potter’s clay in a prehistoric time, the land giving off an almost feral odor when rain tried to restore it to life.