When Hackberry returned from San Antonio after the shooting death of Isaac Clawson, he pulled off his boots on the back steps and walked inside the house in his socks, undressed in the bath, and stayed in the shower until there was no more hot water in the tank. Then he dried himself and put on fresh clothes and took his shoeshine kit out on the steps and used the garden hose and a can of Kiwi polish and a brush and a rag to clean Isaac Clawson’s blood from the sole and welt of his right boot.

He had burst into the motel room where Isaac Clawson died, not knowing what was on the other side of the door, and stepped into a pool of Clawson’s blood, printing the carpet with it, printing the walkway outside, smearing it into the grit and worn fabric that marked the passage of a thousand low-rent trysts.

And that was the way he would always remember that moment-as one of ineptitude and unseemliness and violation. Later, after the arrival of a journalist and a photographer, someone had placed a hand towel over Clawson’s head and face. The towel didn’t cover his features adequately and provided him neither anonymity nor dignity. Instead, it seemed to add to the degradation done to him by the world.

The shooter, who was probably Preacher Jack Collins, had gotten away. In his wake, he had left the ultimate societal violation for others to clean up. For Hackberry, those details and none other would always define the death of Isaac Clawson. Also, he would never lose the sense that somehow, by stepping in Clawson’s blood, he had contributed to the degradation of Clawson’s person.

Hackberry used a second rag to wipe the moisture from the hose off his boots. When his boots were dry and clean and smooth to the touch, he slipped them on his feet and put his rags, his shoe brush, and the can of Kiwi polish in a paper bag, soaked the bag with charcoal starter, and burned it in the metal trash barrel by his toolshed. Then he sat down on the steps and looked at the sun rising above the poplars at the back of his property.

Inside the shadows, he saw a doe with twin fawns looking back at him. Two minutes later, Pam Tibbs pulled her cruiser into the driveway and rang the bell.

“Back here,” Hackberry yelled.

When she came around the side of the house, she was holding a thermos in one hand and a bag of doughnuts in the other. “You get some sleep?” she said.

“Enough.”

“You coming to the office?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“You eat yet?”

“Yeah, I think I did. Yeah, I’m sure I did.”

She sat on the step below him and unscrewed the top of the thermos and popped open the bag of doughnuts. She poured coffee into the thermos top and wrapped a doughnut in a napkin and handed both to him. “You worry me sometimes,” she said.

“Pam, I’m your administrative superior. That means we don’t personalize certain kinds of considerations.”

She glanced at her watch. “Until eight A.M. I’ll do what I damn please. How do you like that? Can I get a cup out of your kitchen?”

He started to answer, but she opened the screen door and went inside before he could speak. When she came back out, she filled her cup and sat down beside him. “Clawson went in without backup. His death is not on either one of us,” she said.

“I didn’t say it was.”

“But you thought it.”

“Jack Collins got away. We were probably within a hundred feet of him. But he got out of the motel and out of the parking lot and probably out of San Antonio while I was tracking an ICE agent’s blood all over the crime scene.”

“That’s not what’s bothering you, is it?”

When he blinked, like a camera lens clatching open and closing just as quickly, he saw the faces of the Asian women staring up at him from the killing ground behind the stucco church, grains of dirt on their lips and in their nostrils and hair.

“Ballistics shows that all the women were killed by the same weapon,” he said. “There was probably only one shooter. From what the FBI knows about Collins, he seems to be the one most capable of that kind of mass murder. We could have put Collins out of business.”

“We will. Or if we don’t get to him first, the feds will.”

Hackberry looked at the doe with her fawns in the poplar trees and could feel Pam’s eyes on the side of his face. He thought of his twin sons and his dead wife and the sound the wind made at night when it channeled through the grass in the pasture. Pam moved her foot slightly and touched the side of her shoe against his boot. “Are you listening to me, Hack?”

He could feel a great fatigue seep through his body. He cupped his hands on his knees and turned his head toward her. There was no mistaking the look in her eyes. “I’m too old,” he said.

“Too old for what?”

“The things young people do.”

“Like what?”

“You got me. How about we change the subject?”

“You’re a stubborn and unteachable man. That’s why somebody needs to look after you.”

He got to his feet, shifting a growing pocket of pain out of his spine. “I must have committed some terrible sins in my past life,” he said.

She drank from her coffee, her gaze lifting to his. He let out his breath and went inside to get his hat and gun before going to the office.

THREE DAYS LATER, at five P.M., Ethan Riser called Hackberry at the department and asked him to have a drink.

“Where are you?” Hackberry asked.

“At the hotel.”

“What are you doing down here?”

“Soliciting some help.”

“The FBI can’t handle its problems on its own?”

“I heard you like Jack Daniel’s.”

“The word is ‘liked,’ past tense.”

“I’ll meet you at that joint down the street,” Ethan Riser said.

One block from the jail, behind the Eat Café, was a saloon with a sign over the bar that warned the customer YOU ARE STANDING ON THE HARDEST FLOOR IN TEXAS, SO YOU BEST NOT LAND FACEDOWN ON IT. The floor was made from old railroad ties that were grimed black with diesel and creosote and cinders and smoke from prairie fires and anchored to their crossbeams with rusted steel spikes. The bar itself was fitted with a brass footrail that had three cuspidors pushed neatly under it. On top of the bar were a bowl of hard-boiled eggs and a jar of pickled hogs’ feet and another jar that contained a urine-yellow liquid and a rattlesnake whose thick coils and open mouth were pressed against the glass. The lights behind the bar were hooded with green plastic shades, and a wood-bladed fan turned slowly on the ceiling. Ethan Riser was standing at the far end of the bar, a cone-shaped glass of draft beer in one hand, a leather cup in the other.

“What’s up?” Hackberry said.

Ethan Riser rattled five poker dice in the leather cup and rolled them on the bar. “Your grandfather really put John Wesley Hardin in the can?”

“He locked him in chains and nailed the links to the bed of a wagon and drove him there personally, after first raking him off the top of his horse.”

“Know how Hardin died?”

“He was rolling dice in the Acme saloon in El Paso. He said, ‘You got four sixes to beat’ to the man drinking next to him. Then he heard a pistol cock behind his head. Then next thing he heard was a pistol ball entering his skull just above the eye.”

“I wish I could roll four sixes, but I can’t,” Riser said. “I’ve got a psychopath on the loose that some other people want to cut a deal with, even if this lunatic has murdered a federal agent.”

“Jack Collins?”

“These people I work with, or under, think Collins can help us nail somebody we’ve wanted to take off at the neck for a long time. A Russian by the name of Josef Sholokoff. Ever hear of him?”

“No.”

“I think my colleagues are wrong on two counts. I believe Collins is a button man others hire and discard like used Kleenex. I don’t think he’s wired in to people of any importance. Second, I don’t believe in making deals with the killers of federal agents.” Riser saw the expression in Hackberry’s eyes, a brief flicker of disappointment that seemed to make Riser reexamine what he had just said. “Okay, I don’t believe in making deals with guys who mow down defenseless women, either.”