“Why tell me all this?”

“Because you’re smart and not political. Because you’ve been around awhile and you don’t care a lot about what people think of you or what happens to you.”

“You know how to say it, Mr. Riser.” Hackberry signaled to the bartender. He leaned on his elbows and waited for Riser to continue. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the beer in Riser’s glass going flat.

“We think we got a break down by the Big Bend,” Riser said. “A guy caused a commotion in a convenience store, and the clerk called it in. The guy had been putting gas in his SUV, and his buddy had gone inside to buy beer. Except the buddy left the beer on the counter and went out the back door and hauled ass.”

The bartender set a glass of ice and carbonated water and lime slices in front of Hackberry.

“You drink that?” Riser asked.

“Go on about the guy.”

“He came into the convenience store and wanted to know where Pete went. The clerk said he didn’t know. The guy called him a liar and pulled a semiauto out of his overalls. The clerk called nine-one-one, and the sheriff decided to lift some prints off the fuel-pump handle. They got a hit. The guy with the semiauto is Robert Lee Motree, also known as Bobby Lee Motree. He did six months in the Broward County stockade for illegal possession of a firearm. He’s also worked for a New Orleans private investigative service owned by a guy named Arthur Rooney. You recognize that name?”

“Yeah, but I thought Rooney ran some escort fronts in Houston or Dallas,” Hackberry said.

“That’s the same guy. Rooney got blown out of New Orleans by Katrina and is in Galveston now.” Riser seemed to hesitate, as though his words were leading him into an area he hadn’t fully given himself consent to enter.

“Go on,” Hackberry said.

“Rooney is a careful man, but we put a tap on his current punch of the day. He made a call from her apartment to a contract hitter by the name of Hugo Cistranos. On the tape, it sounds like Rooney and Cistranos are going to clip Jack Collins.”

“Why?”

“Get this. Collins cut off Rooney’s finger with a barber’s razor on Rooney’s own desktop.” Riser started laughing.

“What’s the Russian’s role in all this?”

“We’re not sure. He’s a big player in Arizona and Nevada and California. He owns whole networks of whores and porn studios and has a lot of outlaw bikers muling his tar and crystal meth up from the border. How much China white do you see here?”

“Not much. It’s upscale stuff. Addicts with money can smoke it and not worry about needles and AIDS.”

“DEA says a two-million-dollar shipment was off-loaded from a two-engine plane that landed on a highway in your county last week.”

“Tell them thanks for letting us in on that.”

“If you were looking for Vikki Gaddis and Pete Flores down in the Big Bend, where would you start?”

“I’d have to give that some thought.”

“You don’t like us much, do you?” Riser drank from his beer and wiped his mouth.

“I like y’all just fine. I just don’t trust you,” Hackberry said.

THAT NIGHT HACKBERRY ate dinner by himself in a back booth at a restaurant out on the highway, his Stetson crown-down on the seat beside him. Working-class families were lined up at the salad bar, and country music filtered through the swinging doors of the lounge annex on the far side of the cashier’s counter. He saw Pam Tibbs enter the front door with an athletic-looking man dressed in sport clothes and shined loafers, his dark hair wet-combed and sun-bleached at the tips, his face confident and tanned and unwrinkled by either worry or age. Pam wore a purple skirt and black pumps and a black top with a gold cross and chain; she had just had her hair cut and looked not only lovely but ten years younger than her age in the way that women look when they love someone. When she saw Hackberry, she jiggled her fingers at him and went inside the lounge with her friend.

Ten minutes later, she came back out of the swinging doors and sat down across from Hackberry. He could smell her perfume and the hint of bourbon and ice and crushed cherries on her breath. “Join us,” she said.

“Who is ‘us’?” he asked, and wondered if she caught the tinge of resentment in his voice.

“My cousin and me. His wife will be here in a few minutes,” she said, her fingers spreading on the table, her expression not quite able to contain her surprise at his reaction.

“Thanks, I have to get home.”

“Hack?”

“What?”

“Come on.”

“Come on, what?”

He felt her foot touch his under the table. “Ease up,” she said.

“Pam-”

“I mean it. Give yourself a break. People can’t be alone all the time.”

“You’re my chief deputy. Act like it,” he said. He looked sideways to see if anyone had heard him.

“What if I am?” she said, leaning forward now.

“I’d like to finish my dinner.”

“You make me mad. I want to hit you sometimes.”

“I’m going to get some salad.”

“Your chicken-fried steak will get cold.”

Hackberry thought he might have discovered the source of many unexplained brain aneurysms.

THAT NIGHT HE returned home and sat on a folding chair in the yard under a sky that roiled with thunderclouds. It was not a rational act. The hour was late, the wind bending the poplar trees at the foot of his property, the air filled with bits of desiccated matter that stung his face like insects. Overhead, yellow pools of dry lightning flared and pulsed in the clouds but made no sound. Even though he had soaked the lawn that morning, the ground under his feet felt as hard as brick. Five or six deer had clustered down in the trees as though preparing for an impending storm. Then he realized the deer were there for other reasons. On a rise just above his property, he saw the silhouettes of four coyotes slink across the crest. When lightning lit the sky behind them, he saw the yellow-gray of their coats, the peculiar way they hung their heads, the neck bones and jaws loose and not completely connected, a suggestion of slather on the teeth and lips.

Was this what it was all about? he wondered. One creature killing and eating another? Or even worse, the fanged predator with eyes in the front hunting down and tearing apart the gentle grass-eating animal born with eyes on the sides of its head, forever condemned to be food for coyotes and wolves and cougars and, finally, man with his sharpened stick?

What was it that had bothered him about Ethan Riser? The fact that he could drink normally and walk away from it? That he represented an organization with power that had almost global reach? Or Hackberry’s refusal to accept the notion that the Ethan Risers of the world were functional and made the system work and, in spite of all their inadequacies and failures, did an enormous amount of good?

No, that wasn’t it, either. Some people dwelled apart and didn’t fit. It was that simple. Preacher Jack Collins was one of them. In all probability, he was a psychopath who, upon his death, would continue to look upon himself as normal, stepping through a hole in the dimension still convinced it was the world that was wrong and not he. But there were both male and female counterparts to men like Jack Collins. They wore badges or Roman collars or climbed fire ladders into flaming buildings or did triage in battalion aid stations and, like Collins, never discussed their difference or the events in their lives that had sawed them loose from the seminal glue holding the rest of humankind together.

Saint Paul had written that perhaps there were angels living among us. If so, perhaps this was the bunch he was talking about. But before any one of them congratulated himself, he needed to be aware of the dues that went with membership. If an individual, through either his own volition or events over which he had no control, found himself taking up residence in a country undefined by flags or physical borders, he could be assured of one immediate and abiding consequence: He was on his own, and solitude and loneliness would probably be his companions unto the grave.