The greatest irony was that celibacy often went with the residency, less out of spiritual choice than circumstance. And those who called celibacy a gift were usually, in Hackberry’s opinion, those who lived twenty-four hours a day inside the iron maiden, their flesh tormented by the spikes of their unacknowledged desire.

He leaned forward in his folding chair and stretched his lower back, his sciatica like a fire creeping along his spinal cord.

He saw the cruiser turn off the road and come up his driveway. He heard the doorbell ring but did not bother to get up to answer it. When Pam Tibbs came around the side of the house, he saw that she had changed out of her evening clothes into jeans and a departmental khaki shirt. She was wearing her gun belt and cuffs and slapjack and Mace.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

“This month I go on at oh-one-hundred Saturdays,” she replied.

“That doesn’t address the question.”

“You always sit in the yard by yourself at one in the morning?”

“Sometimes my back lights up and I have to wait for it to pass.”

She was standing in front of him, looking down at him, the curly ends of her hair hanging against her cheeks, her eyes bright in the shadows. He could hear her breathing and see her breasts rising and falling under her shirt. “You want me to resign?” she said.

“No, I just want you to accept certain realities.”

“Like what?”

“You’re still a young woman. The world is yours. Don’t mistake sympathy or admiration or friendship for love.”

“Who the hell are you to tell me what to think?”

“Your goddamn boss is what I am.”

“You never swear, Hack. You’re going to start now?”

“I told you, I’m old. You need to let me alone, Pam.”

“Then run me off,” she said. “Until then I’m not going anywhere.”

She was standing closer to his chair, closer than she should have been. He stood up, towering over her. He could smell the heat in her clothes and the warm odor in her hair. She put her hands on both of his hips and pressed the crown of her head into the center of his chest. He could feel his mouth go dry and a thickness growing in his loins.

“The best women always fall in love with the wrong men,” he said. “You’re one of those, kid.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“You’re late for your shift,” he said.

He left her there and went inside the house and locked the door behind him.

13

LIAM ERIKSSON HAD parked his pickup truck, one with a camper shell inserted in the bed, down in a sandy bottom thinly shaded by mesquite trees. A shiny green liquid, one with the viscosity of an industrial lubricant, wound through the pebbled creek bed, and gnats and horseflies hung in the brush along the banks. In the distance was a long stretch of baked flatland that glimmered like salt and, beyond it, a range of blue hills. Bobby Lee Motree sat on a rock and took a longneck from a bucket of ice and cracked off the cap.

“I don’t see how you can cut up a sweet piece like that,” he said.

“Business is business. Why be sentimental about it? Besides, I found it, so it ain’t no skin off my ass,” Liam replied.

Liam stood at the rear door of his camper shell, touching the blade of a hacksaw with his thumb. He was bare-chested and wore a straw hat with a wilted brim, like one a female gardener would wear, and hiking shorts with big snap pockets and alpine shoes with lugs on the soles. He had shaved off his orange beard after he had screwed up at the check-cashing store in San Antonio; now the lower half of his face looked like emery paper. Or maybe the skin of a freshly exhumed corpse, Bobby Lee thought.

“You should have left your beard, or maybe just trimmed or dyed it,” Bobby Lee said.

“Something eating on you?”

Yeah, there was. But exactly how much information could he trust Liam with? Bobby Lee bit on his lip and thought about it.

Liam grinned, showing the gaps in his teeth, and locked down a pump shotgun in a machinist vise that was bolted to the bed of his truck. He had already wood-rasped the stock into a pistol grip and machine-sanded the wood smooth. He set the hacksaw blade flush with the pump and began sawing.

“I think I’ve figured out where the soldier boy is living,” Bobby Lee said.

“How’d you do that?” Liam asked, still grinning.

“He led me south, then way to hell and gone out east. I think he’s probably about the same distance in the exact opposite direction.”

“You were always good at ciphering things out, Bobby Lee. Matter of bloodline, maybe,” Liam said. “I’m referring to the fact that Robert E. Lee is in your pedigree.”

Was Liam coming on wise? Bobby Lee narrowed his eyes. All right, let’s take a run at it, he thought. “We’ve worked lots of gigs, me and you.”

“We’ve splattered the walls, bud. They’re never gonna know who did any of it, either,” Liam said.

“But this current deal has gotten complicated.” Bobby Lee let his words hang in the air.

Liam stopped sawing, not raising his eyes. He wiped the cut in the shotgun’s barrel with an oily rag. “Does this have something to do with that call you got from Hugo?”

“Hugo says we get rid of the girl and the soldier. Then we do Nick Dolan and his wife, with special instructions for the wife. Then we do Preacher.”

Liam began sawing again, his back turned to Bobby Lee. “I suspect I misheard you on that last part.”

“Jack cut off Artie Rooney’s finger, and now he’s shaking him down for a half mil. Hugo says it’s time for Jack to join the Hallelujah Chorus.”

Liam turned around. “Do Preacher? You’re actually serious? You haven’t started fooling with acid again?”

“I’m taking you into my confidence, Liam. I don’t like the way things have turned out. But Preacher is slipping. I think it’s because of the deal behind the church.”

“Yeah, well, nobody planned that one. If that’s on anybody, it’s on Hugo.”

“You in or not, Liam?”

“Cap Preacher? That’s like trying to kill death.”

“He’s got a weakness. It’s got something to do with sugar. Or candy or pastry. I don’t get it. But he’s got something wrong with him. A hooker I knew said Jack almost died once because of something he ate.”

“You’re that scared of him?” Without waiting for an answer, Liam casually resumed cutting off the shotgun’s barrel, the muscles in his back rippling like warm tallow as he worked.

Bobby Lee felt a blood vessel pulse in his temple. He took a sip of his beer before he spoke. “Want to add anything to that last remark?”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Because I’m having a little trouble handling it.”

“I was talking about myself. Preacher scares the hell out of me. He’s a mean motor scooter and crazy besides.”

Bobby Lee started to speak again but this time held his tongue. He cracked open another beer and drank from it, realizing irrefutably that he had made his problems worse by taking Liam into his confidence. He had stood up for Liam with Preacher, and this was what he got for it. Liam was no different from any other gutter rat in the business. He had no mercy, either. He had proved that when he went to work on the owner of the diner, what-was-his-name, Junior Kraut Face or something. Now Bobby Lee had both Preacher and Liam to worry about, plus the fact that he hadn’t gotten paid, plus the fact that Preacher had popped a federal agent, which was sure to bring down a ton of heat on all of them.

Liam finished sawing through the shotgun’s barrel and sailed it across the creek bed into a cluster of sandstone boulders. He listened as the barrel tinkled and rolled down the side of a ravine. He begin fitting a series of twelve-gauge shells into the magazine, pushing them in with his thumb until the spring in the loading tube came tight. “I already took out the sportsman’s plug,” he said. “Five double-aught bucks. You want to see the paint fly? These babies can do it.”