“Who’s the man with the shotgun?”

“His name is Eriksson. My deputy will recognize the name. Better get going, Reverend.”

“You said ‘we.’”

“Sir?”

“You said ‘we’ll’ get the girl out. Who’s ‘we’?”

A moment later, Hackberry closed the distance between himself and the doorway while the minister and his wife began herding a group of twelve to fifteen people toward the front of the restaurant. Hackberry pressed his back against the wall, his revolver pointed upward. He could see the red sunset flowing through the destroyed front window and hear sirens in the distance. “Hear that sound, Eriksson?” he said.

There was a beat. “How’d you make me?”

“I didn’t. If you hadn’t shot at me, I would have walked past you.”

“You’re lying.”

“Why would I lie?”

Eriksson had no answer. Hackberry remembered that originally, a second man had been sitting in Eriksson’s booth, someone who had probably blown Dodge and left Eriksson to take the fall for both of them.

“Your partner screwed you, bub,” Hackberry said. “Why take his weight? Send the little girl out, and it’ll be taken into consideration. You did security work in Iraq. That’ll be a factor, too. Get a good defense lawyer, and with the right kind of post-traumatic-stress-disorder mambo, you might even skate. It beats eating a two-hundred-and-thirty-grain round from a forty-five.”

“You’re gonna drive me out of this county. You’re gonna get me into Mexico. Or I waste the girl.”

“Maybe I can arrange that.”

“No, you don’t arrange anything. You do it.”

“How do you want to work that? Want me to bring a vehicle around back and load you and the girl up?”

“No, you put your piece on the floor, slide it to me with your foot, then you walk in with your fingers laced on the back of your neck.”

“That doesn’t sound workable, Eriksson.”

“Maybe you’d like to see her brains floating in the toilet bowl.”

Hackberry heard the voice of a little girl crying. Or rather, the voice of a child whose fear had gone beyond crying into a series of hiccups and constrictions of air in the nostrils and throat, like someone having a seizure. “Be stand-up. Let her go, partner,” Hackberry said.

“You want her? No problem. Kick the piece inside and come in after it. Otherwise, all bets are off. Think I’m jerking your johnson? Stick your head in here.”

Hackberry could hear a dronelike whirring sound in his ears, one he associated with wind blowing out of a blue-black sky across miles of snowy hills and ice splintering under the weight of thousands of advancing Chinese infantry.

“I’ll make it easy for you,” Eriksson said. He opened the bathroom door slightly, allowing Hackberry a brief view of the restroom’s interior. Eriksson was holding the little girl by the neck of her T-shirt while he screwed the cut-down pump into her shoulder bone. “I got nothing to lose,” he said.

“I believe you,” Hackberry said. He stepped backward, opened the cylinder to his revolver, and dumped his four spent rounds and two unfired ones into his palm and threw them clattering across the floor. He squatted, placed his revolver on the floor, and shoved it with one foot into the restroom.

“Walk in behind it,” Eriksson said.

Then Hackberry was in the enclosure with him, staring into the muzzle of the shotgun.

“Go on, little girl,” Eriksson said. “I wasn’t gonna hurt you. I just had to say that.”

“Yes, you were. You hurt me bad,” she said, cupping her hand to one shoulder.

“Get out of here, you little skank,” Eriksson said. He bolted the door behind her, his attention never leaving Hackberry. “Slickered you, motherfucker.”

Hackberry let his eyes become dead and unseeing, let them drift off Eriksson’s face to a spot on the wall. Or perhaps to a patch of red sky that should not have been visible inside a women’s restroom.

“Did you hear me?” Eriksson asked.

“You’re a smart one,” Hackberry said.

“You got that right.”

Then Eriksson seemed to realize something was wrong in his environment, that he had not seen or taken note of something, that in spite of his years of vanquishing his enemies and shaving the odds and orchestrating events so that he always walked away a winner, something had gone terribly wrong. “Get on your cell,” he said.

“What for?”

“What do you mean, what for? Tell your people to stay away from the building. Tell them to bring a car to the back.”

“You’re not getting a car.”

“I’ll get a car or you’ll catch the bus, whichever you prefer.”

“You’re leaving here in cuffs.”

Eriksson took his own cell phone from his pocket and tossed it to Hackberry. It bounced off Hackberry’s chest and fell to the floor. “Pick it up and make the call, Sheriff,” Eriksson said.

“I said you’re a smart one. A smart man is a listener. Listen to what I say and don’t turn around. No, no, keep your eyes on me. You do not want to turn around.”

“Are you senile? I’m holding a shotgun in your face.”

“If you turn around, you’ll lose your head,” Hackberry said. “Look straight ahead. Kneel down and place your weapon on the floor.”

Eriksson’s lips parted. They were dry, caked slightly with mucus. His hands tightened on the twelve-gauge. He crimped his lips, wetting them before he spoke. “This has got a hair trigger. No matter what happens, you’re gonna have a throat full of bucks.”

“Believe what I tell you, Eriksson. Don’t move, don’t back away from me, don’t turn around. If you do any of those things, you will die. I give you my word on that. No one wants to see that happen to you. But it’s your choice. You lower your weapon by the barrel with your left hand and place it on the floor and step away from it.”

“I think you’re a mighty good actor, Sheriff, but I also think you’re full of shit.”

Eriksson stepped backward, out of Hackberry’s reach, turning his line of vision toward a frosted back window that had been wedged open with a tire tool. For just a moment, the aim of his shotgun angled away from Hackberry’s chest. Outside, a huge cloud of orange dust gusted across the sun.

Eriksson’s translucent blue eyes were charged with light. His face seemed to twitch just before he saw Pam Tibbs standing slightly beyond the window ledge, her khaki shirt speckled with taco sauce, her chrome-plated revolver aimed in front of her with both hands. That was when she squeezed the trigger, driving a soft-nosed.357 round through one side of his head and out the other.

15

PREACHER JACK COLLINS lived at several residences, none of which carried his name on a deed or a rental agreement. One of them was located south of old Highway 90, within sight of the Del Norte Mountains, twenty miles deep into broken desert terrain that looked composed of crushed stone knitted together by the roots of scrub brush and mesquite and cactus that bloomed with bloodred flowers.

On the mountain behind his one-bedroom stucco house was a series of ancient telegraph poles whose wires hung on the ground like strands of black spaghetti. Behind the poles was the gaping opening of a rock-walled root cellar that had been shored up with wood posts and crossbeams that either had collapsed or that insects had reduced to the weightless density of cork.

One starlit night, Preacher had sat in the entrance and watched the desert take on the gray and blue and silver illumination that it seemed to draw down into itself from the sky, as though the sky and the earth worked together to both cool the desert and turn it into a pewter artwork. Then he had realized that a breeze was blowing into his face and flowing over his arms and shoulders and into the excavation at his back. The root cellar was not a root cellar after all. Nor was it a mine. It was a cave, deep and spiraling, one that had probably been formed by water millions of years ago, one that led to the other side of the mountain or a cavern far beneath it. Perhaps early settlers had framed up the walls and ceilings with timbered support, but Preacher was convinced no human hand had contributed to its creation.