“Pull back the slide. You’ll see a round in the chamber. The reason you didn’t point the gun at me is because you’re not a killer. But other men are, and they don’t think two seconds about the deeds they do. Those are the men I’m trying to protect your family from. Some of us are made different in the womb and are not to be underestimated. I’m one of them, but I think I’m different from the others. Is everything I say lost on you? Are you ignorant as well as corrupt?”

“No, you make me want to blow your fucking head off.”

The door to the upstairs opened, and light flooded down the staircase. “Who’s down there?” Esther said. Before anyone could answer her question, she descended the stairs, gripping an empty pot by the handle. She stared down at Preacher. “Who are you?”

“A friend.”

“How’d you get in my house?”

“The side door was open. I’ve explained this. Why don’t you sit down?”

“You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

“One of who?”

“The gangsters who have been plaguing our lives.”

“You’re wrong.”

“He’s about to leave, Esther,” Nick said.

“You’re one of those who abducted my husband,” she said.

“I wouldn’t call it that.”

“Don’t lie.”

“You shouldn’t use that term to me, madam.”

She stepped closer to him. “The Asian women, the prostitutes, the illegals or whatever they were, you’re here about them. You’re the one who did it.”

“Did what?”

“Killed them. It was you, wasn’t it?”

“Why do you say that?” Preacher’s mouth twitched slightly, his words catching in his throat.

“Your eyes are dead. Only one kind of man has eyes like that. Someone who murders the light behind his own eyes. Someone who has tried to scrub God’s fingerprint off his soul.”

“Don’t you talk to me like that, woman.”

“You call me ‘woman’? A dog turd off the sidewalk calls me ‘woman’ in my own house?”

“I came here to-”

“Shut up, you worthless gangster,” she said.

“By God, you won’t talk to me like-” he began.

She swung the stainless-steel pot, still caked with oatmeal, across his face. The sound reverberated like a brass cymbal inside the room. Before he could recover from the shock, she hit him again, this time on the head. When he tried to raise his arms, she rained down one blow after another on his neck, shoulders, and elbows, gripping the handle with both hands, chopping downward as though attacking a tree stump.

“Esther!” Nick said, coming from behind his desk.

When Preacher lowered his arms, she swung the pot again, catching him right above the ear. He got to his feet and stumbled to the side door, blood leaking out of his hair. He jerked open the door and climbed the short flight of concrete steps into the yard, grabbing the higher steps for support, his palms smearing with bird shit.

Esther picked up his walking canes and followed him into the yard, through the citrus and crepe myrtle trees and windmill palms and hibiscus. He headed for the street, trying to outdistance her, looking back over his shoulder, his hatchet face quivering, his broken movements like a land crab’s. She flung his walking canes at his head. “Just so you don’t have any reason to come back,” she said.

Preacher crashed through the hedge onto the sidewalk and saw Bobby Lee fire up his vehicle down the street, just as a water truck passed and splattered Preacher from head to foot. The eastern sky was the blue of a robin’s egg and ribbed at the bottom with strips of crimson and purple cloud. The colors were majestic, the royal colors of David and Solomon, as though the sky itself had conspired to mock his grandiosity and foolish pride and vain hope that salvation would ever be his.

16

EARLY SATURDAY MORNING, Hackberry walked down to his barn and skimmed the bugs from the secondary tank he kept for his registered Missouri foxtrotters, a chestnut named Missy’s Playboy and a palomino named Love That Santa Fe. Then he turned on the spigot full blast and let the water run until it overflowed the aluminum sides and was clean of insects and dust and cold to the touch and tinted a light green from the pieces of hay floating in it. Both foxtrotters were still colts and gave themselves the liberty of nuzzling him and poking at his pockets for treats, their breath heavy and warm and grassy on the side of his face. Sometimes they pulled a glove from his pocket or grabbed the hat from his head and ran away with it. But this morning they were not playful and instead kept staring down the pasture, motionless, ears back, nostrils dilating in the wind that blew out of the north.

“What’s wrong, boys? A cougar been around?” Hackberry said. “You guys are too big to be bothered by such critters as that.”

He heard his cell phone chime in his khakis. He opened it, looking toward the railed fence at the north end of the pasture, seeing nothing but a solitary oak framed against the sunrise and an abandoned clap board shack his neighbor kept hay in. He placed the phone against his ear. “You up, Hack?” a voice said.

“What’s going on, Maydeen?”

“I just got a weird call. Some guy says he has to talk with you but won’t give his name.”

“What’s he want?”

“He said you’re in danger. I asked him in danger of what. He said I didn’t want to know. He said he’s using a cell phone he bought off a street person, so I could forget about tracing the call.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“That I’d deliver the message. If he calls again, you want me to give him your number?”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

“There’s something else. I asked him if he’d been drinking. He said, ‘I wish I was just having the DTs. I wish this was all a dream. But those Asian women didn’t shoot themselves.’”

A half hour later, while Hackberry was watering his flower beds, his cell phone chimed in his pocket again. “Hello?” he said. There was no reply. “Is this the same man who called my office earlier?”

“Yes.”

Hackberry leaned over and turned off the water faucet. “You wanted to warn me about something?”

“Yes.”

“Want to tell me what it is?”

“Jack Collins, that’s his name. People call him Preacher.”

“What about him?”

“He thinks you’re after him. He thinks you and me have met.”

“What’s your name?”

“Collins killed the Thai women. He’s hooked up with Hugo Cistranos and Arthur Rooney. He thinks he’s a character out of the Bible.”

“Are you telling me you’re in danger, sir?”

“I don’t care about me.”

“Collins is trying to hurt your family?”

“You’ve got it all wrong. He thinks he’s protecting us. Collins says Arthur Rooney plans to kill us.”

“Let us help you. Meet me someplace.”

“No. I made this call because-”

“Because what?”

“I don’t want your blood on me. I don’t want the Asian women’s blood on me. I don’t want that soldier and his girlfriend hurt, either. I didn’t plan any of this.”

Nobody does, bud, Hackberry thought.

“Did you make a nine-one-one call about this some time ago and try to warn the FBI about Vikki Gaddis and her boyfriend?”

“No.”

“I think you did. I heard your voice on the tape. I think you’re probably a good man. You shouldn’t be afraid of us.”

“Artie Rooney says he wants my wife shot in the mouth. I’m not a good man. I let all this happen. I said what I had to say. You’re never gonna hear from me again.”

The signal went dead.

Hackberry called Maydeen. “Get ahold of Ethan Riser. Tell him I think we’ve got a solid lead on Jack Collins.”

“Ethan who?”

“The FBI agent. Tell him to call me at the house.”

“Is there somebody out to get you, Hack?”

“Why should I be a threat to anybody?”

“Because you’re stubborn as a cinder block and you don’t give up and all the shitbags know it.”