There was a long silence. “Why are you always ridiculing me? I’m the only guy who stood with you. You really hurt my feelings, man.”

“You got a point. You’re a good boy, Bobby Lee.”

“That means a lot to me, Jack. But you got to quit renting space in your head to bozos who couldn’t shine your shoes.”

“Artie Rooney is going to pay me a half million dollars. Ten percent of that will go to you.”

“That’s generous of you, man. You got a kind heart.”

“In the meantime, Artie is going to leave the Jews alone. That one isn’t up for grabs.”

“You still worried about the Jews after what Ms. Dolan did to you? What about the Gaddis broad and the soldier boy? Are they out?”

“They’re in.”

“They’re in?”

“You heard me.”

“What about Holland?”

“I’ll give it some thought.”

“I think he saw me. I pulled off the road to case his place. I thought he was asleep. He came outside and saw my car. But it was too dark for him to get my tag or see my face. If we leave him alone, he’ll forget about it.”

“You didn’t tell me that.”

“So I just did. Use your head, Jack. Artie Rooney hijacked Josef Sholokoff’s whores. Who do you think Rooney is gonna put that on? You got the rep from L.A. to Miami. Mexican cops think you walk through walls. Artie gets on the phone, tells Sholokoff you’re a psycho, tells him you’re working for Nick Dolan, and gets you permanently out of his hair. You taught me to be a fly on the wall, Jack.”

“Want to spell that out?”

“That agent you capped wasn’t just a fed, he was from ICE. They’re fanatics, worse than Treasury agents. You got any idea of how hot you are?”

“You just said ‘you.’”

“Okay, ‘we.’”

“Call me when you find Vikki Gaddis.”

“Is this girl worth clipping? Think about it. A waitress from a truck stop?”

“Did I say anything about clipping her? Did you hear me say that?”

“No.”

“You find her, but you don’t touch her.”

“Why should I want to touch her? It’s not me who’s got-”

“Got what?”

“An obsession. Like a tumor on the brain. The size of a carrot.”

Again Preacher let his silence speak for him; it was a weapon Bobby Lee never knew how to deal with.

“You still there?”

“Still here,” Preacher said.

“You’re the best there is, Jack. Nobody else could have done what you did behind the church. It took guts to do that.”

“Say again?”

“To step across the line like that, to grease every one of them, to burn the whole magazine and bulldoze them under and mark it off. It takes maximum cojones to do a mass whack like that, Jack. That’s why you’re you.”

This time Preacher’s silence was not of his own volition. He took the cell phone from his ear and opened his mouth to clear a blockage in his ear canal. The side of his face felt both numb and hot to the touch, as though he had been stung by a bee. He stared at the gray rock. The lizard was gone, and at the base of the rock, he saw a spray of tiny purple flowers that looked like tiny violets. He wondered how any flower that lovely and delicate could grow in the desert.

“You still there? Talk to me, man,” he heard Bobby Lee’s voice say. Preacher closed his cell phone without replying. He picked up the Thompson and ran a bore brush through the barrel and swabbed it with a clean oil patch. He folded a piece of white paper and inserted it in the open chamber, reflecting the sunlight up through the rifling. The inside of the barrel was immaculate, the whorls of light an affirmation of the gun’s mechanical integrity and reliability. He lifted up the drum and snapped it cleanly into place under the barrel and laid the gun across his lap, his palms resting on the wood stock and steel frame. He could hear whirring sounds in his head, like wind blowing in a cave or perhaps the voices of women whispering to him through the ground, whispering inside the wildflowers.

AT THAT SAME moment, one hundred miles away, three bikers were headed down a two-lane highway, full-bore, their arms wrapped with jailhouse tats, the points of their shoulders bright with sunburn. Sometimes, out of boredom, they lazed across the solid yellow stripe or stopped at a roadside rathole for a beer and a grease burger or caught a live hillbilly band at a shitkicker nightclub or steak house. But otherwise, they burned their way across the American Southwest with the dedication of Visigoths. The crystal that coursed in their veins, the dirty thunder of their exhaust flattening against the asphalt, the blowtorch velocity of the wind on their skin, the surge of the engines’ power into their genitalia, blended together in a paean to their lives.

They topped a rise and turned onto a dirt road and followed it for two miles until they came out on the cusp of a sloping plain of alluvial grit and alkali and green mesquite. They stopped between two dun-colored bluffs, and their leader consulted a topographical map without dismounting, then used binoculars to study a small stucco house set against a mountain that contained a shadow-darkened opening in its face. “Bingo,” he said.

The three men dismounted and touched fists and parked their hogs down in a gulley and built a fire and cooked their food on sticks. When they had finished eating, they pissed on the flames in the sunset and rolled out their sleeping bags and smoked weed and, like spectators at an exotic zoo, silently watched a coyote with a stiffened back leg try to keep up with a pack climbing a hill. Then they fell asleep.

On the fair side of the plain, the stucco house was quiet. A solitary figure sat on a metal chair in front of the opening to a shored-up cave, staring at the mantle of gold light on the hills, his expression as removed from earthly concerns as that of a man whose severed head had just been placed on a platter.

17

BUT IN THE morning, the man who lived upon occasion in the stucco house was not to be found. The bikers had approached the house on foot from three directions, the sun still buried beneath the earth’s rim, the light so weak their bodies cast no shadows on the ground. A compact car was parked twenty yards away from the house, the doors unlocked, the keys hanging in the ignition. The bikers kicked open the front and back doors of the house, turned over the bed, raked the clothes out of the closets, and tore the plywood out of the ceiling to see if Preacher was hiding in an attic or crawl space.

“The mine shaft,” one of them said.

“Where?” another said.

“Up on the mountain. There’s no other place he could be. Josef said he’s on crutches.”

“How’d he know we were coming?”

“The Mexicans say he walks through walls.”

“That’s why their country would make a great golf course, as long as it was run by white people.”

The bikers spread out and approached the opening on the mountainside, their weapons hanging loosely at their sides. They wore needle- nosed cowboy boots that were metal-plated around the heels and toes, jeans that were stiff with grit and road grime, and shirts whose sleeves were razored off at the armpits. Their hair was sunburned at the tips and grew in locks on the backs of their necks. Their bodies had the tendons and lean hardness of men who lifted weights daily and for whom narcissism was a virtue and not a character defect.

Their leader was named Tim. He stood two inches taller than his companions and wore a gold earring in one earlobe and a beard that ran along his jawline like a cluster of black ants. A Glock semiautomatic hung from his right hand. He paused in front of the cave and slipped the gun into the back of his belt, as though enacting a private ritual unrelated to what anyone thought of him. He took a breath and entered the cave. He produced a penlight from his jeans, clicked it on, and shone it into the darkness.