“It’s a mine?” one of his companions said.

“I can feel a breeze blowing through it. It’s got to have a second opening.”

“You see the guy?”

“No, that’s why I said it’s got a second opening. Maybe he went through it and out the other side.”

“Where’s it go?”

Tim continued to walk deeper into the cave, the beam of his penlight watery and diffuse on the walls. “Come have a look at this.”

“At what?”

“Did you see Snakes on a Plane?”

The two bikers who had remained outside the cave stepped into the darkness. Tim aimed the penlight in front of him, pointing it down a passageway that twisted into the mountain.

“Jesus!” one of them said.

“They go where there’s food or water. Maybe a cougar dragged its kill in here,” Tim said. “You ever see that many in one place?”

“Maybe Collins is a ghoul. Maybe he dumps his victims in here.”

“Go down and check it out. They rattle before they strike. They’re not rattling. You’ll be okay.”

“How about that one on the ledge behind you?”

The other two bikers waited, smiles on their faces, expecting Tim to jump. Instead, he turned around and shone the light into a diamondback’s eyes. He picked up a piece of splintered timber that had fallen from the roof. He poked at the snake’s head with it, then bedeviled it in the stomach, and finally, lifted it up in a coil and flipped it into the darkness.

“You’re not afraid of snakes?”

“I’m afraid of bad information. I think this Texas bunch is jerking Josef around. This guy Collins is a hitter, not a pimp. Hitters don’t boost somebody else’s whores.”

“Where do you think he went?”

“One thing is for sure. He didn’t go out the other side.”

“Then where is he?”

“Probably watching us.”

“No way. From where?”

“I don’t know. The guy has been killing people for twenty years and never went inside.”

“This blows, Tim.”

They were outside the cave now, the stucco house still in shadow, the morning cool, the wind ruffling the mesquite. The three men stared at the surrounding hills, looking for the glint of binoculars or the lens on a telescopic rifle sight.

“Who are we supposed to check in with?”

“The guy who ratted out Collins. His name is Hugo Cistranos.”

“What are we gonna do?”

Tim slipped the Glock from behind his belt and strolled down the gravel path from the cave to Preacher’s compact car. He circled the car, taking careful aim, and shot out each tire. He went inside the house and closed all the windows, like a man securing his home from an impending storm. He found a candle in a kitchen drawer, lit it, and melted the wax in a pool so he could affix it to the drainboard. Then he shut the front door and turned on the propane stove and shut the kitchen door behind him as he exited the house.

“Let’s fang down some frijoles,” he said.

SHERIFF HACKBERRY HOLLAND had just picked up Danny Boy Lorca for public intoxication and locked him in a cell upstairs when Maydeen told him Ethan Riser was on the phone.

“How you doing, Mr. Riser?” Hackberry said, picking up the receiver on his desk.

“Can’t you call me Ethan?”

“It’s a southern inhibition.”

“You were right about the origins of your mystery caller. We think his name is Nick Dolan. He was a floating casino operator in New Orleans before Katrina.”

“How’d you ID him?”

“His name was in Isaac Clawson’s notes. Clawson figured the Thai murder victims for prostitutes somebody was smuggling into the country, so he started running down anybody with major ties to escort services. It appears Clawson was giving Arthur Rooney a hard look and decided to check out Nick Dolan at the same time. Evidently, he interviewed Dolan at his vacation home in New Braunfels.”

“Why are y’all just finding this out?”

“Like I told you, Clawson liked to work alone. He didn’t put everything he did in the official file.”

“But so far you’re not absolutely sure Dolan is the same guy who called me?”

“Dolan knows Rooney. Dolan has been mixed up with prostitution for the last two years. Clawson had him in his bombsights. Also, Dolan just dissolved his partnership in his escort services and fired all the strippers at his nightclub. Either Clawson scared the shit out of him, or Dolan has developed problems of conscience.”

“You haven’t interviewed him yet?”

“No.”

“You’re putting a tap on him instead?”

“Did I say that?”

“I think you’re calling me because you don’t want me to find Dolan on my own.”

“Some people have a way of putting themselves in the middle of electric storms, Sheriff.”

“I don’t think the problem is mine. Your colleagues want Collins as a conduit to this Russian out on the West Coast. I think they might want to use Dolan as bait. In the meantime, I’m a hangnail.”

This time Ethan Riser was silent.

“You’re telling me I’m bait, too?” Hackberry said.

“I can’t speak for the actions of others. But I sleep nights. I do so because I treat people as honestly as I can. Watch your ass, Sheriff. Guys like us are old school. But there’s not many of us left.”

A FEW MINUTES later, Hackberry filled a Styrofoam cup with black coffee, dropped three sugar cubes in it, and removed a folded-up checkerboard and a box of wood checkers from his bottom desk drawer. He walked up the old steel stairs to the second floor and pulled up a chair to Danny Boy Lorca’s cell. He sat down and placed the coffee and the checkerboard inside the bars and unfolded the checkerboard on the concrete floor. “Set ’em up,” he said.

“I fell off the wagon again,” Danny Boy said, sitting up on the edge of his bunk, rubbing his face. His skin was as dark as smoked leather, his eyes dead, like coals that have been consumed by their own fire.

“One day you’ll quit. Between now and then, don’t fret yourself about it,” Hackberry said.

“I dreamed it rained. I saw a dried-out field of corn stand up straight in the rain. I had the same dream for three nights.”

Hackberry’s eyes crinkled at the corners.

“You don’t pay no attention to dreams, huh?” Danny Boy said.

“You bet I do. Your move,” Hackberry said.

THE THREE BIKERS checked in to a motel next to a truck stop and nightclub, partially because the portable sign in front of the nightclub said LADIES FREE TONIGHT-TWO-FERS 5 TO 8. They showered and changed into fresh clothes and drank Mexican beer at the bar and picked up a woman who said she worked at the dollar store in town. They also picked up her friend, who was sullen and suspicious and claimed she had a ten-year-old boy waiting alone at home.

But when Tim showed the friend his tin Altoids box packed to the brim with a lovely white granular cake of nose candy, she changed her mind and joined him and her girlfriend and the other two bikers for a couple of lines, some high-octane weed, and an order-in pizza back at the motel.

Tim had rented a room at the end of the building, and while his companions and their new friends went at it full-throttle on two beds, he drank a soda outside and crushed the can in one hand and threw it in the trash. He sat on a bench under a tree throbbing with cicadas and opened his cell phone. He could hear the bedstead banging against the motel wall and the cacophonous laughter of the two dimwits his friends had picked up, as if their laughter were outside them and not part of anything that was funny. He put an unlit cigarette in his mouth and tried to clear his head. What would the smart money do in a situation like this? You didn’t blow a hit for Josef Sholokoff. You also didn’t mess up when you took on a guy like Jack Collins, at least if he was as good as people said he was.

The eaves of the motel were lit with pink neon tubing. The light was fading from the sky, and the air was purple and dense and moist, with a smell of dust in it that suggested a drop in the barometer, perhaps even a taste of rain. The fronds on a palm tree by the entrance to the motel straightened and rattled in the wind. He thought about going back inside and trying out one of the dimwits. No, first things first. He dialed a number on his cell phone. While he listened to the ring, he wondered what was keeping the pizza man with their order.