“I never claimed it.”

“You let others do that for you. You don’t discourage them.”

“I don’t study on what other people say or think. Why do you keep favoring the other side of your bed, Sheriff?”

“I have problems with sciatica. I can’t lie in one position.”

“Is this what you’re looking for?” Preacher said, holding up Hackberry’s revolver.

“Maybe.”

“If you’re going to keep a weapon close by your bed, it should be a small one, a derringer or an Airweight you can tuck under your mattress or pillow so an intruder cain’t find it without waking you up. You favor a thumb-buster forty-five? That’s a lot like carrying around a junkyard on your hip, isn’t it?”

Hackberry looked through the screen door at the rain blowing in the pasture, his horses playing in it, rearing in mock combat, a stump fire glowing orange and hot under a log each time the wind fed fresh oxygen into the flames. “Do what you came to do and be done,” he said.

“I wouldn’t rush my fate if I were you.”

“You lecture others, a man who killed nine unarmed women, some of them hardly more than children? You think you’re the scourge of God? You’re a pimple on creation. I’ve known your kind all my life. You’re always looking for a cause or a flag to hide under. There’s no mystery to your psychological makeup, Collins. Your mother probably wanted you aborted and cursed the day you were born. I think you were despised in the womb.”

Preacher’s mouth was a stitched seam, as though he were taking the measure of each word Hackberry used. He huffed air out his nostrils indifferently. “Could be. I never got to know her real well. You’re a recipient of the Navy Cross.”

“So what?”

“I checked out your background. You don’t fit easily into one shoe box. You were a womanizer and a drunkard. While you were married and running for Congress, you were hiring Mexican girls down on the border. You ever carry diseases home to your wife?”

The ammunition drum on the Thompson rested between Preacher’s knees; the index finger of his right hand was poised outside the trigger guard. “The question isn’t a complicated one,” he said.

“You name it and I did it. Until I met the woman who became my second wife.”

“The Marxist?”

“She was an organizer for the United Farm Workers and a friend of Cesar Chavez.”

“That’s how you took up with the papists?”

“There’re worse groups.”

“The situation with those Oriental women wasn’t of my selection.”

“I dug them up. I saw your handiwork up close and personal. Run your bullshit on somebody else.”

“You found them?”

“At least one girl had dirt clenched in her palm. You know what that indicates?”

Preacher raised his index finger in the air. “I didn’t have control of what happened out there.”

“You’re using the passive voice.”

“What?”

“It involves manipulation of language to avoid admission of guilt.”

“You a grammarian besides a war hero?”

“There’s nothing heroic about my history. I informed on two fellow POWs.”

Preacher seemed to have lost interest in the subject. He scratched idly at his cheek with four fingers. “You afraid?”

“Of what?”

“The other side.”

“I’ve already been there.”

“Say again?”

“I looked into the eyes of a man just like you. He carried a burp gun that was made in China or Russia. He was a cruel man. I suspect his cruelty masked his innate cowardice. I never met a cruel man or a bully who wasn’t a coward.”

Preacher waved his hand at the air. “Be quiet.”

At first Hackberry thought his words had reached inside Preacher’s defense system, then realized the vanity of his perception. Preacher had risen from his chair, his attention fixed on the road, the Thompson slanted downward. He moved to the window. “She’s not the brightest bulb in the box, is she?”

“Who?”

“Your deputy, the one who killed Liam. She just turned on her interior light to write in her log.”

“She patrols this road when she has the night shift. She’s not part of this, Collins.”

“Oh, yes, she is, my friend.”

“You sonofabitch, you motherfucker.”

“What did you call me?”

“I’m the guy who came after you, Collins. Not my deputy. She takes orders. She’s not a player.”

“You insult my mother, but you ask immunity for your female friend? Her fate is on your conscience. Think back: the unlocked doors, pursu ing me outside your jurisdiction, the killing of Liam Eriksson. You engineered this, Sheriff. Look into my face. Look inside me. You see yourself.”

Preacher had leaned down to speak, his breath sour, a tiny web of saliva at the corner of his mouth. Hackberry grabbed Preacher’s shirt with one hand and knotted the cloth in his fist and pulled Preacher toward him. He spat full in his face, then gathered his spittle a second time and spat on him again and again, until his mouth was empty of moisture.

Preacher jerked away from him and drove the butt of the Thompson into the bridge of Hackberry’s nose, using both hands. He hit him again, this time in the head, splitting the scalp, raking the steel butt plate down Hackberry’s ear.

Preacher picked up his hat from the dresser and walked toward the side door. “I’ll be back to deal with you later. I’ll be the last thing you ever see. And you’ll beg to take back every word you said about my mother.”

Blood leaked out of Hackberry’s hair into his eyes. He watched impotently as Preacher went out the door into the yard, the Thompson tilted downward in his silhouette like a black exclamation point against the glow of the cruiser’s headlights.

Hackberry strained against the manacle on his left wrist, forming his fingers into a cone, trying to pull the back of his hand through the steel’s circumference, blood running in strings down his thumb, braiding off his nails. He got to his feet and, with both arms outstretched, jerked against the chain, which was locked by the other manacle around a thick dowel on the bedstead. Through the window, he could see Preacher far down the driveway, approaching Pam Tibbs’s cruiser, the rain swirling like spun glass around him, thunder rippling across the sky.

Hackberry saw Pam reach up and turn off the dome light. Then, for a reason he didn’t understand, the light went back on. Hackberry yelled at the top of his voice just as the bedstead splintered apart. Preacher fitted the Thompson to his shoulder, his right elbow pointed outward like a chicken’s wing, and aimed through the iron sights.

The eruption of fire from the barrel was like the jagged and erratic contortions of an electrical arc. The.45-caliber rounds blew the glass out of the back and side windows and stitched across the doors, ripping stuffing out of the seats, exploding a side mirror, tattering the hood, flattening a tire in under a second.

Hackberry tore the handcuffs loose from the destroyed bedstead and found his holstered revolver on the floor where Preacher had placed it. He ran barefoot into the side yard just as Preacher let off another burst, this time holding the Thompson against his hip, spraying the cruiser from one end to the other. A flame glowed under the hood, then seemed to drip from the engine onto the asphalt and race backward toward the gasoline tank. There was no transition between the moment of ignition and the explosion that followed. A fireball exploded from the car’s frame, filling the windows, roasting the interior, rising into the darkness in a dirty red-black scorch that gave off a smell like an incinerator behind a rendering plant. Hackberry felt the whoosh of heat float across the lawn and touch his face.

“Collins!” he shouted. He saw Preacher turn, framed against the burning car. Hackberry raised his revolver and aimed with both hands and fired once, the report deafening, the recoil like the kick of a jackhammer. He steadied the front sight and fired two more shots, but he was too far away from his target, and he heard the rounds strike stone or the top of a rise and whine into the darkness with a sound like the tremolo of a broken banjo string.