He saw Preacher move out of the light and head for the north pasture, unhurried, holding the Thompson by the pistol grip, the barrel pointed at the sky, glancing back at Hackberry only once.

The rain steamed on the smoldering remains of the cruiser, the flames in the grass burning outward in a ring, the mesquite starting to catch and flare like fireflies. There was no movement anywhere near the cruiser. The airbags in the front seat had inflated and exploded in the heat and were now draped on the steering wheel and blackened seats and dashboard like curtains of ash. Hackberry could feel his eyes brimming with water. He followed Preacher into the pasture, the rain blowing in his face, his two geldings terrified. Inside the flash of lightning in the clouds, he thought he saw Preacher climbing through the rails of the north fence. He fired once, or was it twice, with no effect.

He stepped on a fence clip and felt the aluminum tip slice through the ball of his foot. Then Preacher was out in the pasture, out of the shadows, past the stump fire. Hackberry paused at the fence and fired again. This time he saw Preacher’s coat jump, as though a gust of wind had caught it and flapped it loose from his side. Hackberry climbed through the fence and went deeper into the Johnson grass, toward a thicket behind which a compact car was parked.

Preacher opened the compact’s door. Almost as an afterthought, he turned and faced Hackberry, his Thompson lowered. He smiled at the corner of his mouth. “You’re a persistent man, Holland.”

Hackberry raised his revolver with both hands, cocked back the hammer, and sighted on Preacher’s face. “Send me a postcard and tell me how you like hell,” he said. He squeezed the trigger. But the hammer snapped on a spent cartridge.

“You lose, bub,” Preacher said.

“Be done with it.”

“I don’t have to. I’m stronger than you are. I’ll live inside your thoughts the rest of your life. The woman I just killed will become my friend and haunt your sleep. Welcome to the great shade.”

Preacher got in his car, started the engine, and drove slowly out of the field. After he had passed the burned shell of the cruiser, he turned on his headlights and proceeded down the county road toward town, the pocked hole in his rear window glinting like a crystal eye.

Hackberry walked out of the field onto the asphalt, the blood in his hair mixing with the rain, running through his eyebrows and down his face. In the way that dreams turn out to be only dreams, he saw an image in the mist that made no sense, that was out of place and time, that was like the reversal of a film whose frames contained material that was unacceptable and had to be corrected.

Pam Tibbs was climbing from the rain ditch that paralleled the far side of the road, her clothes powdered with soot, her face smudged and streaked with rain.

“Oh, Pam,” he said.

She stepped out on the road, her eyes watering in the black smoke blowing off the cruiser’s tires. She seemed disoriented, as though the earth were shifting under her feet. She looked at him woodenly. “I’d gotten out of the cruiser. I thought I hit a deer. A doe with two fawns ran in front of me. One of the fawns was making a sound like it was hurt or frightened. But they’re not here. I think the explosion knocked me unconscious.”

“I was sure you were dead.”

“You’re hurt,” she said.

“I’m fine.”

“Is Collins still here?”

“He’s gone. You have your cell?”

He saw that it was already in her hand. He took it from her, but his fingers were shaking so badly that she had to make the 911 call for him.

20

PETE CAUGHT A ride back to the motel on a poultry truck and slept through the morning, trying to block out the memories of the previous night, which included his fight with Vikki, his failed attempt to boost a car, his admission of fear and inadequacy to his friend Billy Bob in Montana, and his rage and attack upon the driver of the compact car at the traffic light.

How could one guy screw up so often, so bad, and in so short a time? When he woke at noon, a poisonous lethargy seemed to grip both his body and spirit, as though he had been drinking for two days and all his tomorrows had been mortgaged. He was sure that if a high wind blew away the motel and left him behind, he would discover that creation was a vast empty shell as well as a sham, a stage set that hid no mysteries, and he was an insignificant cipher in the middle of it.

Vikki was nowhere in sight. His only companion was a roach the size of a cigar butt climbing up the curtain by the television set. He put on his shirt, not bothering to button it, and sat on the side of the bed and wondered what he should do next.

Billy Bob had said to trust his cousin the sheriff. But what about the feds? Sometimes they hung witnesses out to dry. Pete had heard stories about the Justice Department prosecuting cases that couldn’t be won, turning over the names of confidential informants to defense lawyers who passed the names on to their clients and exposed the informants to violent and perhaps fatal retribution.

His and Vikki’s names would be in the newspapers. Vikki had pumped two rounds into this guy Preacher when he had tried to force her into his car. Pete had never seen the man’s face and knew nothing of his history or background but had little doubt what he would do to Vikki if he got his hands on her.

But what if Pete continued to do nothing? So far he and Vikki had been lucky. If they just had money or passports or a car. Or a weapon. But they had none of these things, and now, to compound his problems, he had fought with Vikki.

The rains had passed when he went outside, but the sky was sealed from horizon to horizon with clouds that were as heavy and gray as lead, like a giant lid pressing the humidity and heat back into the earth. In the convenience store that doubled as a Greyhound bus stop, he bought a box of saltine crackers and a can of Vienna sausages. He also bought a coned-up straw hat from a Mexican who was selling hats and serapes and garish velvet paintings of either the Crucifixion or the Sacred Heart of Jesus off the back of a pickup truck. He bought a bottle of Coca-Cola from the outside machine, and just as the sun was breaking through the overcast, spearing columns of light onto the desert, he squatted down in the shade of the store and began eating the sausages sandwiched between crackers, drinking from the soda, moistening the dried-out saltines to the point where they were almost chewable.

He could not explain adequately to himself why he had bought the hat, which had cost six dollars, except for the fact that squatting down on his haunches, the leather of his colorless cowboy boots spiderwebbing with cracks, eating his lunch in the hot shade of a convenience store on the outer edges of the Great American Desert, his hat slanted down on his brow, was like a conduit back into a time when he had thought of the world in terms of chimerical holograms rather than events-bobber-fishing in a green river, Angus grazing in red clover, sunlit showers breaking on bluebonnets in the spring, harvest moons that were as big and brown and dust-veiled as a planet that had strayed from its orbit.

Pickup trucks and country music and dancing to the “Bandera Waltz” under Japanese lanterns at a beer garden on the banks of the Frio. Barbecues and fish frys and high school kids on hayrides and other kids hanging out on horseback in front of the IGA. Dinner on the ground and devil in the bush and baptism by immersion and outdoor preachers ranting in ecstasy with their eyes rolled back in their heads. If he could just reach back a couple of years and put his hand on all of it and hold on to it and never let anyone talk him into giving it up.