At six A.M. Hackberry saw Pam Tibbs’s cruiser turn off the asphalt road and come under the arch and up his driveway. She parked the cruiser and unchained the pedestrian gate on the horse lot and walked toward him with a big brown paper bag hanging from her right hand.

“Are Gaddis and Flores up yet?” she said.

“I didn’t notice.”

“Did you eat?”

“Nope.”

“I brought you some melted-cheese-and-egg-and-ham sandwiches and some coffee and a couple of fried pies.”

“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me something.”

“Talk to the state attorney’s office. Get somebody on your side.”

“Wars of enormous importance are always fought in places nobody cares about, Pam. This is our home. We take care of it.”

“That’s what this is about, isn’t it? The outside world came across the moat.”

Hackberry propped the push broom against a stall and took two folding chairs out of the tack room and set them up on the concrete pad. He took the paper bag from Pam’s hand and waited for her to sit down. Then he sat down and opened the bag but did not remove anything from it.

“Some of the Asian women had eight-ball hemorrhages. I see their eyes staring at me in my sleep. I want Collins dead. I want this guy Arthur Rooney dead and this guy Hugo Cistranos dead. The feds are after a Russian out in Phoenix. Their workload is greater than ours, and their priorities are different from ours. It’s that simple.”

“I doubt they’ll be that tolerant.”

“That’s their problem.”

“Flores seems like a nice kid, but he’s a five-star fuckup.”

“Y’all talking about me?” Pete said from the doorway.

Pam Tibbs’s face turned as red as a sunburn. Pete was smiling, silhouetted against the sunrise, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of fresh jeans he had tucked into his boots.

“We were wondering if you and Vikki would like to have breakfast with us,” Hackberry said.

“There’s something I didn’t pass on yesterday,” Pete said. “I don’t think it’s a big deal, but Vikki did. When Danny Boy picked us up, he had to stop for gas at that filling station run by Ouzel Flagler’s brother. I just thought I’d mention it.”

Pam Tibbs looked at Hackberry, her lips pursed, her eyes lidless.

“Some people say Ouzel is mixed up with Mexican dope mules and such, but I don’t set a lot of store in that. He seems pretty much a harmless guy to me. What do y’all think?” Pete said.

THE FIRST MORNING that he woke in Preacher’s tent, Bobby Lee could feel the difference in the temperature. He pushed open the flap and felt a great cushion of cool air rising off the earth, glazing the mesas and monument rocks and creosote brush and spavined trees with dew, even staining the soil with dark areas of moisture, as though an erratic rain shower had blown across the land during the night.

Preacher was still asleep on his cot, his head deep in a striped pillow that had no pillowcase and had been stained by the grease from his hair. Bobby Lee went outside and used the chemical toilet and started a fire in the woodstove. He filled a spouted metal pot with water from the hundred-gallon drum Preacher had paid four Mexicans to mount on eight-foot stanchions; he poured coffee grounds into the pot and set it on the stove. When the sun broke above the horizon, the wood framing of Preacher’s new house, constructed by the same Mexicans-all illegals who spoke no English-stood out in skeletal relief against the vastness of the landscape, as though it did not belong there or, if it did, it marked the beginning of a great societal and environmental change about to take place. The wind came up, and Bobby Lee watched the burned books from Preacher’s house that had been bulldozed into a pile of debris blow away in gray and blackened scraps of paper. Was a change of some kind taking place before Bobby Lee’s eyes? Was he witness to events that, as Preacher constantly suggested, were prophesied thousands of years ago?

Preacher had told Bobby Lee he would be part of the new place. If his name was not on the deed, he would nonetheless be bonded to the property and the house by Preacher’s word. Was it possible for Preacher and Bobby Lee to get the mow-down behind them and resolve their problems with Hugo Cistranos and Artie Rooney and this Russian Sholokoff? It happened. He knew retired button men in Miami and Hallandale who had done thirty or forty hits in New York and Boston and Jersey and never gone down on a serious beef and today had no one looking at them. The guys who had killed Jimmy Hoffa and Johnny Roselli had never been in custody, guys who might have even been involved with the murder of John Kennedy. If those guys could skate, anybody could.

When the coffee boiled, he used a dish towel to pour a tin cup full from the pot, then lifted the cup to his mouth. The coffee, grounds and all, scalding hot, landed on his stomach lining like a cupful of acid.

He went back inside the tent. Preacher was up, pulling on his pants. “You look like you’re having some kind of discomfort there, Bobby Lee,” he said.

“I think I got an ulcer.”

“You got coffee out there?”

“I’ll get you some.” Thanks for the concern, Bobby Lee said to himself. He went back outside and filled a second tin cup. He opened the wooden icebox and took out a perforated can of condensed milk and a box of sugar cubes. “You take sugar or you don’t?” he called out.

“You don’t remember?” Preacher said through the flap.

“I get it mixed up.”

“Two cubes and a half teaspoon of canned milk.”

Bobby Lee brought the cup back inside the tent and placed it in Preacher’s hand. “You’re not diabetic?”

“No, I told you that.”

“So you avoid alcohol out of principle rather than for health reasons?”

“Why should you care, Bobby Lee?”

“Just one of those things. Liam and me were talking once about how you got medical issues of some kind.”

Preacher was standing up over his writing table, unshaved, wearing an unironed white shirt. He drank from his cup, touching his lips gingerly against the rim. “Why would you and Liam be talking about my health?”

“I don’t remember the circumstances.”

“You think I have a health problem that people need to know about?”

“No, Jack, I know you’re good about taking care of yourself, is all. Liam and me were just making conversation.”

“But a man like Liam Eriksson was intensely concerned about my well-being?”

“Wish I hadn’t brought it up.”

“Did Liam bring it up?”

“Maybe. I don’t remember.”

Preacher sat down on his unmade cot and set his coffee on the writing table. Before going to bed, he had been playing blackjack against himself. The deck was splayed facedown on the table. Two cards had been dealt faceup to the imaginary player. The dealer’s hole card was facedown. The second dealer’s card had not been dealt. “What do you reckon has given you that ulcer?”

“Everything went south because of the Asian women. It was a mistake that just happened. You and me shouldn’t have to pay the price. It’s not fair.”

“You’re still a fish.”

“About what?”

“We weren’t hijacking the women. We were hijacking the heroin in their stomachs. They started going nuts on us, and Hugo decided to waste the whole bunch and use the lot behind the church as a storage area. He was going to dig them up later.”

“That’s sick.”

“But this Holland fellow came along and changed all that. What I’m saying to you is there are no accidents.”

Bobby Lee wasn’t about to enter into Preacher’s psychotic frame of reference. “What if we get out of the country for a while? Let everything cool off?”

“You disappoint me.”

“Come on, don’t talk to me like that, man.”

“We’ve got Arthur Rooney and Hugo to deal with. Sholokoff is going to send another hit team after us. I’ve got all that federal heat coming down on me because of that fellow from ICE. I don’t think I’m quite finished with Sheriff Holland, either. He spat on me. The girl did, too.”