The phone made his face jerk. It was Ethan Riser.

“I’m returning your call. What’s up?” Riser said.

“Hugo Cistranos may be in my neighborhood,” Hackberry said. “What kind of leash did you have on this guy?”

“You’re asking me if he’s under surveillance?”

“I know you have him tapped. Where is he?”

“I don’t know. Somebody saw him?”

“We may have a guy with a laser sight in the neighborhood, but I can’t confirm that. Have you gotten any more feedback on those license numbers that may belong to Jack Collins?”

“I’m at my granddaughter’s wedding reception right now. I returned your call as a professional courtesy. Either tell me specifically what is on your mind or call me back during business hours on Monday.”

“I need your assurances about Pete Flores.”

“In regard to what?”

“If I bring him in, you don’t stuff him into the wood chipper.”

“We don’t stuff people in wood chippers.”

“Sell that stuff to somebody else.” The line was silent. Hackberry felt a rush of blood in his head that made him dizzy. He swallowed until his mouth was dry again and waited for the tautness to go out of his throat before he spoke. “Flores didn’t see the mass killing. All he can do is put Cistranos at the scene. You already know Cistranos is dirty on the mass homicide. You must have wiretap evidence by this time. You must have information from CIs. Maybe you’ve already flipped Arthur Rooney. I think the only reason you haven’t picked up Cistranos is he’s bait. You don’t need the kid, do you?”

“If you’re in contact with Pete Flores, you tell him he’d better get his ass into an FBI office.”

“That kid got fried in a tank because he believed in his country. You think he belongs in a federal prison or a place like Huntsville?”

“I’d like to say it’s been good talking to you. But instead, I think I’ll just say goodbye.”

“Don’t blow me off, Agent Riser. You guys are determined to hang Josef Sholokoff from a meat hook, and you don’t care how you get him there.”

But Hackberry was already talking to a dead connection.

EARLY SUNDAY MORNING, the sun was barely above the hills when Pam Tibbs turned the cruiser, with Hackberry in the passenger seat, in to Ouzel Flagler’s place. They rumbled across the cattle guard, the cloud of dust from the cruiser drifting back amid the junked farm tractors and construction machinery and rusted-out tankers and tangles of fence wire strewn over the property. The Sunday-morning quiet was starkly palpable, almost unnatural, in its contrast to the visual reminders of Ouzel’s customers’ Saturday-night fun at the blind-pig bar he operated: beer cans and red plastic cups and fast-food containers scattered across a half acre, a discarded condom flattened into a tire track, ashtrays and at least one dirty plastic diaper dumped on the ground.

“We’re not any too soon,” Hackberry said, peering through the windshield.

Ouzel and his wife and two grandchildren were exiting the side door of their house. All of them were dressed for church, Ouzel in brown shoes and a blue tie dotted with dozens of tiny white stars and a dark polyester suit that shone as brightly as grease.

“You want to take him in?” Pam asked.

But Hackberry’s attention was fixed on the abandoned machinery.

“Did you hear me?”

“I think I underestimated Ouzel’s potential,” he replied. “Cut off his vehicle. Keep his wife away from a phone while I talk to him.”

“You look like somebody put thumbtacks in your breakfast cereal.”

“This place is really an eyesore, isn’t it? Why in the hell do we allow something like this to exist?”

She looked at him curiously. When they got out of the cruiser, she picked up her baton from between the seats and slipped it through the ring on her belt. Hackberry stepped in front of Ouzel, raising his hand. “Hold up, partner, you’ll have to be late for the sermon this morning,” he said.

“What’s wrong?” Ouzel said.

“Ask your family to go back inside. My deputy will stay with them.”

“We get too loud here last night?”

“Deputy Tibbs, leave me your baton,” Hackberry said.

She looked at him strangely again, then slipped the baton from its ring and handed it to him, her eyes lingering warily on his.

“I don’t know what’s going on here,” Ouzel said.

Pam placed her hands on the two small children’s shoulders and began walking them toward the side door. But the wife-a broad-faced, hulking peasant of a woman who was known for her bad disposition and her clean brown beautiful hair-did not move and stared straight into Hackberry’s face, her dark eyes like lumps of coal that were no long capable of giving off heat. “These are our grandkids,” she said.

“Yes?”

“We take them to church because their mother won’t,” she said. “They’re good kids. They don’t need this.”

“Mrs. Flagler, you and your husband are not victims,” Hackberry said. “If you cared about those children, you wouldn’t be involved with criminals who transport heroin and crystal meth through your property. Now go back in your house and don’t come out until you’re told to.”

“You heard him, ma’am,” Pam said. Before she entered the Flagler house, she looked back over her shoulder at Hackberry, this time with genuine concern.

Ouzel’s Lexus was parked incongruously under a cottonwood tree, its tinted windows and waxed surfaces darkly splendid in the shade.

“You aren’t afraid birds will corrode your paint?” Hackberry said.

“I parked it there a few minutes ago so it’d be cool when we got in,” Ouzel said.

“There’s a man in the neighborhood with a laser-sighted rifle. I think you brought him here,” Hackberry said.

“I don’t know anything about that. No, sir, I don’t know anything about rifles. Never did. Never had much interest.” Ouzel’s gaze swept the great panorama of plains and mountains to the south, as though he were simply passing the time of day in idle conversation with a friend.

Hackberry placed the flat of his hand on the hood of the Lexus. Then he picked a leaf off a ventilator slit and let it blow away in the wind. “What’d it cost you, sixty grand, something like that?”

“It wasn’t that much. I got a deal.” Ouzel looked back at his house from the shadows the tree made. When he rotated his neck, the bulbous purple swellings in his throat raking against the stiffness of his collar, his small eyes sunk into black dots, Hackberry thought he could detect an odor that was reminiscent of a violated grave or the stench given off by an incinerator in which dead animals were burned. He wondered if he was starting to step across an invisible line.

“Why you staring at me like that?” Ouzel said.

“We let you skate on the sale of illegal booze because it was easier to keep an eye on you than it was to monitor a half-dozen vendors we couldn’t keep track of. But that was a big mistake on our part. You got mixed up with the dope traffickers across the river, and they’ve been using the back of your property as a corridor ever since. How much of your construction equipment is operational?”

“None of it. It’s junk. I sell parts off it.”

“When is the last time you saw Hugo Cistranos, Ouzel?”

“I cain’t say that name rings bells.”

Hackberry laid Pam Tibbs’s metal baton on the hood of the car. It rolled off, bouncing on the bumper before it struck the dirt with a pinging sound. He picked it up and reset it on the hood, then grabbed it when it rolled again, resetting it until it balanced, the tiny scratches showing like cats’ whiskers in the paint. He watched the baton contemplatively and moved it once more, pushing it audibly across the hood’s surface. “A couple of young people were almost killed yesterday. You sicced the shooter on them. Now you’re on your way to your church with your grandchildren. You’re a special kind of fellow, Ouzel.” Hackberry spun the baton on the car hood the way one might spin a bottle. “What do you think we ought to do about that?”