“I hope he went out shivering like a dog passing broken glass,” Rooney said. “Tell me Mrs. Dolan was with him. Make my day perfect. Don’t hold back on me, Hugo. I want every detail. You parked one in her mouth, right? I’m getting hard thinking about it.”

Preacher folded the cell phone in his palm and dropped it in the pocket of his trousers. He stared out at the dust and mist blowing across the canyon, his expression contemplative, his mouth like a surgical wound. He stuck his little finger in one ear and removed something from his ear canal. Then he smiled at Hugo.

“Everything okay?” Hugo said.

“Right as rain,” Preacher said.

“Because words can get mixed up over the phone, or people can misunderstand each other.”

“No problem, Hugo. Take a walk with me.”

“Walk where?”

“A man should always have choices. Ever read Ernest Hemingway? He said death is only bad when it’s prolonged and humiliating. When I brood on things like this, I take a walk.”

“I don’t get what you’re saying. Where we going?”

“That’s the point. It’s for you to choose. Pancho Villa always gave his prisoners a choice. They could stand against a wall with a blindfold over their eyes or take off running. If it was me, I don’t think I’d run. I’d say screw that. I’d eat a round from one of those Mausers. Winchesters and Mausers were the standard issue for Villa’s troops. Did you know that?”

“Jack, let’s talk a minute. I don’t know what Artie said, but he gets excited sometimes. I mean, you’d think that two hundred grand I brought you was drained out of his veins. He’s always yelling about what you did to his hand, like he didn’t bring it on himself, which everybody knows he did. Come on, Jack, slow down here. It’s a matter of keeping things in perspective, like the lady in your car there, I know you want to care for her and everybody knows you’ve always been a gentleman that way and you got a code most people in the life don’t have, wait, we don’t need to keep walking anywhere, let’s just stay right here a second, I mean right here where we’re talking, I’m not real big on heights, I never have been, I’m not afraid, I just want to be reasonable and make sure you understand I always thought you and Bobby Lee here were stand-up, and look, man, you got your two hundred large and I’m never gonna breathe a word about this stuff, you got my word, you want me to blow the country, you want my condo in Galveston, you name it, hey, Jack, come on, whoa, I’m telling you the truth, I get vertigo, my heart won’t take it.”

“Don’t fault yourself for this, Hugo. You’ve made a choice. Bobby Lee and I respect that,” Preacher said. “Keep looking at me. That’s right, you’re a stand-up guy. See, it’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Hugo Cistranos stepped backward onto a shelf of air, his eyes closed and his fingers extended in front of him, like a blind man feeling in the dark. Then he plummeted three hundred feet, straight down, through the top of a cottonwood into the streambed filled with rocks that were the color of dirty snow.

27

HACKBERRY DID NOT get back home until almost ten that night. When he tried to sleep, the insides of his eyelids were dry and abrasive, as though there were sand in them or his corneas had been burned by the flash of an arc welder. Each time he thought he was successfully slipping off to sleep, he would feel himself jerked awake by the images of the dead men in the game farm’s lounge or, less dramatically, by the banality of an evil man who, when dying, had grieved over the wasted pot roast that had come from the exotic animal he had paid five thousand dollars to kill.

The tape Pam Tibbs had retrieved from the security camera had proved of little help. It had shown the arrival of a Honda and a Ford pickup truck. It had shown the back of a man wearing a fedora and a suit coat and slacks that flattened against his body in the wind. It had shown two tall unshaved men in colorful western shirts and bleached tight-fitting jeans that accentuated their genitalia. One of the tall men carried an elongated object wrapped loosely in a raincoat. The tape also showed a man in a dented and sweat-ringed top hat, his face shadowed, his striped overalls starched and pressed.

But it did not show the license tag on the pickup truck, and it showed only one letter and one number on the Honda: an S and the numeral 2. The value of the tape was minimal, other than the fact that the S and 2 confirmed that the vehicle Pete Flores had attacked with rocks was being driven by Jack Collins and perhaps was even registered to him, although under an alias.

Maybe the grouping of the letters and the numbers on the plate would narrow down the list provided earlier by the Texas DMV. In the morning Hackberry would call Austin again and start over. In the meantime, he had to sleep. He had learned long ago as a navy corpsman that Morpheus did not bestow his gifts easily or cheaply. The sleep that most people yearned for rarely came this side of the grave, except perhaps to the very innocent or to those willing to mortgage tomorrow for tonight. Tying off a vein, watching the blood rise inside a hypodermic needle, staining a mint-bruised mug of crushed ice with four fingers of Black Jack Daniel’s were all guaranteed to work. But the cost meant taking up residence in a country no reasonable person ever wanted to enter.

Throughout the night, he could hear the wind stressing the storm shutters against their hooks and swelling under his house. He saw flashes of lightning in the clouds, the windmill in his south pasture shivering in momentary relief against the darkness, his horses running in the grass, clattering against the railed fence. He heard thunder ripping across the sky like a tin roof being slowly torn asunder by the hands of God. He sat on the side of his bed in his skivvies, his heavy blue-black white-handled revolver clenched in his hand.

He thought of Pam Tibbs and the way she had always covered his back and incessantly brought him food. He thought of the way her rump filled out her jeans and the bold way she carried herself and her mercurial moods that vacillated from a martial flash in the eyes to an invasive warmth that made him step back from her and put his hands in his back pockets.

Why think about her now, at this moment, as he sat on the side of his bed with the coldness of a pistol on his naked thigh, like an old fool who still thought he could be the giver of death rather than its recipient?

Because he was alone and his sons were far away, and because every unused second that clicked on the clock was an act of theft to which he was making himself party.

He went into the office at seven on Monday morning, hung his dove-colored hat on a wood peg on the wall, and pulled from his desk drawer the DMV fax that contained the 173 possible registrants of the Honda driven by Preacher Jack Collins. He flattened the pages on his ink blotter, placed a ruler under the name of the first registrant, and began working his way down the list. He had gotten through six names when the phone rang. The caller was not one he cared to hear from.

“Ethan Riser,” Hackberry said, trying to hide the resignation in his voice.

“I heard you had a bad day up at the game farm,” Riser said.

“Not as bad as the guys Jack Collins eased into the next world.”

“A couple of my colleagues say it was a real mess. They appreciated your help.”

“That’s funny, I don’t remember their saying that.”

“So you know about Nick Dolan’s wife?”

“No, not the particulars. Just what I got from this guy T-Bone Simmons.” Hackberry leaned forward on his desk, his back stiffening. “What about her?”

“She was carjacked or kidnapped, I guess it depends on how you want to put it. Her vehicle was found on a side road off I-10, just east of Segovia.”