“Esther knows she’s safe with me.”

“Where’s Hugo Cistranos?”

“Oh, you’ll find him. Just watch the sky. It takes two or three days, but you’ll see them circling.”

“And you don’t think she’s afraid?”

There was a long beat.

“Good try. I’ve always heard the inculcation of guilt is a papist trait.”

“I have an envelope filled with photos of the nine terrified women and girls you machine-gunned and buried. Did they scream when they died? Did they beg in a language you couldn’t understand? Did they dissolve into a bloody mist while you sprayed them with a Thompson? Am I describing the scene accurately? Correct me if I haven’t. Please tell me in your own words what it was like to shoot nine defenseless human beings who were so desperate for a new life they’d allow their stomachs to be filled with balloons of heroin?”

He could hear Collins breathing hard. Then the line went dead.

Maydeen filled a cup with coffee in the other room and brought it to him on a saucer. Both she and Pam watched him without speaking.

“Y’all got something to do?” he said.

“We’re going to get him,” Pam said.

“I’ll believe it when it happens,” he said, picking up the fax sheets from his desk blotter again, his thumbs crimping the edges of the paper to the point of tearing them.

AS THE MORNING passed, a seemingly insignificant detail from his conversation with Jack Collins had burrowed itself into his memory and wouldn’t leave him alone. It was the sound of Collins breathing. No, that wasn’t it. It was the way Collins breathed and the image the sound conjured up from the Hollywood of years gone by. Collins seemed to draw his air across his teeth. His mouth became a slit, his speech laconic and clipped, his face without expression, like a man speaking not to other people but to a persona that lived inside him. Perhaps speaking like a man who had a nervous twitch, who was wrapped too tight for his own good, who was at war with the Fates.

A man with dry lips and a voice that rasped as if his larynx had been fried by cigarettes and whiskey or clotted with rust. A man who wore his hair mowed on the sides and combed straight back on top, a man who wore a hat and clothes from another era, his narrow belt hitched tightly into his ribs and his unpressed slacks tucked into western boots, perhaps like a prospector of years past, his whole demeanor that of tarnished frontier gentility.

Hackberry re-sorted the fax sheets and found the third page in the transmission. He stared at one listing as though seeing it for the first time. How dumb does one lawman get, particularly one who considered himself a student of his own era? “Come in here, Pam,” he said.

She stood in the doorway. “What’s up?”

“Take a look at the names on this page.”

“What about them?”

“Which one of them sticks in your mind?”

“None.”

“Look again.”

“I’m a blank.”

He put his thumb on the edge of one name. She stood behind him, leaning down, one arm propped on his desk, her arm touching his shoulder.

“F. C. Dobbs. What’s remarkable about that?” she said.

“You remember the name Fred C. Dobbs?”

“No.”

“Did you see The Treasure of the Sierra Madre?”

“A long time ago.”

“Humphrey Bogart played the role of a totally worthless panhandler and all-around loser whose clothes are in tatters and his lips are so chapped they’re about to crack. When he thinks he’s about to be slickered, he grimaces at the camera and says, ‘Nobody is putting anything over on Fred C. Dobbs.’”

“Collins thinks he’s a character in a film?”

“No, Collins is a chameleon and a clown. He’s a self-educated guy who believes a library card makes him more intelligent than an MIT graduate. He likes to laugh at the rest of us.”

“Maybe F. C. Dobbs is a real person. Maybe it’s just coincidence.”

“There are no coincidences with a guy like Jack Collins. He’s the thing that’s wrong with all the rest of us. He just has more of it and nowhere to leave it.”

“There’s no physical address for Dobbs, just a post office box in Presidio County?” she said.

“So far.”

“Give Maydeen and me a few minutes,” she said.

But it was almost quitting time before Pam and Maydeen got off the phones. In the meantime, Hackberry had his hands full with Nick Dolan, who had called three times, each time more angry and irrational.

“Mr. Dolan, you have my word. As soon as I learn anything about your wife, I’ll call you first,” Hackberry said.

“That’s what the FBI says. I look like a douche bag? I sound like a douche bag? I am a douche bag? I’m stupid here? Tell me which it is,” Nick said.

“We’ll find her.”

“They were following me around. They were bugging my phones. But they couldn’t protect my wife.”

“You need to take that up with the FBI, sir.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m sitting in my office, the place you just called up for the third time.”

“No, like where are you on the map?”

“You don’t need to be here, Mr. Dolan.”

“I’m supposed to play with my joint while this crazoid kidnaps my wife?”

“Stay home, sir.”

“I’m getting in my car now. I’m on my way.”

“No, you’re not. You’re-”

Dead connection.

Pam Tibbs tapped on the doorjamb. She had a legal pad folded back in her left hand. “This is what we’ve got. A man using the name F. C. Dobbs had a Texas driver’s license two years ago but doesn’t have one now. His rent on his post office box in Presidio has lapsed. Ten years ago a man named Fred Dobbs, no middle initial, bought five hundred acres of land down toward Big Bend at a tax sale. There were four big parcels strung all over the place. He sold them six months later.”

Hackberry fiddled with his ear. “Who owned the land before Dobbs?”

Pam looked back at her notes. “A woman named Edna Wilcox. I talked to the sheriff in Brewster. He said the Wilcox woman had been married to a railroad man who died of food poisoning. He said she died of a fall and didn’t leave any heirs.”

“What happened to Dobbs?”

“The clerk of court didn’t know, and neither did the sheriff.”

“So we’ve got a dead end?” Hackberry said.

“The state offices are closing now. We can start in again tomorrow. Was that Nick Dolan calling again?”

“Yeah, he said he’s on his way here.” Hackberry leaned back in his swivel chair. Rain was blowing against the window, and the hills surrounding the town were disappearing inside the grayness of the afternoon. “Who did Fred Dobbs, no middle initial, sell the land to?”

Pam turned the page on her legal pad and studied her notes. “I don’t know if I wrote it down. Wait a minute, here it is. The buyer was Bee Travis.”

Hackberry knitted his fingers behind his head. “T-R-A-V-I-S, you’re sure that’s the right spelling?”

“I think so. There was static on the line.”

Hackberry clicked his nails on the desk blotter and looked at his watch. “Call the clerk of court again before the courthouse closes.”

“Has anyone ever talked to you about OCD problems?” She looked at his expression. “Okay, sorry, I’m on it.”

Two minutes later, she came back into his office. “The first name is actually the initial B, not ‘Bee’ with a double e. The last name is Traven, not Travis. I wrote it down wrong.” She glanced away, then looked back at him and held her gaze on his face, her chest rising and falling.

But he wasn’t thinking about her chagrin. “Collins sold the land to himself. He laundered his name and laundered the deed.”

“I’m not following you at all.”

“B. Traven was a mysterious eccentric who wrote the novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

“Sell that one to Ethan Riser.”

“I’m not even going to try. Sign out a cruiser and pack your overnight bag.”

She went to the door and closed it, then returned to his desk. She leaned on the flats of both her hands, her breasts hanging down heavily inside her shirt. “Think about what you’re doing. If anybody could figure out Collins’s aliases, it would be someone with your educational background. You don’t think he knows that? If he’s there now, it’s because he wants you to find him.”