“Maybe he’ll get his wish.”

28

THAT’S HAIL,” PREACHER said to the woman sitting on the cot across from him. “Hear it? It’s early this year. But at this altitude, you cain’t ever tell. Here, I’ll open the flap. Look outside. See, it looks like mothballs bouncing all over the desert floor. Look at it come down.”

The woman’s face was gray, her eyes dark and angry, her black hair pulled straight back. In the gloom of the tent, she looked more Andalusian than Semitic. She wore a beige sundress and Roman sandals, and her face and shoulders and underarms were still damp from the wet cloth she had washed herself with.

“A plane will be here tomorrow. The wind is too strong for it to land today,” he said. “The pilot has to drop in over those bluffs. It’s hard to do when the wind is out of the north.”

“You’ll have to drug me,” she said.

“I just ask you to give me one year. Is that a big price, considering I protected your family and spared your husband’s life when Arthur Rooney wanted him dead? You know where Arthur Rooney is today, maybe at this very moment?”

He waited for her to reply, but the only sound in the tent was the clicking of hailstones outside.

“Mr. Rooney is under the waves,” he said. “Not quite to the continental shelf, but almost that far.”

“I wouldn’t give you the parings from my nails. I’ll open my veins before I let you touch me. If you fall asleep, I’ll cut your throat.”

“See, when you speak like that, I know you’re the one.”

“One what?”

“Like your namesake in the Book of Esther. She was born a queen, but it took Xerxes to make her one.”

“You’re not only a criminal, you’re an idiot. You wouldn’t know the Book of Esther from a telephone directory.”

Bobby Lee Motree bent inside the open tent flap, wearing a denim jacket, his top hat tied down with a scarf. He held a tin plate in each hand. Both plates contained a single sandwich, a dollop of canned spinach, and another one of fruit cocktail.

“Molo picked up some stuff at the convenience store,” Bobby Lee said. “I seasoned the spinach with some bacon bits and Tabasco. Hope y’all like it.”

“What the hell is that?” Preacher said, looking down at his plate.

“What it looks like, Jack. Fruit cocktail, spinach, and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches,” Bobby Lee said.

Preacher threw his plate outside the tent into the dirt. “Go to town and buy some decent food. You clean that shit out of the icebox and bury it.”

“You eat sandwiches every day. You eat in cafés where the kitchen is more unsanitary than the washroom. Why are you always on my case, man?”

“Because I don’t like peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Is that hard to understand?”

“Hey, Molo, Preacher says your food sucks!” Bobby Lee shouted.

“You think this is a joke?” Preacher said.

“No, Jack, I’m just indicating maybe you don’t know who your friends are. What do I have to do to prove myself?”

“For starters, don’t serve me shit to eat.”

“Then get your own damn food. I’m tired of being somebody’s nigger.”

“I’ve told you about using language like that in my presence.”

Bobby Lee flipped the tent flap shut and walked away without securing it to the tent pole, his hobnailed boots crunching on the hailstones. Preacher heard him talking to the Mexican killers, most of his words lost in the wind. But part of one sentence came through loud and clear: “His Highness the child in there…”

At first Esther Dolan had set down her plate on the table, evidently intending not to eat. But as she had listened to the exchange between Bobby Lee and the man they called Preacher, her dark eyes had grown steadily more thoughtful, veiled, turned inward. She picked up the plate and set it in her lap, then used the plastic knife to cut her sandwich into quarters. She bit off a corner of one square and chewed it slowly, gazing into space, as though disconnected from any of the events taking place around her.

Preacher tied the flap to the tent pole and sat down heavily on his cot. He drank the coffee from his cup, his fedora snugged low on his brow, the crown etched with a thin chain of dried salt.

“You should eat something,” she said.

“My main meal is always at evening. And it’s a half meal at that. Know why that is?”

“You’re on a diet?”

“A horse always has a half tank in him. He has enough fuel in his stomach to deal with or elude his enemies, but not too much to slow him down.”

She feigned attention to his words but was clearly not listening. Bobby Lee had put a paper napkin under her plate. She slipped it out and set one of the sandwich squares on it. “Take this. It’s high in both protein and sugar.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Your mother gave you too many peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches when you were little? Maybe that’s why you’re always out of sorts.”

“My mother fixed whatever a gandy dancer brought to the boxcar where we lived. That was where she made her living, too. Behind a blanket hung over a rope.”

“What happened to her?”

“She took a fall off some rocks.”

When Esther didn’t reply, he said, “That was after she poisoned her husband. Or deliberately fed him spoiled food. It took him a while to die.”

“You’re making that up.” Before he could answer, she wrapped the piece of sandwich in the napkin and set it on his knee.

“I’ve always heard Jewish women are compulsive feeders. Thanks but no thanks,” he said, setting the sandwich square on the table.

She continued to eat, her shoulders slightly stooped, a demure quality settling over her that seemed to intrigue and arouse him.

“A woman like you is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of person,” he said.

“You’re very kind,” she said, her eyes lowered.

BY DARK HACKBERRY Holland and Pam Tibbs had had no luck finding the residence that might have been occupied by the man using the name B. Traven. On the back roads, in the blowing rain and tumbleweeds and darkness, they could find few mile markers or rural mailboxes with numbers or houses that were lighted. A crew on a utility truck told them there had been a giant power failure from Fort Stockton down to the border. No one, including the sheriff’s department, had any knowledge of a man by the name of B. Traven. One deputy who had worked previously at the tax assessor’s office volunteered that Traven was an absentee landowner who resided in New Mexico and rented his property to hippies or people who came and went with the season or tended to live off the computer.

At nine-thirty P.M. Hackberry and Pam took adjoining rooms at a motel south of Alpine. The motel had a generator that created enough power to keep the motel functional during the storm, the outside lights glowing with the low intensity and yellow dullness of sodium lamps. A number of revelers had taken refuge there, talking loudly in the parking lot and on the concourse, slamming metal doors so hard the walls shook, carrying twelve-packs and fast food to their rooms. As Hackberry looked out the window at the darkness of the night, at the lightning flashes in the clouds, at the leak of electric sparks from a damaged transformer that was trying to come back on line, he thought of candles flickering in a graveyard.

He closed the curtain and sat on the bed in the dark and called the department. Maydeen Stoltz picked up.

“You’re not on duty tonight,” he said.

“You and Pam are. Why shouldn’t I be?”

“So far we haven’t gotten any leads on B. Traven or the guy calling himself Fred C. Dobbs. Did you hear anything from Ethan Riser?”

“Nothing. But Nick Dolan was here. Boy, was he here.”

“What happened?”

“I put some earplugs in. I mean that literally. That guy has a voice like a herd of pygmies. He went into your office without permission and said he’d wait there until you got back. That’s not all.”