“What’s the rest of it?”

“Did you have the flag folded up in your drawer?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“I think he took it. The drawer was open when he left, and the flag wasn’t in it.”

“What does he want with our flag?”

“Ask him.”

“Where is he now?”

“I’m not real sure. He went to your house.”

“Don’t tell me that.”

“What can Dolan do at your house?”

“I gave Vikki Gaddis and Pete Flores an approximate idea where we were going. I thought Collins might have said something to Gaddis that would link him to the properties he’s bought and sold under an alias.”

“That was the right thing to do, Hack. Don’t worry about it.”

“Early in the morning, get on the horn to Riser.”

“What do you want me to tell him?”

“Give him all the information we have on Collins. Tell him to send the cavalry or stay home. It’s his call.”

“Hack?”

“What?”

“Pam thinks Collins is trying to steal your soul.”

“So?”

“Pam’s feelings are not objective.”

“What are you telling me?”

“Don’t take chances with Collins.”

“The man has a hostage.”

“In one way or another, they all do. It’s what they use most effectively against us. You blow that bastard out of his socks.”

“Maydeen, you’re a good woman, but you’ve got a serious character defect. I can never be quite sure where you stand on an issue.”

After he closed his cell phone, he continued to sit on the side of the bed in the dark, the long day starting to catch up with him. Someone had left the engine running on a diesel-powered vehicle immediately outside Hackberry’s window. The sound vibrated through the wall and floor, staining the air with noxious fumes and a ceaseless hammering that was like a deliberate assault on the sensibilities. It was the signature act of the modern correspondent of the classical Vandal-senseless and stupid and at war with civilization, like someone graffiti-spraying a freshly painted white wall or smearing his feces on someone’s furniture.

Nazis were not ideologues. They were bullies and sackers of civilization. Their logos and ethos were that simple. Hackberry felt that he had lived into a time when gangbangers who sold crack to their own people and did drive-bys with automatic weapons were treated as cultural icons. Concurrently, outlaw white bikers muled crystal meth into every city in the United States. When they went down, it was only because they were murdered by their own kind. They were like creatures that had been incarnated from a Mad Max script. And like any form of cognitive dissonance in a society, they existed because they were given sanction and even lionized.

Who was to blame? Maybe no one. Or maybe everyone.

He opened the door and stepped out on the concourse. A bright red oversize pickup truck with an extended cab was parked two feet from him. The sound of the diesel engine was so loud he had to open and close his mouth to clear his ears. He could hear a party roaring two doors down. He walked out onto the lawn by the parking lot and picked up a brick from the border of the flower garden. The brick felt cool and heavy in his hand and smelled faintly of moist soil and chemical fertilizer.

He returned to the pickup truck and broke the driver’s window with the brick, setting off the alarm. Then he reached inside and unlocked the door and ripped the wiring from under the dashboard. He tossed the brick into a shrub.

A minute later, the driver, an unshaved man in greasy denims, was at his truck, aghast. “What the fuck?” he said.

“Yeah, too bad,” Hackberry said. “I’d file a report if I was you.”

“You saw it?”

“A guy with a brick,” Hackberry said.

Pam Tibbs had opened the door to her room and was drinking a beer in the doorway. She was dressed in jeans and a maroon Texas Aggie T-shirt. “I saw him running across the lawn,” she said.

“Look at my fucking truck.”

“The world is really sliding down the bowl,” Pam said.

A few minutes later, she tapped on the bolted door that connected her room to Hackberry’s. “Are you having a nervous collapse?” she said.

“Not me,” he said.

“Can I come in?”

“Help yourself.”

“Why are you sitting in the dark?”

“Why waste electrical power?”

“You thinking about Jack Collins?”

“No, I’m thinking about everything.” He was sitting at the small wood table against the wall. There was a telephone on it and nothing else. The chair on which he sat was as utilitarian as wood was capable of being. She walked into a blade of light from the window so he could see her face. “You think we’re firing in the well?” she said.

“No. Collins is out there. I know it.”

“Out where?”

“Someplace we don’t suspect. It won’t be part of a pattern. It won’t be in a place we look for the bad guys. He won’t be surrounded by whores or dope or stolen goods or even weapons. He’ll be in a place that’s as ordinary as rocks and dirt.”

“What are you saying, Hack?”

He shrugged and smiled. “Where’s your beer?”

“I drank it.”

“Open another one. It doesn’t bother me.”

“I only bought one.”

He stood up, towering over her. Her shadow seemed to dissolve against his body. She lowered her head and folded her arms across her breasts. He could hear her breathing in the dark.

“I’m really old,” he said.

“You’ve said that.”

“My history is suspect, my judgment poor.”

“Not to me.”

He cupped his hands on her shoulders. She hooked her thumbs in her back pockets. He could see the gray part in the shine on her hair. He bent over her, his arms circling her back, his hands touching her ribs and sliding up between her shoulder blades into the stiffness of her hair on the nape of her neck. Then he drifted his fingers across her cheek and the corner of her eye, brushing a lock of hair back from her forehead.

He felt her step on top of his feet, and before he knew it, she had raised her mouth inches from his, the yeasty smell of beer touching his lips.

WHEN PREACHER UNZIPPED the flap on Bobby Lee’s polyethylene tent, the storm had passed and the heavens were ink-black again, bursting with stars that stretched from horizon to horizon, the mesas in the east pink and barely visible against the few distant thunderheads that still flickered with lightning.

Bobby Lee pushed his head out of his sleeping bag, his hair matted, his eyes bleary with sleep. “Is the plane here?”

“Not yet. But I made coffee. Get up. I want to take care of some business,” Preacher said.

“It’s cold.”

“Put your coat and hat on. Take my gloves.”

“I’ve never seen it this cold this time of year.”

“I’ll get your coffee. Where are your boots?”

“What’s going on, Jack?”

Preacher lowered his voice. “I want to give you your money now. Don’t wake up Molo and Angel. Nor the woman.”

“You’re really taking her with us?”

“What did you think I was going to do?”

“Shoot your wad and get it out of your system?”

Preacher was squatting, balancing on his haunches. He looked at the fire curling and then flattening under the tin coffeepot he had set on the refrigerator grille propped across a ring of blackened rocks. His eyes were as empty as glass in the firelight, his shoulders poking through his suit coat. “Coarseness toward women doesn’t behoove a man, son.”

“You slept in the tent with her?” Bobby Lee said, pulling on his boots.

“No, I wouldn’t do that, not unless I was invited.”

“She invited us to kidnap her? You’re one for the books, Jack.” Bobby Lee climbed out of the tent, pulling on a black sheep-lined leather coat that was spiderwebbed with cracks. “Where’s the spendolies-”

Preacher placed a finger to his lips and began walking up the compacted footpath to the cave opening in the side of the mountain, his body bent slightly forward into the incline, his right hand hooked through the bail of a battery-powered lantern. He glanced back at the large tent where the two Mexican killers slept, then smiled enigmatically at Bobby Lee. “The freshness of the predawn hour has no equivalent,” he said. When he stepped inside the cave, the darkness enveloped him like a cloak.