would not cross, any deeds they would not perform, including a drive-by for La Familia Michoacana on a teenage birthday party in Juarez, Jack had not seen it. Their greatest problem, in his view, was the impaired thought processes that seemed to live behind the indolence in their faces. The inside of Jaime’s head could only be described as a tangled web of cruelty that was linked somehow to his stupidity and sullen nature. The more intelligent of the two, Eladio, thought that his transparent childlike deceit and attempts at manipulation were signs of sophistication. During a rare loss of restraint with the two cousins, Jack had asked Eladio if his mother had been impregnated by a bowling pin. Eladio had responded, “You are a man of knowledge, Senor Jack. But you must not misjudge simple men. We think and feel deeply about our mothers. They are the center of our lives.”
“Then why do you say chinga tu madre to each other at every opportunity?” Jack had said.
“I am not equipped to discuss abstractions with a man of your intelligence,” Eladio had said. “But my mother is eighty and still tells stories of her mother, who was a concubine of Pancho Villa and one of those who helped hide his severed head in the Van Horn Mountains. That is the level of respect we have for the women in our family.”
Jack had made a mental note about the level of stability in his employees.
At this particular moment, he was irritated with the weather, the clouds of black flies buzzing over a calf’s carcass in a nearby streambed, and the fact that the two cousins seemed incapable of doing anything right except killing people. The man who owned the airstrip and the hangar and the improvised cafe outside it had installed a jukebox just inside the hangar door, one loaded with gangsta-rap recordings that blasted through the speakers so loudly that the side of the tin hangar shook. Jack had told Eladio and Jaime to talk with the jukebox’s owner, but either the owner had ignored the warning or they had not bothered. So while he was trying to make notes in preparation for his conversation with the sheriff, his eardrums were being assailed by a level of electronic percussion that was like having a studded snow tire driven over his head.
Jack capped his pen, stuck it between the pages of his notebook, and went inside the hangar, where the owner was cleaning the concrete pad with a push broom. “Can I help you, senor?” he said.
Jack pointed to his ear, indicating he couldn’t hear.
“You got a problem with your ear?” the owner shouted.
Jack pulled the plug on the jukebox, cut the electric cord in two with his pocketknife, and set the plug on top of the casing. “No, I’m fine now. Thanks,” he said.
Then he sat down at his table under the canvas flap and drank a glass of seltzer and chewed on a lime slice, staring into space, each eye like a glass orb with a dead insect frozen inside it. He dialed his cell phone with his thumb and lifted the phone to his ear and waited, his body heat increasing inside his clothes, his pulse quickening. Why would his metabolism react to calling the sheriff? It could be anything, he told himself. Why dwell on it? Maybe it was because he had finally found a worthy opponent.
Or maybe it was something else.
What?
Don’t think about it, he told himself.
Why not? I’m supposed to be afraid of my own thoughts? he asked himself.
Maybe Holland is the father you never had. Maybe you want him to like you.
Like hell I do.
You could have taken him off the board a couple of times. Why didn’t you do it, Jackie Boy?
The situation was one-sided. There’s no honor in that. Don’t call me that name.
There was honor in the shooting of the nine Thai women?
I don’t want to talk about that. It’s over. I did my penance in the desert.
He thought he heard the hysterical laughter of a woman, someone who always hung just on the edge of his vision, ridiculing him, waiting for him to slip up, her smile as cruel as an open cut in living tissue.
When the female deputy answered, Jack said, “Put the sheriff on the line, woman.”
Whatever she said in response never registered. Instead, he heard the voice of the woman who lived in his dreams and his unconscious and his idle daytime moments and his futile attempts at joy. He heard her incessant, piercing laughter, louder and louder, and he knew that eventually, he would once again resort to the release that never failed him, an eruption of gunfire that reverberated through his hands and arms like a jackhammer and made his teeth rattle and cleansed his thoughts and deadened his ears to all sound, both outside and inside his head.
“What do you need, Mr. Collins?” the sheriff’s voice said.
“I know where the Asian woman is. I can take you there,” he replied.
“Where might that be?”
“Down in Mexico, way to heck and gone by car, not so far by air.”
“She’s with Sholokoff?”
“She and Temple Dowling and the ’breed known as Krill. How’s Noie doing?”
“I don’t know. I kicked him loose.”
“You did what?”
“Last time I saw him, he was walking toward the city-limits sign, whistling a song.”
“The feds aren’t going to be happy with you.”
“I’ll try to live with it. Where can we meet, Mr. Collins?”
“You ever lie?”
“No.”
“Not ever?”
“You heard me the first time,” Hackberry said.
“I’m trusting you. I don’t do that with most people.”
“Do whatever you want, sir. But don’t expect me to feel flattered.”
“I’ll give you some coordinates and see you no later than four hours from now. I suppose you’ll bring the female deputy with you?”
“Count on it. Why are you doing this, Mr. Collins?”
“Sholokoff shouldn’t have taken the Asian woman. She’s not a player.”
“There’s another reason.”
“Sholokoff tried to have me capped. I owe him one.”
“There’s another reason.”
“When you find out what it is, tell me so we’ll both know. Don’t bring anybody besides the female deputy and your pilot. A couple of my men will pick you up. If you violate any aspect of our arrangement, the deal is off and you won’t hear from me again. The Asian woman’s fate will be on your conscience.”
“If you try to harm me or my deputy, I’m going to cool you out on the spot. I’m like you, Jack-over-the-hill and out of place and time, with not a lot to lose.”
“Then keep your damn word, and we’ll get along just fine.”
Jack clicked off his cell phone. Unbelievably, the jukebox sprang to life and began blaring rap music out the door. He remembered that the cord he’d cut had both a female and a male plug and was detachable from the box. The owner of the hangar had probably replaced it and decided to prove he could be as assertive and unpleasant as an imperious gringo from Texas who thought he could come to Mexico and wipe his ass on the place.
Jack went to the plane and removed his guitar case and set it on top of the table. The wind was blowing harder, the heat and dust swirling under the canopy as Jack unfastened the top of the case and inserted plugs in his ears and removed his Thompson and snapped a thirty-round box magazine into the bottom of the receiver and went inside the hangar. The owner took one look at him and dropped his push broom and began running for the back door. Jack raised the Thompson’s barrel and squeezed the trigger, ripping apart the jukebox, scattering plastic shards and electronic components all over the concrete pad, stitching the tin wall with holes the size of nickels.
“Senor, what the fuck you doin’?” Eladio said behind him.
Jack still had the plugs stoppered in his ears and could not hear him. The only sound he heard was his mother’s laughter-maniacal, forever taunting, a paean of ridicule aimed at a driven man who would never escape the black box in which a little boy had been locked.
Krill did not know a great deal about the complexities of politics. A man owned land or he did not own land. Either he was allowed to keep the product of his labor or he was not allowed to keep it. The abstractions of ideology seemed the stuff that fools and radicals and drunkards argued about in late-hour bars because they had
