to squeeze all light and sensation and awareness from his mind, to become a black dot that could drift away on the wind and re-form later as a shadow that would eventually become flesh and blood again. Maybe one day he would forget the fear that caused him to stop being who he was; maybe he would meet the man he chose not to help and be forgiven by him and hence become capable of forgiving himself. When all those things happened, he might even forget what his fellow human beings were capable of doing.
When the screams of the tormented man finally softened and died and were swallowed by the wind, Danny Boy raised his head above a rock and gazed down the incline where the tangle of tumbleweed and deadwood partially obscured the handiwork of the armed men. The wind was laced with grit and rain that looked like splinters of glass. When lightning rippled across the sky, Danny Boy saw the armed men in detail.
Five of them could have been pulled at random from any jail across the border. But it was the leader who made a cold vapor wrap itself around Danny Boy’s heart. He was taller than the others and stood out for many reasons; in fact, the incongruities in his appearance only added to the darkness of his persona. His body was not stitched with scars or chained with Gothic-letter and swastika and death’s-head tats. Nor was his head shaved into a bullet or his mouth surrounded by a circle of carefully trimmed beard. Nor did he wear lizard-skin boots that were plated on the heels and tips. His running shoes looked fresh out of the box; his navy blue sweatpants had a red stripe down each leg, similar to a design a nineteenth-century Mexican cavalry officer might wear. His skin was clean, his chest flat, the nipples no bigger than dimes, his shoulders wide, his arms like pipe stems, his pubic hair showing just above the white cord that held up his pants. An inverted M16 was cross-strapped across his bare back; a canteen hung at his side from a web belt, and a hatchet and a long thin knife of the kind that was used to dress wild game. The man leaned over and speared something with the tip of the knife and lifted it in the air, examining it against the lights flashing in the clouds. He cinched the object with a lanyard and tied it to his belt, letting it drip down his leg.
Then Danny Boy saw the leader freeze, as though he had just smelled an invasive odor on the wind. He turned toward Danny Boy’s hiding place and stared up the incline. “?Quien esta en la oscuridad?” he said.
Danny Boy shrank down onto the ground, the rocks cutting into his knees and the heels of his hands.
“You see something up there?” one of the other men said.
But the leader did not speak, in either Spanish or English.
“It’s just the wind. There’s nothing out here. The wind plays tricks,” the first man said.
“?Ahora para donde vamos?” another man said.
The leader waited a long time to answer. “?Donde vive La Magdalena? ” he asked.
“Don’t fuck with that woman, Krill. Bad luck, man.”
But the leader, whose nickname was Krill, did not reply. A moment that could have been a thousand years passed; then Danny Boy heard the six men begin walking back down through the riverbed toward the distant mountains from which they had come, their tracks cracking the clay and braiding together in long serpentine lines. After they were out of sight, Danny Boy stood up and looked down at their bloody handiwork, scattered across the ground in pieces, glimmering in the rain.
Pam Tibbs was Hackberry’s chief deputy. Her mahogany-colored hair was sunburned white at the tips, and it hung on her cheeks in the indifferent way it might have on a teenage girl. She wore wide-ass jeans and half-topped boots and a polished gun belt and a khaki shirt with an American flag sewn on one sleeve. Her moods were mercurial, her words often confrontational. Her potential for violence seldom registered on her adversaries until things happened that should not have happened. When she was angry, she sucked in her cheeks, accentuating a mole by her mouth, turning her lips into a button. Men often thought she was trying to be cute. They were mistaken.
At noon she was drinking a cup of coffee at her office window when she saw Danny Boy Lorca stumbling down the street toward the department, bent at the torso as though waging war against invisible forces, a piece of newspaper matting against his chest before it flapped loose and scudded across the intersection. When Danny Boy tripped on the curb and fell hard on one knee, then fell again when he tried to pick himself up, Pam Tibbs set down her coffee cup and went outside, the wind blowing lines in her hair. She bent down, her breasts hanging heavy against her shirt, and lifted him to his feet and walked him inside.
“I messed myself. I got to get in the shower,” he said.
“You know where it is,” she said.
“They killed a man.”
She didn’t seem to hear what he had said. She glanced at the cast-iron spiral of steps that led upstairs to the jail. “Can you make it by yourself?”
“I ain’t drunk. I was this morning, but I ain’t now. The guy in charge, I remember his name.” Danny Boy closed his eyes and opened them again. “I think I do.”
“I’ll be upstairs in a minute and open the cell.”
“I hid all the time they was doing it.”
“Say again.”
“I hid behind a big rock. Maybe for fifteen minutes. He was screaming all the while.”
She nodded, her expression neutral. Danny Boy’s eyes were scorched with hangover, his mouth white at the corners with dried mucus, his breath dense and sedimentary, like a load of fruit that had been dumped down a stone well. He waited, although she didn’t know for what. Was it absolution? “Don’t slip on the steps,” she said.
She tapped on Hackberry’s door but opened it without waiting for him to answer. He was on the phone, his eyes drifting to hers. “Thanks for the alert, Ethan. We’ll get back to you if we hear anything,” he said into the receiver. He hung up and seemed to think about the conversation he’d just had, his gaze not actually taking her in. “What’s up?” he said.
“Danny Boy Lorca just came in drunk. He says he saw a man killed.”
“Where?”
“I didn’t get that far. He’s in the shower.”
Hackberry scratched at his cheek. Outside, the American flag was snapping on its pole against a gray sky, the fabric washed so thin that the light showed through the threads. “That was Ethan Riser at the FBI. They’re looking for a federal employee who might have been grabbed by some Mexican drug mules and taken to a prison across the border. An informant said the federal employee could have gotten loose and headed for home.”
“I’ve heard Danny Boy has been digging up dinosaur eggs south of his property.”
“I didn’t know there were any around here,” Hackberry said.
“If they’re out there, he’d be the guy to find them.”
“How’s that?” he said, although he wasn’t really listening.
“A guy who believes he can see the navel of the world from his back window? He says all power comes out of this hole in the ground. Down inside the hole is another world. That’s where the rain and the corn gods live. Compared to a belief system like that, hunting for dinosaur eggs seems like bland stuff.”
“That’s interesting.”
She waited, as though examining his words. “Try this: He says the killing took fifteen minutes to transpire. He says he heard it all. You think this might be the guy the feds are looking for?”
Hackberry bounced his knuckles lightly up and down on the desk blotter and stood up, straightening his back, trying to hide the pain that crept into his face, his outline massive against the window. “Bring your recorder and a pot of coffee, will you?” he said.
The report Danny Boy gave of the murder he had witnessed was not one that lent itself to credulity. “You were drinking before you went digging for dinosaur eggs?” Hackberry said.
“No, sir, I hadn’t had a drop in two days.”
“Two days?” Hackberry said.
“Yes, sir, every bit of it. I got eighty-sixed. I didn’t have no more money, anyway.”
“Well, you must have seen what you saw,” Hackberry said. “Want to take a ride?”
Danny Boy didn’t answer. He was sitting on the iron bunk of his cell, wearing lace-up boots without socks and clean jailhouse jeans and a denim shirt, his hair wet from his shower and his skin as dark as smoke. His hands were folded in his lap, his shoulders slumped.
“What’s the problem?” Hackberry said.
“I’m ashamed of what I done.”
