the back of his neck lifting in the wind. Their irritability was obviously growing, but the seated man seemed to pay no attention to it. He grinned, his teeth as tiny as pearls. “Got you, didn’t I? They say that Chinese woman down yonder works miracles. Y’all believe that?”
“Buddy, you just don’t listen, do you?”
“You reckon she can mix her spit with dirt and touch the eyelids of a blind man and give him back his sight? Because that’s the kind of he’p both of y’all need. Like all benighted men, you’re arrogant. You walk upon the precipice and never glance at your feet.”
“In about ten seconds, I’ll be forced to hurt you.”
“You wouldn’t be the first.”
One of the men removed his shades and slipped them in a leather case, then began picking up rocks from the ground.
“If you’d read the Bible you burned, you would have learned how Joshua took Canaan for the Hebrews,” the seated man said. “He always attacked at daybreak, with the sun rising on his back. His enemies had to look into the glare while he was killing them.”
The man who had taken off his shades flung a rock at the seated man and struck the side of his face. The rock was sharp-edged and triangle-shaped and left a one-inch cut as thin as thread just below the seated man’s eye, one that seeped blood like tears on ceramic.
“You get the message?” the rock thrower said. “Do I have to do it again?”
“Well, it’s been nice talking to you,” the seated man said. He stood up, silhouetted against the sun, the brim of his panama hat riffling in the wind. He lifted his guitar case from the ground and set it on the hard, barkless worm-scrolled apex of the tree trunk and began unsnapping the latches. When he turned around again, the two men he had mistakenly identified as federal agents stared at him openmouthed, their hands wooden at their sides, their expressions frozen like those of statues.
“It’s a beaut, isn’t it? I paid eighteen thousand for it. Same model you see John Dillinger carrying in that famous photograph.”
“We can talk this out, pal,” the rock thrower said.
“My biggest problem with you boys is your lack of respect. But maybe the devil can teach y’all manners.”
Against the brilliance of the sun, the spray of rounds from the Thompson seemed like an eruption of lightning bolts from a black cutout. The few rounds that missed their target whanged off the rocks and ricocheted into the distance with a sound like the tremolo in a flopping saw blade. Then the man in the panama hat pulled the ammunition drum from the Thompson’s frame and laid the Thompson and the fifty-round drum inside the guitar case and shut and latched the top. Before leaving, he took the remaining ham sandwich from the lunch box on the rock and unwrapped it from the wax paper and let the paper blow across the landscape. He ate the sandwich with one hand while he walked back to his vehicle, the guitar case knocking against his leg, the soles of his boots clopping on a series of flat stones like the feet of a hoofed animal.
When Hackberry and Pam arrived at the Asian woman’s house, the air was dense and sparkling with humidity, coating every surface in sight, clinging to the skin like damp cotton, as though the sunrise were a source not of light but of ignition. The morning itself seemed divided between darkness and shadow, the clouds overhead roiling and black and crackling with electricity against an otherwise blue and tranquil sky. In the north Hackberry could see a great brown plume of dust lifting out of the hills, and he thought he could smell an odor like baitfish that had been trapped in seaweed and left stranded along the edge of a receding ocean, although he was hundreds of miles from salt water. His eyes burned with his own sweat as he watched the Asian woman approach from the backyard, wearing a white dress and a necklace of black stones.
“Here comes Teahouse of the August Moon, ” Pam said.
“Don’t start,” Hackberry said.
“I can’t help it. This woman is a fraud.”
“Time to be quiet, Pam,” he said.
She turned and stared at the side of his face, her nostrils dilating. He stepped forward into the breeze, removing her from the periphery of his vision. He tipped the brim of his hat. “How you doin’, Miss Anton?” he said. “Sorry to bother you, but we’ve got a problem with a guy by the name of Jack Collins.”
“I don’t recall the name,” she replied.
“Collins is a mass killer. Some federal people burned a shack he was using. I think Jack aims to do some serious payback. Your place is probably under surveillance by the feds. I suspect Jack knows that. My bet is he’ll be coming around.”
“Why should this man know I’m under surveillance?”
“Krill knew to come here. Krill is a lamebrain compared to Collins. The Mexicans say he can walk through walls. Collins has killed people for years but has never been arrested or spent one day in jail. He murdered nine Thai girls down by Chapala Crossing. I dug them up.”
“He’s the one who did that?” Anton Ling said, her face frozen as though painted on the air, her eyes elongated and lidless.
“He tried to kill my chief deputy in her cruiser. He executed one of his own men in a cave we had cornered him in. He blew three outlaw bikers all over a motel room. He pushed a corrupt PI off a cliff up in the Glass Mountains. A little earlier in the day, he wiped out a whole collection of gangsters in a hunting lodge. He dressed as a cleaning woman in a San Antonio motel and murdered an ICE agent. Nobody knows his body count across the border.”
Anton Ling seemed to listen less with shock or horror than with the fixed attention of someone revisiting a tape seen before. “You think he’s a threat to the people who come to my house?”
“Probably not. They don’t have anything he wants,” Hackberry said.
“But he could be a threat to me?”
“Possibly.”
“Well, I appreciate your telling me this. But I can’t control what this man does or doesn’t do.”
“It’s not all about you, Ms. Ling. Believe it or not, we’d like to get this guy in custody,” Pam said. “Collins wears suits and fedoras he buys from the Goodwill. His face looks like it was stung by bumblebees. See anybody like that around?”
“No, I haven’t. Otherwise I would have told you.”
“Sure? So far you haven’t been very forthcoming,” Pam said.
“Madam, what did I just say?”
“You can call me Chief Deputy Tibbs, thank you.”
“I’d like to invite you in,” Anton Ling said to Hackberry. “But I have to go to San Antonio. Some of our people are in jail.”
“Your people?” Pam said.
“Yes, that’s what I call them. They’re destitute, cheated out of their money by coyotes, hunted by nativist snipers, and generally treated as though they’re subhuman. The particular woman I’m going to try to bail out watched her two-year-old daughter die of a rattlesnake bite in the desert.”
“I think Pam was just asking a question, Miss Anton,” Hackberry said.
“No, she was making a statement. She’s done it several times now.”
“Why is it we have to keep coming out here to protect you from yourself? To be honest, it’s getting to be a drag,” Pam said.
“Then your problem can be easily solved. Just leave and don’t bother to come back.”
“I think that’s a good idea,” Pam said.
Hackberry was not listening. The thunderheads had blotted out the sun, dropping the countryside into shadow. He had turned his head toward the southeast, where the wind was whipping dust off the hilltops and riffling the mesquite that grew down the slopes. His eyes fixed on a spot where rain had started to tumble out of the sky and a muted sound like crackling foil seemed to leak from the clouds. Hackberry opened and closed his mouth to clear his ears and listen to the sound that had started and now had stopped.
“What is it?” Pam said.
“Somebody was firing a machine gun,” he replied.
“I didn’t hear it,” she said.
