Danny Boy pulled the sleeve of his denim jacket up on one arm, then forgot what he was doing and stared emptily at his visitor. There were lumps on the visitor’s face, as though insects had fed on it.
“Is that why you’re a drunk, or were you a drunk before you hid in the ravine?”
“I don’t make no claims about myself. I am what I am.”
“So what are you?”
“What you’re looking at, I reckon.”
“A drunk Indian?”
Danny Boy felt a pain in one temple; it ran down through his eye like an electric current, obscuring his vision, as though a cataract had suddenly formed on the lens. “This is my place. Everything you see here, it’s mine. It’s where I grew up.”
“What’s that mean?”
Danny Boy couldn’t formulate an adequate answer to the question, but he tried. “My daddy drilled a deep- water well with an old Ford engine and grew corn and squash and melons. We sold them at the farmers’ market every Saturday. We’d go to the picture show in the afternoon and sneak in our own popcorn and Kool-Aid in a quart jar. My mother was alive back then. We all went into town together in our truck, with us kids sitting on the flatbed.”
“If there’s some kind of allegorical meaning, it eludes me.”
“You ain’t welcome here.”
“I want the man named Krill. Most of the illegals in this county come through your land or the Asian woman’s. So get used to me being around. Krill hurt a friend of mine. His name is Noie Barnum.”
“The guy named Krill ain’t your problem.”
“Explain that to me.”
Danny Boy reached for his bottle of Corona, but the visitor pulled it from his hand. “You shouldn’t drink any more,” the visitor said.
“Look out yonder.”
“At what?”
“Them.”
The visitor turned and gazed down the slope at the scrub brush and yuccas and mesquite trees rustling in the breeze. Then he stared at the mauve tint in the darkness of the sky and at the silhouettes of the mesas and hills and at the stars disappearing into the false dawn. “You see turtles out there?” the visitor said.
“No, I see the women and girls who been following you.”
“What’d you say?”
“All them Asian women and girls you killed. They’re standing just yonder. The Ghost Trail runs right through here. My people keep them safe now. After I hid from the man named Krill, I couldn’t see the Ghost Trail no more. But now I can.”
“I’d think twice before I ran my mouth to the wrong fellow.”
“They’re pointing at you. There’s nine of them. They want to know why you stole their lives. You didn’t have nothing to gain. They were begging when you did it. They had their fingers knitted together like they were in church. They were crying.”
The visitor reached out and tapped Danny Boy on the cheek with the flat of his hand. “I can hurt you, fellow.”
“Put a bullet in me. I was on Sugar Land Farm. You cain’t do no worse than has already been done to me.”
“You know the line ‘Don’t tempt the Lord thy God’?”
“But you ain’t Him.”
The visitor rose to his feet. The flap of his coat was hooked back on the butt of his revolver. He was breathing hard through his nose, his gaze wandering from one object to the next, as though his thoughts were of no avail to him. He stared at Danny Boy. “Sheriff Holland spat on me once. Did you know that?”
“No, sir.”
“You know what it feels like when another man spits on you? I’m not talking about a woman, because they do that sort of thing when a man offends their vanity. I’m talking about a man doing it. You know what that feels like?”
“No, sir.”
“Sheriff Holland did that to me. I could have shot him then, but I didn’t. Know why?”
“No, sir.”
“Because I’m a merciful man. Because when I deliver Sheriff Holland up to judgment, it won’t be the result of an emotional reaction. It will be under circumstances of my choosing.”
Danny Boy nodded, his gaze turned inward.
“Tell the sheriff I was here,” the visitor said. “Tell him I keep my word. Tell him he’ll know when it’s my ring. Can you keep all that in your head?”
“Yes, sir, I can,” Danny Boy said.
“That’s good. You’re a good listener.” Then the visitor poured the jelly glass half full of rum and picked it up from the table and threw it into Danny Boy’s face.
That same morning, Hackberry went to the office early, his mind clear after a good night’s sleep, the wind cool out of the north, the broken sidewalks dark with night damp, the hills outside town a soft green against an ink-wash sky. He could smell food cooking at the Eat Cafe down the street. Pam Tibbs met him at the back entrance of the department. “Danny Boy Lorca just came in half drunk and asked me to lock him up,” she said.
“You mean he wants to sleep it off?”
“No, he wants to be locked up. He says he had a visitor this morning.”
Hackberry walked through the hallway and hung his hat on a wood peg in his office. “I hate to ask,” he said.
“The guy didn’t give his name. Danny Boy said he was carrying a pistol. He was wearing a suit and a hat and beat-up needle-nose boots. He said he’d be looking you up and you’d know when it was his ring.”
“Why is Collins pestering Danny Boy?”
“That’s not all that happened this morning. I was down at the cafe, and two SUVs loaded with some cowboy cutie-pies came in. Stonewashed jeans, mustaches, two or three days of beard, stylized haircuts. They looked like porn actors.”
“Like the two guys Collins popped?”
“The guy in charge knew the waitress. He had on a blue suit and a silver western shirt without a tie, like he was one of the boys. After they left, I asked her who he was. She said that was Temple Dowling.”
“Forget about Dowling.”
She closed the office door and approached his desk. “It didn’t quite end there. I heard him talking in the booth. I heard him use your name.”
“We need to get to the point, Pam.”
“He called you a drunk.”
“That’s what I used to be.”
“That’s not all of it. I heard him whispering, then all of them laughed.”
“Blow it off. These guys aren’t worth talking about.”
“Then one guy said, ‘He brought clap home to his wife?’ Dowling said something I couldn’t hear, and they all laughed again, loud enough that everybody in the cafe turned around and looked at them.”
“What that man said isn’t true. But I don’t care whether he says it or not. If he does it in my presence, I’ll do something about it. In the meantime, let’s forget it and talk to Danny Boy.” Hackberry took the ring of cell keys off a peg next to his hat.
“I followed them into the parking lot,” Pam said.
“Did you hit somebody?”
“No.”
“All right, then let it go.”
“I took the motormouth aside, the one who said something about clap. He was the driver of one of the SUVs. I told him I wasn’t going to cite him for his broken taillights, but if I ever heard him slander your name again, I was
