remain their own history books, each containing a story they could not pass on to others and from which no one would learn anything of value.
Hackberry could see himself in R.C., walking down the flume of an ancient riverbed, staring back into the Jeep’s headlights, his mouth cut with a grin, the soft white baked clay cracking under his weight. Youth was its own anodyne, Hackberry thought. For R.C., the world was still a fine place, his faith in his fellow man renewed by the arrival of his friends, his life unfolding before him as though it had been charted with the same divine hand that had placed our progenitors in an Edenic paradise. For just a second, Hackberry wanted to take all the experience out of his own life and give it to R.C. and pray that he would do better with it than Hackberry had.
He rolled down the passenger window. “Miss your turnoff to San Antone?” he said.
“I knew y’all would be along,” R.C. said, grinning broadly, getting in the back. “What kept you? I was starting to get a little antsy.”
“Bad traffic jam. What kept us? What the hell happened out here?” Hackberry said.
“This half-breed Negrito buried me after he almost took my head off with a shovel, that’s what happened. Then Jack Collins and two Mexicans dug me up.”
Pam put her foot on the brake. “Collins is down here?”
“He was.”
“Where?” she asked.
“Him and the two Mexicans walked over a rise and just went poof, gone, just like that.”
“Did they have a car?” Hackberry said.
“I didn’t hear one. But the wind was blowing out of the north. Maybe I just didn’t hear them start it up.”
“What did Collins say to you?” Hackberry said.
“He said I had a choice. I could play Russian roulette or he’d pop me. When I told him I wouldn’t do it, he gave me directions to the highway. I cain’t figure it out. Maybe everything people say about him ain’t altogether true.”
“Don’t fool yourself,” Hackberry said.
“So why’d he cut me loose?”
“He told you to tell me something, didn’t he?”
“He’s got you on his mind, that’s for sure, but he didn’t send no message. No, sir.”
Hackberry looked straight ahead at the countryside and at the stars that were going out of the sky.
“Did I miss something back there?” R.C. asked.
Collins wants me in his debt, Hackberry thought. But that was not what he said. “You did just fine, R.C. Who cares what goes on in the head of a madman?”
“I do. He’s a scary guy.”
“He is. He kills people.”
“No, in a different way. His breath. It smells like gas. His skin, too. It doesn’t smell like sweat. He doesn’t smell human.”
The Mexicans say he walks through walls, Hackberry thought.
“Sir?”
“There’s a town not far away. You hungry?”
“A twenty-ounce steak and five pounds of fries and a gallon of ice cream would probably get me through till breakfast,” R.C. replied.
“You got it, bub,” Hackberry said.
By dawn Hackberry was back home. He called Ethan Riser’s cell phone and left a message, then slept four hours and showered and called Riser again. This time Riser answered. “I need you here, partner,” Hackberry said.
“I got your message about Collins. We’ve contacted all the authorities in Coahuila.”
“That’s like telling me you just masturbated.”
“Why do you go out of your way to be offensive?”
“Anton Ling told me she was involved in an arms-for-dope operation. The dope went into American ghettos, the guns went to Nicaragua. She says Josef Sholokoff was a player in the deal.”
“I’ve heard all that stuff before.”
“Is it true?”
“Maybe on some level it is. But it’s yesterday’s box score. Sholokoff is our worry, Sheriff. You worry about Collins and this guy Krill. It’s clear they’re both operating in your jurisdiction. Sholokoff is a separate issue.”
Hackberry could feel his hand clenching and unclenching on the phone receiver. Through his window, he could see his horses running in the pasture and yellow dust rising off the hills, plum-colored rain clouds bunching across the sun. He has cancer. He’s at the end of his row. Don’t insult him, he heard a voice say.
“I’m against the wall,” he said. “My deputy was drugged and buried alive. Federal agencies and their minions, people like Temple Dowling, are wiping their ass on my county, and I can’t do anything about it. I’m throwing away the rule book on this one, Ethan.”
“That’s always the temptation. But when it’s over, the result is always the same. You end up with shit on your nose.”
“You coming down here or not?”
There was a long silence. “I’m tied up. I can’t do it. Listen to me, Hack. Stay out of events that happened years ago. Stay away from this Anton Ling woman, too. She’s an idealist who’s full of guilt, and like all idealists, she’d incinerate one half of the earth to save the other half. She had a chance to return Noie Barnum to his own people-that’s us, the good guys, we’re not Al Qaeda. Instead, she chose to hide and feed him and dress his wounds and let him end up in the hands of Jack Collins. Are you going to put your bet on somebody like that? Use your head for a change.”
That evening Danny Boy Lorca entered a saloon off a two-lane highway that wound through hills that resembled industrial waste more than compacted earth. The saloon was built of shaved and lacquered pine logs and had a peaked green roof that, along with the Christmas-tree lights stapled around the window frames, gave it a cheerful appearance in a landscape that seemed suitable only for lizards and scorpions and carrion birds. The saloon’s name was spelled out in a big orange neon sign set on the roof’s apex, the cursive words LA ROSA BLANCA glowing vaporously against the sky. The owner went by the name Joe Tex, although he had no relationship to the musician by the same name. When patrons asked Joe Tex where he had gotten the name for his saloon, he would tell them of his ex-wife, a big-breasted stripper from Dallas who had a heart of gold and a voice that could break windows and a thirst for chilled vodka that the Gulf of Mexico couldn’t quench. The truth was, Joe Tex had never been married and had been a mercenary in Cambodia, operating out of Phnom Penh, where he had been close friends with the owners of a brothel that specialized in oral sex. The name of the brothel had been the White Rose.
Danny Boy had parked his deuce-and-a-half army-surplus flatbed and walked unsteadily across the gravel to the entrance, the drawstring of a duffel bag corded around his forearm, the weight in the bottom of the bag bumping against his hip as he scraped against the doorframe and headed for the bar.
Next door was a 1950s-style motel bordered with red and yellow neon tubing whose circular porte cochere and angular facade and signs gave it the appearance of a parked spaceship. The customers in the saloon were long-haul truckers staying in the motel; women who carried spangled purses and wore eyeliner and lip gloss and had mousse in their hair and whose voices seemed slightly deranged; locals who had been in Huntsville and were probably dangerous and not welcome at other clubs; and college boys looking to get laid or get in trouble, whichever came first.
Joe Tex dressed like a Latino, his cowboy boots plated on the toes and heels, his black cowboy shirt stitched with red roses. He smiled constantly, regardless of the situation, his teeth as solid as tombstones, the black hair on his forearms a signal to others of the power and virility wrapped inside his muscular body, one that pulsed with veins when he lifted weights in nothing but a jockstrap out back in 110-degree heat.
Danny Boy skirted the dance floor, walking as carefully as a man aboard a pitching ship. He set the duffel bag on the bar, the canvas collapsing on the hard objects inside.
“A beer and a shot?” Joe Tex said.
“I want to pay my tab,” Danny Boy said.
Joe Tex took a frosted schooner out of the cooler and drew a beer from a spigot and set it in front of Danny
