Through the back window, Danny Boy could see the reflection of the emergency lights racing along the sides of the highway. “That guy’s a killer,” he said. “You were selling him dope you stole?”
“Maybe I don’t feel good about it.”
“My leg hurts. I don’t want to listen to this no more.”
“I want to go to California and get clean and start over. Give me one of the eggs. I got the information you want.”
Danny Boy looked at the attendant for a long time, his eyes going dull with fatigue. “My duffel bag is on the floor.”
“You’re doing the right thing, man. But I got to ask you something. Why you want to help this guy Barnum?”
“’Cause I got to make up for something.”
“Like what?”
“I was there when Barnum escaped from some killers. I saw the killers torture a man to death.”
“For real?”
“Where’s Noie Barnum?”
“I don’t know the exact place, but when I gave the man in the desert the medical supplies, he looked at the north and said, ‘It’s fixing to rain snakes and frogs up yonder.’ I go, ‘Where up yonder?’ He says, ‘In the Glass Mountains. You ought to come up there and stand in front of a gully washer. It’d flat hydrate all that dope out of your system, make a man out of you.’” The attendant looked into space. “He’s got a special way of making people feel small.”
Danny Boy didn’t reply.
“He made you feel the same way, didn’t he?” the attendant said.
“Not no more he cain’t,” Danny Boy said.
It rained that night. To the south, a tropical storm had blown ashore on the Mexican coast, and the air smelled as dense and cool and laden with salt as seawater, almost as if a great displaced ocean lay just beyond the hills that ringed the town. Before Hackberry Holland and Pam Tibbs arrived at the hospital to interview Danny Boy, a bolt of lightning knocked out the power all over the county. Flashes of white electricity flickered inside the clouds, and Hackberry thought he could smell tropical flowers and dried kelp in the wind and gas inside the trees on the hospital lawn. He was sure these were the musings of a self-absorbed old man, one who could not stop thinking about the past and the ephemerality of his life.
He and Pam Tibbs interviewed Danny Boy before he went into surgery, then tried unsuccessfully to find the ambulance attendant. Hackberry and Pam and their deputies and the surgeons and the other hospital personnel all did their jobs throughout the power outage, not thinking, just doing, never taking the time to wonder if any of it mattered or not. You did your job and you let the score take care of itself. How many times a day did Hackberry offer that same tired workhorse counsel to himself? Was that how one ended his days? Probably, he thought. No, there was no “probably” about it. If you thought about mortality in any other fashion, you’d go insane or put a gun in your mouth.
After the power came back on, he and Pam drove two blocks to a cafe on the courthouse square and had coffee and a piece of pie. Through the window, Hackberry could see the trees on the courthouse lawn and the mist blowing across the lawn and the streetlights shining on a bronze statue of a World War I doughboy, his ’03 Springfield gripped in one hand, his other hand raised above his head as though he were rallying his comrades.
“You look tired,” Pam said.
“You mean I look old.”
“No, I don’t mean that at all.”
“I’m fine. I’ve never been better.”
“Pray that liars aren’t kept a long time in purgatory.”
“Pam, you should have been a low-overhead dentist, someone who does fillings and extractions without the extra cost of Novocain.”
She gazed out the window at the rain and at the drops of water beaded on the glass. Her eyelashes were reddish brown against the glow of the streetlamp; a wet strand of hair curved against her cheek. He couldn’t tell if she was thinking about the two of them or all the events of the past few days. She seemed to read his thoughts. “Why does a mass killer make himself vulnerable to arrest by buying stolen medicine from a junkie in order to take care of a stranger?” she said.
“That’s what every one of them does.”
“Every one of who does what?” she said.
“All sociopaths. They do good deeds as a tribute to their own power and to convince others they’re like the rest of us.”
“You don’t think Collins has any feelings about Noie Barnum?”
“I think the only genuine emotion he’s capable of is self-pity.”
“I don’t like to see you bitter.”
He placed his fork on the side of his plate and poured cream from a small pitcher on top of his half-eaten wedge of blueberry pie. He picked up his fork and then hesitated and set it down again. “By the seventh-inning stretch, this is what you learn. Evil people are different from the rest of us. Redneck cops, Klansmen, predators who rape and murder children, ChiCom prison guards, and messianic head cases like Jack Collins, all of them want us to think they’re complex or they’re patriots or they’re ideologues. But the simple truth is, they do what they do because it makes them feel good.”
“Would you have put that broken pool cue down that bartender’s throat?”
“The bartender thought so. That’s all that counts.”
“Don’t stop being who you are because of these guys. You’ve always said it yourself: Don’t give them that kind of power.”
Hackberry stared out the window at the electricity trembling on the tree above the bronze figure of the doughboy. The statue’s head was turned slightly to one side, the mouth open, as though the doughboy were yelling an encouraging word over his shoulder to those following him across no-man’s-land. Did they know what awaited them? Did they know the Maxim machine guns that would turn them into chaff were the creation of a British inventor?
Hackberry wondered who had erected the monument. He wanted to call them idiots or flag-wavers or members of the unteachable herd. But words such as those were as inaccurate as they were jaundiced and hateful, he thought. In our impotence to rescind all the decisions that led to war, we erected monuments to assuage the wandering spirits whose lives had been stolen, and to somehow compensate the family members whose loss they would carry to the grave. Who were the greater victims? Those who gave their lives or those who made the war?
He said none of these things and instead watched a man in a wilted hat park his car in front of the cafe and come inside.
“Ethan Riser is here,” Hackberry said. “There’s something I didn’t tell you about him. He found out recently he has terminal cancer. No matter what he says tonight, he gets a free pass.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t think he wants other people to know. He’s one of those guys who never shows his hole card, even when the game is over.”
She pinched her eyes with her thumb and index finger, then widened them, the lines in her face flattening. “I’m not to be trusted?” she said.
“Don’t do that.”
“You treat me like I’m some kind of burden you have to put up with, someone you have to instruct regarding decent behavior.”
“Come on, Pam, stop it.”
“You have no sense at all of the pain your words cause, particularly to someone who cares about you. Goddammit, Hack.”
He let out his breath and tried to keep his face empty when he waved at Ethan Riser.
“Just go fuck yourself,” she said.
“Did I walk in on anything?” Ethan said, not looking directly at either one of them, his smile awkward.
