closed his eyes and then opened them and stared upward into the cathedral ceiling. For the first time in his life, Cody Daniels had a sense of finality from which he knew there was no escape. “I shot over the heads of poor Mexicans coming into the country,” he said. “When I was a boy, I made a fifteen-year-old colored girl go to bed with me. I wrote a bad check to some old people who let me charge groceries at their store. I stole a woman’s purse in the bus depot in Denver. I took a watch off a drunk man in an alley behind the Midnight Mission in Los Angeles. I almost killed a woman outside Baltimore.”
“What is he saying?” said the man with the Russian accent.
“He’s sorry he’s on the planet,” said a man holding one of Cody’s arms.
“See what else he has to say,” said the man with the Russian accent.
Cody heard the nail gun again and felt his other foot flatten against the vertical shaft of the cross and try to constrict against the nail that had pinioned it to the wood. This time he thought he screamed, but he couldn’t be sure, because the voice he heard did not seem like his own. The popping of the nail gun continued, the muzzle working its way along the tops of his feet and his palms and finally the small bones in his wrists. He felt himself being lifted up, the top of the cross thudding against the wall behind him, his weight coming down on the nails, the tendons in his chest crushing the air from his lungs. Through a red haze, he could see the faces of his executioners looking up at him, as though they had been frozen in time or lifted out of an ancient event whose significance had eluded them. He heard himself whispering, his words barely audible, his eyes rolling up into his head.
“What’d he say?” one man asked.
“‘I’m proud my name is on her book,’” another man said.
“What the fuck does that mean?” the first man asked.
“It’s from the song ‘The Great Speckled Bird,’” Dennis Rector said.
“What is this speckled bird?” asked the man with the Russian accent, standing at the foot of the stage.
“In the song, it’s supposed to mean the Bible,” Dennis Rector replied.
The man with the Russian accent gazed through the side window at the rain striking the glass.
“What do you want us to do, Mr. Sholokoff?” Rector asked. “Is he alive?”
“I think he is.”
“You think?” Sholokoff said.
“Just tell me what you’d like me to do, sir,” Rector said.
“Do I have to write it down?”
“No, sir.”
“Don’t come into this county again.”
“I come through here to deliver the animals to your game ranches.”
“You need to take a vacation, Dennis. Maybe go out into the desert for a while. Here, I have some money for you. I’ll call you when it’s time to come back to work.”
Sholokoff began walking down the aisle toward the front of the church.
“I did what you wanted,” Rector said. “You shouldn’t treat me like this. I ain’t somebody you can just use and throw away.”
Sholokoff continued out the front of the church into the night without replying or looking back. Dennis Rector pinched his mouth with his hand and stared at Cody Daniels and the blood running from his feet and hands and wrists and down his forearms. He stuck Sholokoff’s wad of bills into his jeans. “I’m gonna get the gas can out of my car,” he said. “Did you guys hear me? Don’t just stand there. Take care of business.”
None of the other men spoke or would look directly at him.
Alocal rancher flying over the church saw the flames burst through the roof of the Cowboy Chapel and reported the fire before Anton Ling did. By the time she had headed up the road to the church, the volunteer fire department truck and Pam Tibbs and Hackberry Holland and another cruiser driven by R. C. Bevins were right behind her.
“Jesus Christ, look at it,” Pam said.
The building was etched with flames that seemed to have gone up all four walls almost simultaneously and had been fed by cold air blowing through all the windows, which probably had been systematically smashed out. The fire had gathered under the ceiling and punched a hole through the roof that was now streaming sparks and curds of black smoke into the wind.
“Somebody used an accelerant,” Hackberry said.
“You think it’s the same guys who broke into Anton Ling’s house?”
“Or Temple Dowling’s people.”
“You believe in karma? I mean for a guy like Cody Daniels.”
“You mean is this happening to him because he was mixed up in the bombing of an abortion clinic? No, I don’t believe in karma, at least not that kind.”
“I thought maybe you did,” Pam said.
“Who gets the rougher deal in life? Beggars on the streets of Calcutta or international-arms merchants?”
Pam’s attention was no longer focused on their conversation. “Hack, Anton Ling is getting out of her truck with a fire extinguisher.”
Hackberry saw Anton Ling run from her truck directly through the front door of the church, a ropy cloud of blue-black smoke funneling from under the top of the doorframe. Pam braked the cruiser behind the pickup, and she and Hackberry and R. C. Bevins and two volunteer firemen ran up the steps behind Anton Ling.
When Hackberry went inside the church, the intensity of the heat was like someone kicking open the door on a blast furnace. The walls were blackening and starting to buckle where they were not already burning, the sap in the cathedral beams igniting and dripping in flaming beads onto the pews below. Hackberry could hardly breathe in the smoke. Anton Ling went down the main aisle toward the stage, the fire extinguisher raised in front of her. Through the smoke, Hackberry could see a man crucified on a large wooden cross at the rear of the stage, his face and skin and bloodied feet lit by stage curtains that had turned into candles.
Hackberry caught up with Anton Ling, his arm raised in front of his face to protect his eyes from the heat. “Give it to me,” he said.
“Take your hand off me,” she said.
“Your dress is on fire, for God’s sake,” he said.
He tore the fire extinguisher from her hands and pulled the pin from the release lever and sprayed foam on her clothing. Then he mounted the stairs at the foot of the stage, the heat blistering his skin and cooking his head even though he was wearing his Stetson. He sprayed the area around the man on the cross while the volunteer firemen, all of them wearing ventilators, sprayed the walls with their backpacks and other firemen pulling a hose came through the front door and horse-tailed the ceiling with a pressurized jet of water pumped from the truck.
“Let’s get the cross down on the stage and carry it through the door,” Hackberry said. “He’s going to die in this smoke.”
But when Hackberry grabbed the shaft of the cross, he recoiled from the heat in the wood.
“Sheriff?” R.C. said.
“What?”
“He’s gone.”
“No, the wounds aren’t mortal.”
“Look above his rib cage. Somebody wanted to make sure he was dead. Somebody shot nails into his heart,” R.C. said.
The flashlights of the firemen jittered and cut angles through the darkness and smoke, the rain spinning down through the hole in the ceiling. “Nobody from around here could do something like this,” one of the firemen said.
“Not a chance, huh?” Hackberry said.
“No, this kind of thing don’t happen here,” the fireman said. “It took somebody doped out of his mind to do this. Like some of those smugglers coming through Miss Ling’s place every night.”
“Shut up,” Anton Ling said.
“If they didn’t do it, who did? ’Cause it wasn’t nobody from around here,” the fireman said.
“Give us a hand on this, bud. We need to get Reverend Daniels off these nails and onto a gurney. You with
