“You know Ethan?” When Collins didn’t answer, Caleb said, “You killed the biker?”
The bumps and knots and sallow skin and unshaved jowls that constituted the face of Jack Collins seemed to harden into a mask, as though his breathing and all the motors in his head had come to a stop. His eyes became lidded, without heat or anger or emotion of any kind. Then his chest began to rise and fall. “Sorry to do this to you, kid,” he said.
“Buddy, before you-”
“Don’t talk.” Jack Collins’s eyes closed, and his mouth formed into a cone, as though he were devolving into a blowfish at the bottom of a dark aquarium, a place where he was surrounded by water that was so cold he had no feeling at all.
Ethan was sitting on a flat rock inside an alcove that had a sandy floor and was protected on the north side by a big sandstone boulder. He heard an abrupt sound inside the wind, like a burst of dirty thunder, and for a moment thought the plane with the sputtering engine had returned or the dirt biker had cranked up his machine and was gunning across the hardpan. Riser stood up and stepped from behind the boulder. Out of the white haze, he saw a figure walking toward him, a man wearing a leather vest with a panama hat slanted on his head, his face swollen with lumps that looked like infected insect bites, his trousers stuffed into the tops of his cowboy boots. The man was holding a Thompson submachine gun with his right hand. “Need to talk,” he said.
Riser stepped back quickly behind the boulder and pulled his semiautomatic from the holster on his hip.
“You hear me? It doesn’t have to end the way you think,” the man called out.
Ethan inched forward and looked around the edge of the boulder. The man with the Thompson was gone, probably up in the rocks from which he could follow a deer trail over the top of the alcove or remain where he was and wait for Ethan to come out in the open.
“You sick down there?” the man said from somewhere up in the pinon trees.
“Come down here and find out,” Ethan said.
“You’re not calling the shots, Mr. Riser.”
“Other people know where I am.”
“No, I think you’re out here on your own hook.”
“Where’s Caleb?” Ethan said.
“He’s not here.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s somewhere else.”
“You killed him?”
“I’m going to ask you a question. You need to think carefully before you answer. If you lie, I’ll know it. Are you the agent who burned me out?”
“No. What did you do to Caleb?”
“Did you order my house burned?”
“That wasn’t a house. It was a shack. You were squatting in it.”
“Did you order it burned? Did you burn my Bible?”
“No, I had nothing to do with it. Where’s Caleb?”
“Who told you where I was?”
“No one.”
“It was your buddy Caleb, wasn’t it? He and his wife took a picture of Noie Barnum and showed it to you.”
“You’ve got your facts turned around, Collins. We received reports on you from the Border Patrol. They’d rounded up some illegals who’d seen you up here.”
“Why would wetbacks take note of a fellow like me?”
“It’s your BO. As soon as they mentioned it, we knew who they were talking about.”
“Throw your piece out on the sand. Throw your cuffs out, too.”
“You’re a public fool, Collins. You’re not a religious warrior or an existentialist hero. You’re a basket case who probably killed his mother. You murder young girls and pose as a political assassin. Let me tell you a story. You know what the Feast Day of Fools was in medieval times? It was a day when all the lower-level dysfunctional people in the church were allowed to do whatever they wanted. They got sodden drunk, fist-fought in front of the altar, farted to hymnal music, buggered each other and each other’s wives and sodomized animals or anything with a heartbeat, and had a glorious time. They got it out of their system, and the next day they all came to church hungover and were forgiven.
“Five hundred years ago there was a place for a pitiful fuck like you, but now there isn’t. So you trail your BO around the desert and terrorize unarmed people and pretend you’re the scourge of God. You need to sew bells on your suit, Collins. Maybe you can get a job as a jester in a medieval reenactment.”
Ethan waited for Collins’s response. The only sound he heard was the wind.
“I rumpled your feelings?” Ethan said. “Hypersensitivity usually goes back to a person’s problems with his mother. Sexual abuse or constant criticism, that kind of thing. If so, we’ve got a special titty-baby unit we can get you into.”
Ethan waited, his palm perspiring on the grips of his semiauto. A gust of wind blew a cloud of alkali dust into his face. He wiped his eyes clear and tried to see above the top of the alcove without exposing himself to a burst of submachine-gun fire. He stepped back into the shade, letting his eyes readjust. Then he knew something was wrong. The alkali dust had not dissipated but had grown thicker. Above, he heard footsteps inside dry brush and the sound of tree branches being broken and dragged over a stone surface. He smelled an odor like greasewood burning and realized he had not been looking at alkali dust but at smoke from a fire, one that was being stoked into a blaze that was so hot, it immediately consumed whatever was dropped into it.
“You burn a man out of his house and excuse yourself by calling it a shack?” Collins said. “Now it’s your turn, Agent Riser. See how you like it.”
A rain of burning grass and tree limbs and trash scraped out of a deadfall showered down on the opening to the alcove, filling the air with smoke and soot and red-hot cinders. Then Collins pushed another load of dry fuel down on top of it.
“I can keep doing it all day, Mr. Riser,” Collins said. “Or you can throw your weapon on the far side of the fire and walk out after it. I won’t shoot.”
“You were the right age for Vietnam. Where were you when the rest of us went?” Ethan said.
“Those were your enemies, not mine. I never injured a man who didn’t ask for it.”
“How about Caleb?”
“Maybe he’s still breathing. Come out of your hiding place and we’ll go see.”
Ethan charged through the flames, his clothes catching fire, his eyebrows and hair singeing. He whirled about, raising his semiauto, hoping for a clear shot at Preacher Jack. But the black silhouette he saw imprinted against the sky was armed with a magic wand that burst with light brighter than the sun, brighter than the fire eating Ethan’s skin, even brighter than the untarnished shield to which he had dedicated most of his adult life. The Thompson seemed to make no sound, but its bullets struck his body with the impact of an entire hillside falling on top of him.
Jack Collins climbed down the slope, careful not to scrape the wood or the steel surfaces of his submachine gun on the rocks, and removed the semiautomatic from Ethan’s hand and the cell phone from the pocket of his khakis. He flipped open the phone and idly reviewed the most recently dialed numbers. The first name to appear on the list was not one he was expecting to see.
Riser had been in touch with her only that morning. Why?
He tossed the cell phone into the fire, and for just a moment he thought he saw the face of the Chinese woman called La Magdalena rise from the flames.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Six hours later, Hackberry Holland sat numbly in his office chair, his forehead propped on his fingers, and listened to the sheriff of Brewster County read from the notes he had made at the crime scene. As in all crime-
