beef-stew special. He looked like he was just coming off a drunk and could have eaten a whole cow between two slices of white bread. That morning I’d swept up some broken glass off the back step and put it in the trash can. The glass was as fine as needles, but I mashed it up even finer and put it in his stew with a lot of potatoes. About thirty minutes later, he went down on the sidewalk like he swallowed a handful of fishhooks. I heard he died, but I didn’t go around asking questions about it.”
Jack snapped the ammunition drum onto his submachine gun and laid the gun lopsidedly inside the guitar case. He wiped the oil off his fingers with a paper towel and gazed somberly into Noie’s face, his eyes melancholy and shiny. Then as though he had been holding his breath underwater to the point where his lungs were bursting, his mouth fell open and his lips creased back in a broad smile. “Got you, boy! I had you convinced you were bunking with Jack the Ripper. My mother was an elementary teacher in Okemah, Oklahoma, and died of Huntington’s chorea. My last job was at a Pee-wee Herman theme park. I couldn’t hurt a fly.”
“What about the submachine gun?”
“I’ve got a whole collection of rare firearms in Rio de Janeiro. One day I’ll show them to you. You don’t believe I’m a rich man, do you?”
“I don’t know what to believe, Jack.”
“That’s because you’re a good kid. Get out your checker set, and let’s put on a pot of coffee and play a game or two.”
The information that came in from the National Crime Information Center on Dennis Rector was of little value, other than to indicate that he had been arrested twice for DWI and once for domestic battery, and the United States Navy had given him a general discharge for the convenience of the service. His wallet contained an Arizona driver’s license, a Social Security card, fourteen dollars, a condom, a GI can opener, a coupon for a box of cereal, a speeding citation that was four months old, a torn ticket to a concert in Branson, Missouri, and a photograph of the deceased in a
navy uniform standing next to an Asian girl wearing a shift and flip-flops. Written in pencil on the back of the photograph were the words “With Luz, Mindanao, Aug. 6, 1982.”
In his right-hand pocket Rector had been carrying seventy-three cents in change, three metal finger picks, and a half stick of gum wrapped in tinfoil.
Hackberry placed Rector’s possessions in a manila envelope and gazed out the window at a pallid and sultry sky and hills that barely contained enough moisture to go with the greening of the season. What was the sum total of a man’s life? Scraps of paper issued by the state? A photo taken with a peasant girl on the rim of the New American Empire on the anniversary of Hiroshima’s bombing? A ticket to a country-music event at which the stage performers wore tasseled red, white, and blue costumes and offered up a meretricious tribute to a culture that celebrated its own vulgarity? A half stick of chewing gum?
Who was Dennis Rector, and what had he come to confess? How could a man who had acquired so little and left such a microscopic trace on the planet be so serious about himself that he would take his own life? What could he have done that was that bad? Hackberry picked up his desk phone. “Would you come in here, Maydeen?” he said.
Ten seconds later, she was standing in his doorway, pear-shaped, wearing a flowery western shirt with her department-issue trousers and a stitched belt and too much lipstick, her perfume flooding the room. “Are you gonna just stare at me or tell me what you want?” she said.
“If someone said to you ‘I ain’t no Judas Iscariot,’ what would you say was on his mind?”
“Did you call him a Judas?”
“ I didn’t. To my knowledge, no one did.”
“I’d say he sold out someone who trusted him, and his guilt was eating his lunch. Are we talking about the guy who hanged himself?”
“That’s the guy.”
“It seems like he had biblical stories on his mind. Like the crucifixion in particular.”
“I believe you’re right.”
“You think he knew Cody Daniels?” she asked.
“He knew Josef Sholokoff, that’s for sure.”
“You think Sholokoff crucified Daniels?”
“I think it was either Sholokoff or Krill. Except a guy like Dennis Rector wouldn’t have occasion to be mixed up with someone like Krill. So that leaves Sholokoff. Is Pam still at lunch?”
“She got a call from the Blue Bonnet Six. A guy skipped on his bill and stole the television set out of the room. Before he skipped, he tried to sell the owner something called a Dobro. What’s a Dobro?”
“A guitar with a resonator in it. It’s played with metal picks, like the ones I just put in this manila envelope.”
“The guy who hanged himself played a musical instrument?”
“Evidently. Why?”
“Musicians make poor criminals. Outside of wrecking hotel rooms, they’re amateurs when it comes to serious criminality,” Maydeen said. When Hackberry didn’t reply, she said, “Know why that is?”
“I think you’re fixing to tell me.”
“You’ll figure it out,” she said.
“Has R.C. called in yet?”
“No, sir.”
“Let me know when he does. Tell me why musicians make poor criminals.”
“They believe they have a gift, so they feel less inclined to steal. They also think they’re special and they don’t have to prove anything.”
“I never thought of it that way,” he said.
“My first husband was hung like a hamster. But after he recorded once with Stevie Ray Vaughan, you’d think he was driving a fire truck up my leg.”
“I can’t believe you just said that.”
“Said what?”
“Out, Maydeen. And close the door behind you, please.”
Hackberry walked to the saloon and ate lunch in the darkness of a back booth and tried to forget the image of Dennis Rector hanging from a barn rafter. But a larger issue than the suicide was bothering him. Hackberry believed that most crimes, particularly homicide, were committed for reasons of sex, money, power, or any combination of the three. Beginning with the murder of the DEA informant by Krill, the homicides Hackberry had investigated recently seemed to defy normal patterns. Supposedly, the central issue was national security and the sale of Noie Barnum to Al Qaeda and the compromise of the Predator drone. But that just didn’t wash. The players were all people driven by ideology or religious obsession or personal rage that was rooted in the id. It was too easy to dismiss Preacher Jack Collins as a psychopath. It was also too easy to categorize Josef Sholokoff as a Russian criminal who slithered through a hole in the immigration process during the Cold War. Something much worse seemed to have come into the lives of this small-town society down here on the border, like a spiritual malignancy irradiating the land with its poisonous substance, remaking the people in its image.
Is that too dark and grandiose an extrapolation from the daily ebb and flow of a rural sheriff’s department? Hackberry wondered. Ask those medieval peasants who were visited in their villages by the representatives of the Inquisition, he said to himself in reply.
He stared at the diamondback rattlesnake that the saloon owner kept in a gallon jar of yellow formaldehyde on the bar. The snake’s body was coiled thickly upon itself, its mouth spread wide against the glass, its eyes like chips of stone, the venom holes visible in its fangs. The rattlesnake had been in the jar at least three years; its color had begun to fade, and pieces of its body were starting to dissolve in dirty strings inside the preservative. Why leave something that ugly if not perverse on top of a bar for that long?
Because the owner was making a statement, Hackberry thought. Evil was outside of us, not in the human breast, and could be contained and made harmless and placed on exhibit. Wasn’t the serpent condemned to crawl on its belly in the dust and to strike at man’s heel and be beaten to death with a stick? What more fitting testimony to that fact than a diamondback yawning open its mouth impotently six inches from the tattooed arm of a trucker knocking back shots of Jack and chasing them with a frosted mug of Lone Star?
Hackberry made a mental note to talk with the bartender. Then his cell phone vibrated on the tabletop. He
