“Pardon?”
“You said ‘when they made you.’ You didn’t use God’s name. Like it would be irreverent. Is that just a quirk, or are you saying I wasn’t created by the hand of God?”
“I said it without thinking, that’s all. It was just a joke.”
“Not to me it isn’t. Know why people use passive voice?”
“I know that it has something to do with grammar, but I’m an engineer, Jack, not much on the literary arts.”
“Passive voice involves sentence structure that hides the identity of the doer. It’s a form of linguistic deception. Pronouns that have no referents are also used to confuse and conceal. A linguist can spot a lie faster than any polygraph can.”
“You never went to college?”
“I never went to high school.”
“You’re amazing.”
“That’s a word used by members of the herd. Everything is either ‘amazing’ or ‘awesome.’ You’re not a member of the herd. Don’t act like you are.”
“Jack, eating supper with you is like trying to digest carpet tacks. I’ve never seen the like of it. My food hasn’t even hit my stomach, and I’m already constipated.”
“Look at me and don’t turn around.”
“What is it?” Noie said.
“A highway patrol cruiser just pulled in five slots down. There’re two cops in it.”
The waitress came to the window and picked up the five-dollar tip and lifted the tray off the door and smiled. “Thank you, sir,” she said.
“My pleasure,” Jack said. He watched her walk away, his eyes slipping off her onto the side of the cruiser.
“We got to back out and drive right past them,” Noie said. “Or wait for them to leave.”
“I’d say that sums it up.” Jack bit down on his lip, his face shadowed by the brim of his hat. He removed it and set it on the dashboard and combed his hair in the rearview mirror.
“What are you doing?” Noie said.
Jack got out of the car, yawning, rubbing his face, a weary traveler about to hit the road again. “Ask the cops for directions to the cutoff to I-10,” he replied. He gazed up at the sky and at the network of lightning that was as spiked as barbed wire inside the clouds. “You can almost smell the salt and coconut palms on the wind. Mexico is waiting for us, son. Soon as we tidy up a few things. Yes, indeedy, a man’s work is never done.”
When Hackberry arrived at work early the next morning, Danny Boy Lorca was sleeping on a flattened cardboard carton in the alleyway behind the rear entrance, one arm over his eyes.
“Want to come in or sleep late and let the sun dry the dew on your clothes?” Hackberry said.
Danny Boy sat up, searching in the shadows as though unsure where he was. “I ain’t drunk.”
“Where’s your truck?”
“At the house. Krill cut all my tires. I hitched a ride into town.”
“Krill was at your house?”
“I busted his driver in the mouth. There was four of them together. They come up the ravine behind my property.”
“You sure it was Krill, Danny? You haven’t been knocking back a few shots, have you?”
“I’m going up to the cafe now and have breakfast. I told you what I seen and what I done.”
“Come inside.”
Danny Boy scratched at a place on his scalp and let out his breath and watched a shaft of sunlight shine on a dog at the end of the alley. The dog had open sores on its skin. “You ought to call the Humane Society and get some he’p for that critter. It ain’t right to leave a sick animal on the street like that.”
“You’re a good man, Danny Boy. I meant you no offense,” Hackberry said.
Danny Boy went inside and sat down by the small gas stove and waited, his work-seamed hands folded between his knees, his ruined face without expression, while Hackberry called Animal Control and fixed coffee and attached the flag to the chain on the metal pole out front and ran it up the pole, the flag suddenly filling with wind and popping against the sky.
“The guy named Krill said I don’t know who my real brothers are,” Danny Boy said.
“He did, huh?”
“His eyes are blue. But his hair and his skin are like mine.”
“I see,” Hackberry said, not understanding.
“He ain’t got no family or home or country. Somebody took all that away from him. That’s why he kills. It ain’t for money. He thinks it is, but it ain’t. He’d pay to do it.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“He believes the dead are more real than the living. That’s the most dangerous kind of man there is,” Danny Boy said.
An hour later, Hackberry called R.C. and Pam Tibbs into his office. “Here’s the lay of the land,” he said. “I’ve made six calls so far this morning and have been stonewalled by every fed I’ve talked to. My best guess is that Noie Barnum deliberately got himself kidnapped by Krill so he could infiltrate Al Qaeda’s connections in Latin America. I’m not sure the FBI was in on it. Maybe Barnum is working for an intelligence group inside the NSA or the Pentagon or the CIA. Or maybe he’s working on his own. Frankly, I don’t care. We’ve been lied to over and over while serious crimes were being committed in our county. If any fed obstructs or jerks us around again, we throw his bureaucratic ass in jail.”
“You sure you want to do that, Hack?” Pam said.
“Watch me.”
“I don’t get your reasoning, Sheriff. If Barnum wanted Krill to sell him to these Al Qaeda guys, how come he escaped?” R.C. said.
“Maybe Krill was going to piece off the action and sell him to a narco gang and wash his hands of the matter. So Barnum decided it was time to boogie.”
“He wants to do all this to get even for what happened to his sister in the Towers?” R.C. said.
“Wouldn’t you?” Hackberry asked.
“I’d do a whole sight more,” R.C. replied.
“Right now we don’t have eyes or ears out there. We need to find a weak link in the chain,” Hackberry said.
“These guys are pros, Sheriff. They don’t have weak links,” R.C. said.
“We’ll create one.”
“Who?” R.C. asked.
“I saw Temple Dowling busting skeet by the Ninth Hole last night,” Pam said.
It wasn’t hard to find him. In the county there was only one country club and private golf course and gated community that offered rental cottages. All of it was located on a palm-dotted watered green stretch of rolling landscape that had all the attributes of an Arizona resort, the rentals constructed of adobe and cedar, the walks bordered with flower beds, the lawns flooded daily by soak hoses at sunset, the evening breeze tinged with smoke from meat fires and the astringent smell of charcoal lighter. The swimming pool glowed with a blue radiance under the stars, and sometimes on summer nights, a 1950s-type orchestra performed on the outdoor dance floor; the buffet-style fried-chicken-and-potato-salad dinners were legendary.
The club not only offered upscale insularity, it also allowed its members to feel comfortable with who they were and gave them sanction to say things they would not say anywhere else. Political correctness ended at the arched entranceway. On the links or in the lounge known as the Ninth Hole, no racial joke was too coarse, no humorous remark about liberals and environmentalists unappreciated. In the evening, against a backdrop of palm trees and golf balls flying under the lights on the driving range, in the dull popping of shotguns and clay pigeons bursting into puffs of colored smoke against a pastel sky, one had the sense that the club was a place where no one died, where all the rewards promised by a benevolent capitalistic deity were handed out in this world rather than the next.
The irony was that most of the members came from the Dallas-Fort Worth area or Houston. The other irony
