She called in her location. “I’ve got a lulu here. Ask Hack to pull all the reports we have on somebody who was shooting at illegals,” she said.
CHAPTER THREE
Hackberry Holland sat behind his desk and listened to Pam Tibbs’s account of the arrest. Outside the window, the American flag was straightening and popping in the wind, the chain rattling on the pole. “What’s our minister friend doing now?” he asked.
“Yelling for his phone call,” she replied. “How do you read that stuff about a hot coal on my tongue?”
“It’s from Isaiah in the Old Testament. Isaiah believed he was a man of unclean lips who dwelled in an unclean land. But an angel placed a burning coal on his tongue and removed his iniquity.”
“I’m iniquitous for not letting him kill himself and others in an auto accident?”
“The sheriff in Jim Hogg told me about this guy a couple of months ago. Cody Daniels was a suspect in the bombing of an abortion clinic on the East Coast. He might not have done it himself, but he was at least one of the cheerleaders. He roams around the country and tends to headquarter in places where there’s not much money for law enforcement. I didn’t know he was here.”
She waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. “You think he could be the guy taking potshots at the illegals coming across the border?” she said.
“Him or a hundred others like him.” Hackberry took off his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Did he threaten you in a specific way?”
“On the way in, he told me I was going to hell.”
“Did he say he was going to put you there or see you there?”
“No.”
“Did he touch the gun on the seat?”
“Not that I saw.”
“Did he make a threatening gesture of any kind?”
“He refused to get out of the vehicle while telling me he was armed.”
“He told R.C. you hit him in the head after you cuffed him.”
“He fell down against the cruiser. What are you trying to say, Hack?”
“We don’t need a lawsuit.”
“I don’t know if I’m more pissed off by this nutcase or what I’m hearing now.”
“It’s the kind of lawsuit that could cost us fifty thousand dollars in order to be right.”
Hackberry looked up at her in the silence. Pam’s eyes were brown, with a reddish tint, and they became charged with light when she was either angry or hurt. She hooked her thumbs in her gun belt and fixed her attention outside the window, her cheeks spotted with color.
“I’m proud of the way you handled it,” he said. “You did all the right things. Let’s see if our man likes his accommodations.”
Hackberry and Pam Tibbs climbed the steel spiral steps in the rear of the building and walked down a corridor of barred cells, past the old drunk tank, to a barred holding unit that contained nothing but a wood bench and a commode with no seat. The man who had identified himself as Reverend Cody Daniels was standing at the window, silhouetted against a sky that had turned yellow with dust.
“I understand you were potting jackrabbits from your pickup truck,” Hackberry said.
“I did no such thing,” Cody Daniels replied. “It’s not against the law, anyway, is it?”
“So you were cruising down the road surveilling the countryside through your binoculars for no particular reason?” Hackberry said.
“What I was looking for is the illegal immigrants and drug transporters who come through here every night.”
“You’re not trying to steal my job, are you?”
“I go where I’ve a mind to. When I got up this morning, this was still a free country.”
“You bet. But you gave my chief deputy a hard time because she made a simple procedural request of you.”
“Check the video camera in your squad car. Truth will out, Sheriff.”
“It’s broken.”
“Pretty much like everything in this town. Mighty convenient, if you ask me.”
“What are you doing in my county?”
“Your county?”
“You’d better believe it.”
“I’m doing the Lord’s work.”
“I heard about your activities on the East Coast. We don’t have any abortion clinics here, Reverend, but that doesn’t mean we’ll put up with your ilk.”
Cody Daniels approached the bars and rested one hand on the cast-iron plate that formed an apron on the bottom of the food slot. The veins in his wrists were green and as thick as night crawlers, his knuckles pronounced, the back of each finger scarred where a tattoo had been removed. He held Hackberry’s gaze. “I have the ability to see into people’s thoughts,” he said. “Right now you got more problems than your department can handle. That’s why you select the likes of me as the target of your wrath. People like me are easy. We pay our taxes and obey the law and try to do what’s right. How many drug dealers do you have locked up here?”
“There’s a kernel of truth in what you say, Reverend, but I’d like to get this issue out of the way so you can go back to your job and we can go back to ours.”
“I think the real problem is you got a romantic relationship going with this woman here.”
“Deputy Tibbs, would you get the reverend’s possessions envelope out of the locker, please?”
Pam gave Hackberry a look but didn’t move.
“I think Reverend Daniels is a reasonable man and is willing to put this behind him,” Hackberry said. “I think he’ll be more mindful of his driving habits and the next time out not object to the requests of a well-meaning deputy sheriff. Is that a fair statement, Reverend?”
“I’m not given to making promises, particularly when I’m not the source of the problem,” Cody Daniels said.
Hackberry drummed his fingers on the apron of the food slot. “Deputy Tibbs, would you get the paperwork started on Reverend Daniels’s release?” he said.
“Yes, sir,” she replied.
Cody Daniels’s eyes followed her down the corridor, his gaze slipping down her back to her wide-ass jeans and the thickness of her thighs. “I guess it’s each to his own,” he said.
“Pardon?” Hackberry said.
“No offense meant, but I think I’d rather belly up to a spool of barbed wire. That’s kind of coarse, but you get the picture.”
“I hope you’ll accept this in the right spirit, Reverend. If you ever sass one of my deputies or speak disrespectfully of Chief Deputy Tibbs again, I’m going to hunt around in that pile of scrap wood behind the jail until I find a long two-by-four, one with sixteen-penny nails sticking out of it, then I’m going to kick it so far up your ass you’ll be spitting splinters. Get the picture? Have a nice day. And stay the hell out of my sight.”
Anton Ling heard the man in the yard before she saw him. He had released the chain on the windmill and cupped water out of the spout, drinking it from his hand, while the blades spun and clattered above his head. He was gaunt and wore a short-sleeve shirt with no buttons; his hair hung on his shoulders and looked like it had been barbered with a knife.
“?Que quieres?” she said.
“Comida,” the man replied.
He was wearing tennis shoes. In the moonlight she could see his ribs stenciled against his sides, his trousers flattening in the wind against his legs. She stepped out on the back porch. The shadows of the windmill’s blades were spinning on his face. “You didn’t come out of Mexico,” she said.
