“Wrap this up?” Dowling said. “Somebody is trying to kill me, and you say ‘wrap this up’?”
Pam and Hackberry stepped inside the cottage and closed the door behind them. “You say somebody locked down on you with a sniper’s rifle?”
“Yeah. Why do you think I called?”
“And Maydeen told you to fuck yourself? That doesn’t sound like her.”
Dowling’s eyes were jumping in their sockets. “Are you listening? I know a laser sight when I see one. Who cares about Maydeen?”
“Did your security guys see it?”
“If they had, Collins would be turning on a rotisserie.”
“The last time a couple of your guys ran into Jack, they didn’t do too well,” Hackberry said. “The coroner had to blot them up with flypaper and a sponge. Did you call the feds?”
“You listen,” Dowling said, his voice trembling with either anger or fear or both. He set down his drink on a bare mahogany table, trying to regain control of his emotions. The velvet drapes were pulled on the windows, the dark carpets and wood furniture and black leather chairs contributing somehow to the coldness pumping out of the air-conditioning ducts. “Collins has killed at least two federal agents. Nobody can do anything about him. Even Josef Sholokoff is afraid of him. But you have a personal relationship with him. If you didn’t, you’d be dead. I think you’re leaving him out there purposely.”
“Jack Collins tried to kill Chief Deputy Tibbs. He knows what I’ll do to him if I get the chance, Mr. Dowling. In the meantime, I’m not sure anything happened here. If Jack had wanted to pop you, your brains would be on your shirt.”
Even in the air-conditioning, the armpits of Dowling’s golf shirt were damp, his face lit with a greasy shine. He picked up his drink, then set it down again, clearing a clot out of his voice box. “I want to talk to you alone,” he said.
“What for?”
“You’ll see.”
“Pam, would you wait up at the club?”
“I love your decor, Mr. Dowling,” she said. “We busted some metalheads and satanists who were growing mushrooms inside a place that looked just like it.”
Dowling went into the bedroom and returned with a cardboard file folder secured by a thin bungee cord. He removed the cord and laid the folder flat side down on a dining room table, his chest rising and falling, as though wondering if he were about to take a wrong turn into the bad side of town. “I was going to give you this anyway,” he said. “So I’m not giving it to you as a bribe or a form of extortion or anything like that.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Hackberry said.
Dowling lifted his glass and drank and set the glass down again, his words steadying in his throat. “Years ago, when you were going across the border, my father had you surveilled and photographed. And buddy, did he get you photographed. Through windows and doorways, in every position and compromising moment a man and woman can put themselves in. You used three cathouses and three cathouses only. Am I right?”
“I don’t know. I had blackouts back then.”
“Trust me, if my father said you did, you did. Nobody in the history of the planet was better at cooking up a witches’ brew to destroy people than he was. He drove my mother mad and ruined his enemies financially and politically. In your case, he planned to blackmail you after you went to Congress. Except you married the union lady and got reborn with the proletariat and left the campaign.”
“Why give me the photos?”
“I wanted to show you we’re on the same side.”
“We’re not.”
Dowling drank the rest of the whiskey in his glass, his cheeks blooming as though his soul had taken on new life. “Look, I don’t have illusions about your feelings toward me. You think I’m a degenerate, and maybe I am. But I’m going to do something for you that nobody else can. You’ve made statements to people about your trips to Mexican whorehouses and the possibility that you screwed some underage girls. You were a whoremonger, all right, but not with young girls. If you had been, the photos would be in that file.” Dowling pushed the folder toward Hackberry. “They’re yours,” he said.
“What about the negatives?”
“They’re in there.”
“And how about other prints?”
“There aren’t any. I don’t have any reason to lie. You may not like me, but I’m not my father.”
“No, you’re not,” Hackberry said ambiguously.
“There’s a barbecue grill on the patio out back. A little charcoal lighter and one match, and you can feed your mistakes to the flames.”
“I tell you what,” Hackberry said, sliding the folder back toward Dowling. “I’ll provide you several phone numbers. You can give these photos to the San Antonio newspapers and my political opponents or ship them off to Screw magazine. Or you can thumbtack them to corkboards in Laundromats around town or glue them on the walls of washrooms and the sides of trucks. The Internet is another possibility.”
“I thought I was doing the decent thing. I thought I’d put my own indiscretions in Mexico behind us. I thought you might hold me in a little higher regard.”
“You profit off of war and people’s misery, Mr. Dowling. My opinion about you has no weight in the matter. You’re a maker of orphans and widows, just as your father was. You send others to fight wars that you yourselves will never serve in. Like a slug, your kind stays under a log, white and corpulent, and fears the sunlight and the cawing of jays. You have many peers, so don’t take my comments on too personal a basis.”
Dowling sat down in a straight-back chair, his hands cupped like dough balls. He was breathing through his mouth, looking upward, as though all the blood had drained out of his head. “You’re a cruel, unforgiving man,” he said.
“No, just a guy who has a long memory and doesn’t allow himself to get bit by the same snake twice.”
Pam Tibbs opened the front door without knocking and leaned inside. “Better come out here, Hack,” she said. “R.C. talked to a caddie who saw a guy prowling around Mr. Dowling’s SUV. R.C. is getting under it now.”
The rain had stopped and the sky had started to clear and water was dripping off the fronds of the banana plants and palm trees and the roof of the shed on the driving range as they walked to the parking lot, Dowling’s security men trailing behind them. In the waning of the sunset, they saw R.C. emerge from under the SUV, his uniform streaked with mud, one hand holding a serrated steel object. “It’s either Chicom or Russian-made,” he said. “The pin was wired to the wheel. One revolution would have pulled the pin and released the spoon.”
“Where was it?” Dowling asked.
“This one was under the front seat,” R.C. said.
“This one?” Dowling repeated.
“I thought I saw something back by the gas tank. I’ll get a better light and check,” R.C. said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It took only two hours of worry and fear and the darker processes of the imagination to put Temple Dowling at Hackberry’s front door.
“It’s a little late,” Hackberry said, a book in his hand.
“I’ll tell you what I know, and you can do what you please with it. But you will not accuse me of being a murderer again.”
“I didn’t say that. I said you profited from it.”
“Same thing.”
“Do you want to come in or get off my property?”
Dowling sat in a chair by the front wall, away from the window, hands on the armrests like a man awaiting electrocution. He had showered and shaved and put on fresh clothes, but his face looked parboiled, his jaw disjointed, as though his mouth could not form the words he had to say. “I was a business partner with Josef
