“Did you hear me?”
“Yeah, I did. How about losing the tone?”
He stood up from his desk, staring out the window into the brilliance of the day, at the wind whipping the flag on the pole, at the hard blueness of the sky above the hills. His right hand opened and closed at his side. “Tell R.C. to bring him through the back.”
“Hack?”
“What is it?”
“You always say we do it by the numbers.”
“What about it?”
“Pam told me about you almost shoving a broken pool cue down a bartender’s throat in that Mexican cantina.”
“R.C.’s life was hanging in the balance. Why are you bringing this up?”
“I could have done the same thing to the bartender, maybe worse, and so could Pam or Felix and a few others in the department. We wouldn’t be bothered about it later, either. But we’re not you. All of us know that, even though you don’t. You go against your own nature.”
“Where’s Pam?”
“In the restroom, the last time I saw her.”
“Believe it or not, Maydeen, sometimes I have my reasons for doing the things I do. We’re not the only people who want to get their hands on Noie Barnum. The less anyone knows about his whereabouts, the safer he is. You got me?”
“Yes, sir, I expect so.”
Hackberry looked down the street to see if R.C.’s cruiser had turned into the intersection yet. He tried to clear his head, to think straight, to keep the lines simple before he gave up his one certifiable chance to nail Jack Collins. “Fill in Pam and get the trusties out of the downstairs area. I want the prisoners in the cells at the end of the upstairs corridor moved to the tank. Barnum goes into total isolation. No contact with anyone. His food is brought to him by a deputy. No trusty gets near him. We’re in total blackout mode regarding his presence. Simply said, he doesn’t exist. You copy that?”
“I guess that means no phone call.”
He gave her a look.
“Got it, got it, got it,” she said.
Hackberry went out the back door and waited for R.C. The alleyway was empty in both directions. Think, he told himself. Don’t blow this one. Why would Barnum be in a convenience store by himself? Collins wouldn’t allow him to go wandering about on his own. They either had a fight or Barnum got sick of Collins’s ego-maniacal rhetoric and decided to take a stroll down the road and find some other company. But why had he stayed with Collins in the first place? To find Krill? To find some Al Qaeda operatives in Latin America and even the score for the death of his half sister? That made more sense than anything else.
R.C.’s cruiser turned in to the alleyway, the flasher off. Hackberry looked at all the rear windows of the building. He saw a face at one of the windows in the upstairs corridor. A deputy or a trusty? R.C. helped his prisoner out of the backseat of the cruiser, and the face went away. The prisoner’s wrists were cuffed behind him, the tendons in his neck corded with either embarrassment or anger. In the sunlight, there were pinpoints of sweat on his forehead.
“I’m Sheriff Holland, Mr. Barnum,” Hackberry said. “You are Noie Barnum?”
“Your deputy called me Noie. But I didn’t tell him that was my name.”
“Have it any way you like, sir. You’re in protective custody, but you’re not under arrest. Do you understand the difference?”
“Yes, you’re saying I don’t have the constitutional right to a phone call or a lawyer.”
“No, I’m saying this is a safe place for you.”
“I think I’d just rather hike down to that cafe we passed and have a piece of pie and a cup of coffee and be on my way, if you don’t mind.”
“That’s not an option, Mr. Barnum. I also need to advise you that you’re starting to piss me off.”
“I don’t see why.”
“I’ll explain. You’re one skip and a jump from being charged as an accessory in several homicides, all of them involving your companion Jack Collins. I dug up nine of his female victims. When we get time, I’ll show you their postmortem photographs. The photos don’t do justice to the realities of an exhumation-the stench of decomposition and the eight-ball stare and that sort of thing-but you’ll have some sense of what a spray of forty-five-caliber bullets can do to human tissue.”
“It’s true?” the prisoner asked.
“What?”
“What you just said. Jack did that?”
Pam Tibbs had just come out the back door. “Who the hell you think did it, son?” she asked.
The prisoner tried to hold his eyes on hers, but his stare broke, and he sucked the moisture out of his cheeks and swallowed.
Pam and Hackberry took the handcuffed man up the steel spiral stairs to the second floor and walked him down the row of cells to the end of the corridor. Pam whanged her baton against a cell door when two men came to the bars. Hackberry unhooked the prisoner, and he and Pam Tibbs stepped inside the room with him.
“You have a lavatory and a toilet and a bed and a chair and a window that lets you see the street,” Hackberry said. “I apologize for all the graffiti and drawings of genitalia on the walls. We repaint every six months, but our clientele are a determined bunch.”
“The other cells have bars. Why am I in this one?”
“The only people you’re going to talk to are us, Mr. Barnum,” Hackberry said. “I have a feeling you and Preacher were holed up down by the border or just on the other side of it. But chances are he’s taken off. Is that right? He’s way down in Coahuila by now?”
“You call him Preacher?”
“I don’t call him anything. Others do,” Hackberry said. “You’re a Quaker, right?”
“A man’s religion is a private matter.”
“You deny your faith?” Hackberry said.
“No, sir, I don’t. As you say, I’m a Quaker.”
“And your namesake sailed out on the Flood?”
“Yes, sir, my christened name is Noie. Same spelling as in the King James.”
“Can you tell me, with your background, why in the name of suffering God you hooked up with a man like Jack Collins?”
“Because he befriended me when nobody else did. Because he bound up my wounds and fed and protected me when others passed me by.”
“Do you know how many innocent people have been hurt or killed because they think you have the design for the Predator drone?” Hackberry said.
“I escaped from a bunch of Mexican killers. They’d held me prisoner for weeks. How could I be carrying the design to a Predator drone? How could anyone have ideas that are that stupid?”
“An FBI agent by the name of Ethan Riser called you the modern equivalent of the Holy Grail,” Hackberry said. “The design is in your head. You’re a very valuable man, Mr. Barnum. Ethan Riser could probably explain that to you better than I, except he’s dead. He’s dead because Jack Collins blew his face and skull apart with a Thompson submachine gun. Ethan Riser was a good man and a friend of mine. Have you ever seen anybody machine-gunned, Mr. Barnum?”
“I found out about your friend when it was too late to do anything about it.”
“Are you a deep-plant, sir?” Hackberry said.
“A what?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I was about to go public with some information about the numbers of innocent people we’ve killed in the drone program, but I went into the desert first to think about it. That’s when I got kidnapped by Krill and his friends. They found my government ID and a letter from a minister about my concerns over the Predator program, and they
