Krill stood frozen, the sound of the helicopter blades growing louder and louder in his head, the dust swirling in the downdraft, the rain clouds forming into blue horsetails, the windmill shuddering against the sky, all of these things happening simultaneously as the man with the. 357 lifted the barrel and fired a solitary round through one side of Negrito’s head and out the other.
Hackberry Holland was reading a biography of T. E. Lawrence under a lamp by his front window when he heard thunder rolling in the clouds far to the south, reverberating in the hills, where occasionally a flash of dry lightning would flicker and then die like a wet match. The book was written by Michael Korda and dealt with the dissolution of empires and a new type of warfare, what came to be known as “wars of insurgency,” all of which had their model among the sand dunes and date palms of Arabia. As Hackberry read the lines describing the white glare of the Arabian desert, he thought of the snow that had blanketed the hills south of the Yalu the first morning he had seen Chinese troops in their quilted uniforms, tens of thousands of them, many of them wearing tennis shoes, marching out of the white brilliance of the snowfield, heedless of the automatic-weapons fire that danced across the fields and the artillery rounds that blew geysers of snow and ice and dirt and rock in their midst.
He closed the book and placed it on his knee and stared out the window. Not far down the road, he could see a tree limb that had fallen across the telephone line that led to his house. Just as he got up to check the phone, he saw a cruiser turn off the road into his drive, its emergency bar rippling, its siren off. Hackberry stepped out on the front porch and watched R. C. Bevins get out of the cruiser and walk toward him on the flagstones, his face somber. “You tried to call?” Hackberry said.
“Yes, sir, your phone’s out. Your cell must be off, too.”
“It’s in my truck. What is it, R.C.?”
“We’ve got a homicide at the Ling place. The victim appears to be Hispanic. From the exit wound in his head, I’d say somebody used a hollow-point. A ten-year-old girl had been left in Ms. Ling’s care and saw it all. When her mother came for her, she found the girl locked in a pantry. Ms. Ling is gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?”
“From what the little girl said, there were six guys in masks. They took Ms. Ling and a friend of the dead man on a helicopter.”
“How long ago?”
“A couple of hours.”
“Did you print the victim?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get a priority with AFIS.”
“Pam is already on it. Who do you reckon are the guys with the chopper?”
“Josef Sholokoff’s people.”
“The little girl said the dead man and his friend spoke Spanish. She also said the friend had a pistol on one hip and a long knife on the other.”
“What else did she say about him?”
“She said he was tall and that he had funny shoulders. She said they were too wide, like he had a stick pushed sideways inside his shirt.”
“That’s Krill.”
“What would he be doing at Ms. Ling’s place?”
“I don’t have any idea, none at all.”
“You okay, Sheriff?”
“How long have you been trying to get me?”
“About fifteen minutes. There wasn’t no way you could know the line was down.”
“Was Ms. Ling hurt?”
“The little girl said a guy shoved her down. The same guy held a knife at the little girl’s throat. She said they all had gloves on, and the shooter called the dead man a greaseball. You think these are the same guys who crucified Cody Daniels?”
“What’s your opinion?”
R.C. scratched at his eyebrow. “I think we got a special breed on our hands,” he said. “I think all this is related to that Barnum boy we got locked in our jail. I’m not sure if we done the right thing on that.”
Pam Tibbs was waiting for Hackberry when he arrived at the jail. She was not wearing makeup, and there were circles under her eyes. “What do you want to do?” she asked.
“About what?” he said.
“Everything.”
“Did you talk to the FBI yet?”
“I reported the homicide and the kidnapping. I didn’t mention our boy in isolation,” she said.
“You’re uncomfortable with that?”
“I don’t know what you’re doing, Hack. I don’t know what the plan is.”
“They’re going to call.”
“The abductors are?”
“You bet.”
“Then what?”
“We’ve got what they want. As long as Barnum stays in our hands, Anton Ling will be kept alive.”
“Hack, they wouldn’t have grabbed her if we hadn’t locked up Barnum.”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“Where are you going?”
“To take a nap,” he said.
He went up the spiral stairs and pulled a mattress from a supply locker into an alcove off the corridor and lay down on his side with his head cushioned on his arm and fell asleep with far more ease than he would have guessed, knowing that his dreams would take him to a place that was as much a part of his future as it was his past. He remembered the words of the writer Paul Fussell, who had said he joined the army to fight the war for its duration and had discovered that he would have to fight it every day and every night for the rest of his life. In his dream, Hackberry returned once again to Camp Five in No Name Valley and the brick factory called Pak’s Palace outside Pyongyang. The dream was not about deprivation or the harshness of the weather or the mistreatment visited upon him by his captors. It was about isolation and abandonment and the belief that one was totally alone and lost and without hope. It was the worst feeling that anyone could ever experience.
In the dream, the landscape changed, and he saw himself standing on a precipice in Southwest Texas, staring out at a valley that looked like an enormous seabed gone dry. The valley floor was covered with great round white rocks that resembled the serrated, coral-encrusted backs of sea tortoises, stranded and alone, dying under an unmerciful sun. In the dream, he was not a navy corpsman but a little boy whose father had said that one day the mermaids would return to Texas and wink at him from somewhere up in the rocks. All he saw in the dream was his own silent witness to the suffering of the sea creatures.
“Jesus Christ, wake up, Hack,” he heard Pam Tibbs say, shaking his arm.
“What? What is it?” he said, his eyes filmed with sleep.
“You must have been having a terrible dream.”
“What’d I say?”
“Just the stuff people yell out in dreams. Forget it.”
“Pam, tell me what I said.”
“‘He takes people apart.’ That’s what you said.”
The telephone call came in one hour later.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
From his office window, he could see flecks of rain blowing in the glow of the streetlights, the traffic signal at the intersection bouncing on its support cables, the electrical flashes in the clouds that ringed the town. “Don’t try tracing this,” the voice said.
