“You’re too slick for us?” Hackberry replied.
“You know what we want. Deliver him up and there won’t be any problem.”
“By now you’ve probably figured out I’m a bit slow on the uptake. What is it you think I have?”
“‘It’ is a Quaker with a hush-puppy accent who by all rights is our property.”
“Somebody snitched us off, huh?”
“Spying on you hasn’t been a big challenge, Sheriff. You seem to leave your shit prints everywhere you go.”
“Should we decide to deliver up our Quaker friend, what are y’all going to do for us?”
“Give you your Chinese girlfriend back, for one. For two, you’ll get her back looking just the way she did the last time you saw her. Are you getting the picture?”
“I don’t know if it’s the electrical storm or that peckerwood speech defect, but you’re a little hard to understand.”
“We have another guest here, a guy whose father you did scut work for. We’re gonna let him be a kind of audiovisual aid for you. Hang on just a second. You’re gonna like this.”
The caller seemed to remove the phone from his ear and hold it away from him. In the background, Hackberry could hear voices and echoes inside a large room, probably one with stone or brick walls. “Turn up the volume for Sheriff Holland,” the caller said.
Then Hackberry heard a sound that he never wanted to hear again, a cry that burst from the throat and reverberated off every surface in the room and died with a series of sobs and a whimper that the listener could associate only with hopelessness and despair.
“That’s Mr. Dowling, Sheriff,” the caller said. “As you’ve probably gathered, he’s not having a good morning.”
“You abducted Temple Dowling?”
“It’s more like he abducted himself. All we had to do was get a little girl to perch her twat on a bar stool, and Mr. Dowling was in the net. Want to talk to Ms. Ling?”
Hackberry could hear his own breath against the surface of the receiver. “Yes, I would,” he said.
“You’d like that?”
“If you want to negotiate, I need to know she’s there.”
“She was with Civil Air Transport, wasn’t she? What they called the Flying Tiger Airline?”
“If that’s what she told you.”
“She didn’t tell me anything. She didn’t have to. She has a tattoo of the Flying Tiger emblem on her ass. Have you ever had an opportunity to see it-I mean her ass?”
Hackberry’s mouth was dry, his heart hammering, his breath coming hard in his throat. “No matter how this plays out, I’ll be seeing you down the track. You know that, don’t you?”
“You still think I sound like a peckerwood? I’d like to hear you say that one more time.”
Hackberry swallowed, a taste like diesel oil sliding down his throat.
“No?” the voice said. “We’ll give you a little time to think over your options. Noie Barnum belongs to us, Sheriff. Want to throw away Ms. Ling’s life for an empty-headed government pissant? Do the smart thing.”
“Why does he belong to you?”
“Mr. Dowling cost my employer a great deal of money. Barnum is the payback. Tell you what. I’m gonna send you a package. Check it out and we’ll talk again. In the meantime, I’m gonna take personal care of Ms. Ling. Don’t worry, I won’t touch a hair on her head. Promise.”
The line went dead.
Anton Ling’s captors had placed her in a subterranean room that was cool and damp and smelled of lichen and the river stones out of which it was made. Three ground-level barred windows that resembled slits in a machine-gun bunker gave onto a scene that seemed out of place and time: a sunrise that had the bluish-red color of a bruise, a meandering milky-brown river from which the fields had been irrigated an emerald green, livestock that could have been water buffalo grazing in riparian grasses. But the people tending animals or working in the fields were not Indo-Chinese peasants; they were Mexicans who had probably eaten breakfast in the dark and gone to work with the singleness of purpose that characterized all workers whose aspirations consisted of little more than getting through the day and returning home in the evening without involving themselves in the political considerations of those who owned the land.
The floor was concrete, once covered with a carpet that had molded into a mat of black thread. Against one wall was a wooden bed with a tick mattress on it, and a toilet in the corner with a partition that partially shielded it from view. The bars in the door were sheathed in flaking orange rust, and the stones in the wall had turned black and oily with the seepage of groundwater. Someone had scratched a Christian cross on one stone; on another was a woman’s name; on another were the words Ayudame, Dios.
The screaming that had come from another part of the subterranean area had stopped about two hours ago. Briefly, Anton had seen a tall, mustached man in a suit and a soiled white shirt carrying a medical bag. He had studiously avoided looking at her, his shoulders rounded, the back of his head turned to her, his uncut hair hanging over his collar like a tangle of twigs. To someone else, he had said, “I have left you the hypodermics. That is all I will do. I have seen nothing here. I am going back to my bed.”
She heard an upstairs door open and feet descending the steps. So far, her captors had not spoken to her without their masks. The man who was approaching her did not wear a mask; he wore elevated shoes, a white sport coat, a monogrammed lavender shirt unbuttoned below the collar, and black slacks. His nose was hooked, the nostrils thick with hair, his cheeks slathered with whiskers, the exposed top of his chest gnarled with tiny bones. He unlocked the cell door with an iron key and pulled it open and came inside the room, wiping the rust off his fingers with a handkerchief. His breath smelled of decay and seemed to reach out and touch her face like wet cobweb. “Frank doesn’t like you,” he said. “He says you spat on him. He says that’s the second time you’ve done it.”
“He tried to take my clothes off.”
“He shouldn’t have done that. I’ll talk to him about it. Sit down.” When she didn’t respond, he beamed and said, “Please. Don’t make everything unpleasant. You remember me?”
“No,” she said, sitting down.
“I helped provide the AK-47s you and your friends shipped to Nicaragua.”
“I dealt with many undesirables. I suspect you were among them.”
“I’ve always wanted to talk with you on a personal level. You are quite famous. Do you want something to eat?”
“Yes.”
“I knew we could be friends.”
“You’re Josef Sholokoff. You were at my house when your men almost drowned me.”
“Maybe.”
“You killed Cody Daniels in the cruelest way a man can die.”
“The cowboy minister? He was of no importance. Why are you worried about him? You should be thinking about yourself. We’re going to put you on the phone with Sheriff Holland.” He was still grinning, his eyes so bright and intense and merry that they were impossible to read. “One way or another, you’ll get on the phone. Or you will be heard on the phone. You know what I mean, don’t you?”
“No,” she replied, looking straight ahead.
“You heard the man screaming earlier this morning. He was talking on the phone to Sheriff Holland. He just didn’t know it.”
“Is he still alive?”
“He might be, if his heart didn’t give out. I’ll check and see. Do you want to meet him?”
“Where is Krill?”
“These are insignificant people. Why do you keep dwelling on them?”
“I think you’re evil. You’re not just a man who does evil. You love evil for its own sake. I’ve known a few like you. Not many, but some.”
“With the Khmer Rouge?”
“No, the Khmer Rouge were uneducated peasants who were bombed by B-52s. You’re different. I suspect your cruelty is your means to hide your cowardice.”
“And you? You didn’t rain fire on people who lived in grass huts?”
