“I did.”
“But I’m evil?”
“You don’t plan for me to leave here, not alive, at least. Take your lies and your deceit from the room. You’re odious in the sight of God and man, Mr. Sholokoff. I suspect your role as a pornographer allows you to feel powerful about women. But in any woman’s eyes, you would be looked upon with pity. Your fetid breath and your physical repulsiveness are simply an extension of the blackness in your heart. Any woman who is not of diminished capacity would immediately be aware of that and want to flee your presence, no matter what she might tell you. Ask the people around you and see what their response is.”
He was clearly fighting to retain the merry light in his eyes and to keep his grin in place, but his mouth twitched slightly, and his nostrils were dilating. “Do you like my farm?”
“Why should I care one way or another about your farm?” she asked.
“Because it’s yours. Your permanent home. You will be among the people, part of the soil, fertilizer for their vegetables,” he replied. “What finer fate for a martyr of your stature?”
Preacher Jack Collins didn’t like to be pushed. Nor did he like losing control of things or, worse, having control taken from him. Not only had Noie Barnum, ingrate extraordinaire, strolled off from their safe house, he had managed to get himself arrested in a convenience store and put in a county bag that usually housed drunks and check writers and wife beaters. When Noie did not return from his stroll down the highway, Jack had gotten on his cell phone and begun making calls to an informational network that he had created and maintained for two decades, a network that no one would ordinarily associate with a man who dressed in beggar’s rags and wandered the desert like a Bedouin. It included hookers from El Paso to Austin, button men from both sides of the border, Murphy artists, street dips and stalls, shylocks, coyotes, second-story creeps, drug mules, corrupt Mexican cops, safecrackers, car boosters, money washers, fences of every stripe, and a morphine-addicted retired librarian in Houston who could probably find Jimmy Hoffa’s body if the FBI would take time to retain her.
It didn’t take long to discover what had happened. Noie had gotten pinched in the convenience store by the same deputy Preacher Jack had dug up from a premature burial. How about that for ingratitude? Then a snitch just getting out of the bag had spotted Noie in custody and dropped the dime on him with Josef Sholokoff’s people. Now several Mexicans were saying that a bunch of guys in camouflage masks had landed a helicopter at the Chinese woman’s place, murdered a man in front of a child, and abducted the Chinese woman and a half-breed.
Jack had no doubt who was behind the abduction. Josef Sholokoff wanted Noie Barnum in his possession. The quickest way to him was through the sheriff, and the quickest way to the sheriff was through Anton Ling.
At four A.M. the morning after the abduction, a man who was part albino and part black and who had pink eyes and hairless skin that resembled different shades of white rubber that had been stitched together delivered a new Toyota to Preacher Jack at a cafe just north of Ojinaga. “There’s another registration and another set of plates under the seat. I got you two driver’s licenses, too,” he said. He put the keys in Jack’s hand, his eyes holding steady on Jack’s.
“Anyone ever tell you it’s rude to stare into somebody’s face?” Jack said.
“You’re hot.”
“You know a time when I wasn’t?”
“Not like this. I had a hard time on the driver’s licenses. Word is you popped an FBI agent.”
“He popped himself.”
“A photo guy I use says you’re the stink on shit and for me not to come back again.”
“You wouldn’t try to put the slide on me, would you, Billy?”
“Just telling you like it is.”
“You want more money?”
“I was thinking about visiting Baja. Maybe lie on the beach and cool out for a while.”
“What do you use for suntan lotion-ninety-weight motor oil?”
“I was speaking metaphorically.”
Jack took three hundred dollars from his wallet and folded the bills between his fingers and stuffed them in the man’s shirt pocket. “A metaphor means comparing one thing in terms of another without using the words ‘like’ or ‘as.’ ‘To lie on a beach’ is not a metaphor. If I said to you, ‘Tell your parents to buy a better quality of condoms,’ I would be making an implication, but I would not be speaking metaphorically. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
“Grammar was never my strong suit.”
“Literary terms have nothing to do with grammar,” Jack said. “If you’re going to speak your native language, why don’t you invest some time in the public library? It’s free. In the meantime, don’t go around using terms you don’t know the meaning of.” Jack stuffed the keys to his Trans Am into the man’s pocket, on top of the bills. “Drive it to San Antone and park it at the airport. Wear gloves, but don’t wipe it down. Leave the keys on the dashboard and the parking stub in the ashtray.”
“Somebody will boost it.”
“Nobody slips one past you.”
“The guy who boosts it will get pinched, and the cops won’t know if he’s lying to them or not-about where he got it, I mean. You’re doing a mind-fuck on them?”
“Don’t use that kind of language in my presence,” Jack said.
“I’ll never figure you out, Preacher.”
“Get out of my sight.”
An hour later, he drove his new car to within one block of Sheriff Holland’s jail and, wearing a hat and round steel-rimmed sunglasses that were as black as welder’s goggles, went into a cafe and ordered a to-go box of scrambled eggs, ham, grits, and toast and a cup of scalding black coffee. He returned to his car and spread his food on the dashboard and ate with a plastic fork and spoon without seasoning of any kind or even seeming to taste it, as though consuming chaff swept up from a granary floor. His windows were down, and the air was cool and smelled of rain, and the storm clouds above the hills were so thick and swollen that he could not tell when the sun broke the horizon. In moments like these, Jack felt a strange sense of peace, as though the travels of the sun and moon had been set into abeyance, as though time had stopped and the denouement of his life, one that he secretly feared, had been postponed indefinitely.
Jack picked up his coffee. It was still so hot, the steam rose into his hat brim and scorched his forehead. But his gaze, which was fastened on the jail, never wavered, nor did his mouth twitch when he drank the cup to the bottom.
The electric light was burning in the sheriff’s office. When the front door opened, Jack saw the sheriff walk to the silver pole by the sidewalk and clip the American flag to the chain and raise it flapping in the wind. At the same moment, Jack’s cell phone vibrated on the seat. The call was from the morphine-addicted reference librarian in Houston.
“I may have found your Russian,” she said. “He owns a place down in Mexico, one with a helipad on it. It’s a horse breeding farm. A French magazine did an article on it about five years back.”
“Can you find out if he’s there?”
“I’ll work on it. I found three game farms he owns in Texas and a place in Phoenix. You want me to check them out, too?”
“No, concentrate on Mexico.”
“I found something else. Sholokoff’s name came up a couple of times with a guy by the name of Temple Dowling. You know him?”
“Dowling was running whores with Sholokoff.”
“I did a search on Dowling and found the name of a security service he uses. I hacked into it and discovered Dowling just went missing in Santa Fe. You think there’s a connection?”
Jack stared at the front of the jail and at the flag ballooning and popping against the charcoal-blue darkness of the sky. “You there, Preacher?” she asked.
“Yeah, Sholokoff’s people probably grabbed him. No one else would have motivation.”
“You doing all this to get the Chinese woman back?”
“What difference does it make?”
“Because there’s this story I don’t believe. About these Thai prostitutes who were murdered. They had heroin balloons in their stomachs. Sholokoff was using them as hookers and mules at the same time. Some people say you
