He stepped back from the box, his hands at his sides. He shook his head. She stepped closer and looked down into the box. “Oh, boy,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“It was flown here?”
He nodded and cleared his throat. “Get the key to Barnum’s cell,” he said.
They went up the stairs together, Hackberry holding the box, Pam walking in front of him. She turned the key in the cell door and pulled it open. Noie Barnum was lying on his bunk, reading a magazine. He put the magazine on the floor but didn’t get up.
“Come in and close the door behind you,” Hackberry said to Pam.
“Something going on?” Barnum said.
“Yeah, sit up,” Hackberry said. “See this?”
“Yeah, a box.”
“Look inside it.”
“What for?”
Hackberry set the box on the foot of the bunk and picked up the magazine from the floor. He rolled it into a cone and slapped Barnum across the head. Then he slapped him a second time and a third. “I want to tear you up, Mr. Barnum. I don’t mean that figuratively. I want to throw you down those stairs. That’s how I feel about you.”
Barnum’s eyes were filming, his face blotched. “You don’t have the right to treat me like this.”
“Look inside that box.”
“Somebody’s head is in there?” Barnum said, his expression defiant, his eyes lifted to Hackberry’s.
Hackberry hit him again, this time tearing the cover loose from the magazine. Barnum lifted his hand to protect himself, then looked down into the box. The blood drained from his face. “Oh God,” he said.
“Tell me what you see.”
“It’s a hand and a foot.”
“Are they male or female?”
“Sir?”
“Answer the question.”
“There’s hair on the ankle. It must be a man’s.”
“Look at the hand.”
“What about it?”
“Look closer. There’s a ring on it. Look at it.”
“I’m not responsible for this.”
“That’s a University of Texas class ring. The hand and the ring belong to Temple Dowling. The people who did this to him will probably start on Anton Ling next. Right now I’d like to rip you apart. Instead of doing that, I’m going to ask you a couple of questions, and you’re going to answer them. Got that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where were you and Jack Collins hiding?”
“Just like you said earlier, right south of the border. But Jack’s gone by now.”
“Gone where?”
“That’s anybody’s guess. You see him and then he’s gone. He’s standing in one place, then in another, without seeming to move. I’ve never known anybody like him.”
“You’re just catching on to the fact that there’s something a little unusual about him?”
“I don’t know where Jack is. I don’t know where Miss Anton is, either. I feel awful about what’s happened. My sister died in the Towers. I wanted to get even with the people who killed her. I didn’t want any of these other things to happen.”
Hackberry let out his breath and felt the heat rise out of his chest like ash off a dead fire. “I want you out of here,” he said.
“Say again?”
“You heard me. Hit the road.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You don’t have to. You just got eighty-sixed from my jail. It’s a first. Burn a candle the next time you’re in church.”
“Maybe I don’t want to leave.”
“Son, you’d better get a lot of gone between you and this jailhouse,” Pam said.
“Well, you’re gonna see me again,” Barnum said.
Pam raised her eyebrows threateningly.
“Yes, ma’am, I’m gone,” he said.
Downstairs, ten minutes later, Pam said, “Hack, what in the hell are you doing?”
“Fixing to call the FBI,” he replied.
But it wasn’t for the reasons she thought.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Pam was still staring at him when he got off the phone. “You told the feds about Dowling’s mutilation but not about Barnum?”
“That’s right,” he replied.
“Why does Barnum get a pass?”
“Because if the feds get him into custody, they’ll probably lose interest in Anton Ling. Second, Barnum isn’t a bad kid and, in my opinion, deserves another chance.”
“You have a funny way of looking at the world, Hack.”
“My father used to say, ‘The name of the game is five-card draw. You never have to play the hand you’re dealt.’ He believed everything we see around us now was once part of the Atlantic Ocean, with mermaids sitting up on the rocks, and that one day I would see the mermaids return.”
“We’d better get some breakfast, kemo sabe.”
“I told you that’s what Rie called me, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, I’m sorry, I forgot,” she said.
“Don’t say you’re sorry. You didn’t know Rie. She’d like for you to call me that. She’d like you.”
She looked at him in a strange way, her mouth slightly parted, her face suddenly vulnerable, but he did not see it. Maydeen had just come out of the dispatcher’s cage, her anger palpable. “He’s on the line, Hack,” she said.
“Who is he?”
“He just told me, ‘Put the sheriff on the line, woman.’”
“Collins?”
“I say we hang up on him. Don’t let him jerk you around like this, Hack.”
“No, I think this is the call we’ve been waiting on,” Hackberry said.
Jack Collins was sitting at a small table under a canvas tarp propped on poles next to an airplane hangar, a corked green bottle of seltzer and a glass and a saucer of salted lime slices by his hand. A clutch of banana plants grew tightly against the hangar wall, beads of moisture the size of BBs sliding down the leaves. The wind was hot, the canvas riffling above his head, the desert lidded from horizon to horizon with a layer of solid blue-black clouds that seemed to force the heat and humidity radiating from the desert floor back into the earth. The clouds crackled with electricity but offered no real promise of rain or even a moment of relief from the grit and alkali in the wind and the smell of salt and decomposition that whirled with the dust devils out of the streambeds. Jack decided there was nothing wrong with Mexico that a half-dozen hydrogen bombs and a lot of topsoil couldn’t cure.
Jack’s pilot and two hired killers, the cousins Eladio and Jaime, were waiting for him by the two-engine Beechcraft on the airstrip. The pilot was on retainer, at Jack’s beck and call on a twenty-four-hour basis. Eladio and Jaime were available for any activity that put money in their pockets, night or day; if there were any lines they
