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    Rain Gods: A Novel
    Rain Gods: A Novel
    Rain Gods: A Novel
    Ebook569 pages10 hours

    Rain Gods: A Novel

    By James Lee Burke

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    “America’s best novelist” (The Denver Post) brings back one of his most fascinating characters—Texas sheriff Hackberry Holland, cousin to lawman Billy Bob Holland—in this heart-pounding bestseller.

    In a heat-cracked border town, the bodies of nine illegal aliens—women and girls, killed execution-style—are unearthed in a shallow grave. Haunted by a past he can’t shake and his own private demons, Hack attempts to untangle the grisly case, which may lead to more bloodshed. Damaged young Iraq vet Pete Flores, who saw too much before fleeing the crime scene, and his girlfriend, Vikki Gaddis, are running for their lives. Sorting through the lowlifes who are hunting down Pete, and with Preacher Jack Collins, a Godfearing serial killer for hire, in the mix, Hack is caught up in a terrifying race for survival—for Pete, Vikki, and himself.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateJul 14, 2009
    ISBN9781439137369
    Author

    James Lee Burke

    James Lee Burke is a New York Times bestselling author, two-time winner of the Edgar Award, and the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in Fiction. He has authored forty novels and two short story collections. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

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    Reviews for Rain Gods

    4/5

    217 ratings17 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This is a story about justice and friendship.In the southern part of Texas by the Mexican border, the sheriff's office is informed that there were shots fired behind an old church.Sheriff Hackberry Holland, a Korean War vet, finds the graves of nine Asian woman. Later, he learns that they had balloons filled with drugs in their stomachs and were probably heading to a place where they could work as prostitutes.With James Lee Burke's ability to describe settings and provide unforgettable characters, we follow the trail of the killers.They want to kill the man who informed the law about the killings. The man, an Iraq vet may be able to identify the killers.The action is well paced so the reader can see what is going on with the criminals, the two young people who are running for their lives and law enforcement led by Hack Holland.The characters are well thought out and believable and the story is entertaining.
    • 4/5
      Great plot and characters for an audiobook! And Will Patton's narration was spot on; I loved the way he differentiated his tone and accent for various characters and had a baseline sound for the omniscient third person narrator (I hope that is clear.)I like Burke's other series but Sheriff Hackberry Holland is tempting me to step out on Dave Roubicheaux.The detail and humor of the characters reminded me of Elmore Leonard's work. I also got a hint of Cormac McCarthy in some of the plotting and descriptions of landscapes and such.Both my husband and I enjoyed listening to this book together and we are already looking for another in this series.
    • 3/5
      Lots of big words I had to look up. Holland ( sheriff of small town in Texas ) looks for murders of illegal women. His Deputiy looking to intangle him in her life, she is much younger. People running away from killers, Killers killing each other, Every one has a problem in their own life, Burke describes Texas boarder towns weather and land scape as something I world not like to experiance. To hot & dry for normal people.
    • 5/5
      This story brings together all the Burkeian elements of redemption, war guilt, the complexities of man (Preacher Collins), the curing power of love, and the author's love and usage of erudite vocabulary and pointoilistic word painting. As they say in bowling, it is a solid strike, right in the pocket, without any pin wavering. I hope Burke sees what a wonderful character he has created in the Preacher, as least equal to Raskolinov, and that he reprises him, but preferably not in southwest Texas (I dislike that place)!
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this audiobook, although I am partial to Burke's Robicheaux character. Hackberry Holland is a fine man and I like that Burke made him in his seventies and still has a young woman attracted to him. I think it does a lot to define his character, to show what a manly type of person he is and how his goodness makes him appealing. "Rain Gods" has a good deal going for it in terms of atmosphere. Burke uses the bleak and isolated climate of Texas in such a way that it contributes to the personalities of the characters by its influence on their moods.Holland not only has to confront a killer responsible for the deaths of people found in a mass grave but he has to deal with a preacher who claims to kill in the name of the Lord. His young deputy, Pam Tibbs, is attracted to him and he is not sure how to handsle that, but she tries to let him know. One of my favorite things about Burke's writing is that his characters are complex and well-developed and he hasn't let me down in this book. I recommend the audiobook if that is something you would consider, if not don't miss it either way!
    • 4/5
      Though metaphor is strtched at times and opinion heavy handed JLB still comes up with some great lines and phrase and he always tells a good story. I definitely will continue the Hack series.
    • 4/5
      A seemingly simple plot - a mass grave is uncovered, and the town Sheriff tracks down the killers - but this book is much more than a simple detective story. It is a contemplation upon the definition of good and evil: is a good man who bends the rules that different from a bad man with a strict moral code? Is a good man bent upon revenge for the murder of his daughter justified in doing bad things to bad people? Who is responsible for a battle-scarred veteran's bad choices? In a James Lee Burke novel, there is no clear black and white...it is all gray, and this makes the characters real, believable, and interesting.Amidst all these rich and varied characters, Burke spins a tangled web of a plot. It is impossible to know what will happen, where a character's actions will take him, and indeed who will survive and who will die. The question of who killed the women buried in the mass grave becomes secondary in the quest to understand why these multifaceted people behave as they do and whether the town sheriff will survive the events unfolding around him. Wonderful, well-written story.
    • 3/5
      bad guys are very cruel people
    • 5/5
      Eager to escape his problematic past, Hackberry Holland acquires the sheriff's position in a rundown Texas border town. When authorities discover nine dead prostitutes buried in the desert, Hack must work with both Texas and Mexico, as well as face down hired gunmen, crooked strip club owners, and dubious drug lords, to solve the case.
    • 5/5
      I normally enjoy James Lee Burke's novels, but this one was exceptional. Half a dozen of the characters (including both the protagonist, his deputy who loves him, and the villains) were outlined in mesmerizing detail.This was one of those rare novels I wished would never end.
    • 5/5
      In his second Hackberry Holland novel, "Rain Gods," James Lee Burke explores the battle faced by Texas lawmen charged with stopping drugs and illegal aliens from crossing the state's southern border. The fact that Hurricane Katrina flushed some of the worst New Orleans scum into Texas, criminals who thrive on human suffering and weaknesses, including human trafficking, makes Sherif Holland's job just that much tougher.Hack Holland admits to himself that he has lived a full life but even at seventy-something years of age he is not ready to call it quits, and he his still the chief law enforcement officer in his little corner of southwest Texas. Hack is a reasonable man, not a judgmental one. He readily admits that his own past includes a time during which he was both a "drunk and a whoremonger" but those years have given him keen insight into the human condition. What he discovers behind a church late one afternoon, however, will shake him to his core.Working on an anonymous tip directing him to the empty ground behind the abandoned church, Holland unearths the machine-gunned bodies of nine women and girls who had been killed there just hours earlier. What he sees and smells as he uncovers the bodies causes him to flash back to his days as a Korean War POW and he knows that his nights are destined to be filled with nightmares again. What he does not know is that he has just stepped into the middle of a fight between New Orleans lowlifes that began decades earlier."Rain Gods" is an epic confrontation between good and evil but it is one in which those on the side of good are not always squeaky clean and those on the side of evil sometimes live under a moral code only they can understand. Its plot is a relatively simple one - but plot is not the most important thing in this James Lee Burke novel. What Burke does best is create complicated, totally believable, characters by adding layer after layer to their makeup while exploring what it is that makes each of them tick. And that is exactly what he does in "Rain Gods."Joining Hackberry Holland in this powerful story are Pam Tibbs, the young deputy who is falling in love with Hack as she works along side him to catch the killers; Pete Flores, the drunken Iraq War vet who knows too much about the murders to be allowed to live; Vikki Gaddis, Pete's long-suffering girlfriend; and "the preacher," a killer with enough of a conscious that he almost becomes a sympathetic character. Interestingly, Burke uses three very strong female characters to save some of his male characters from themselves: Holland has Pam Tibbs to save him from his fatalistic decisions, Vikki Gaddis is willing to flee alongside Pete Flores , and New Orleans gangster Nick Dolan finds that his wife Esther will fight like a tiger to save his life. Without their women, none of these men would have likely survived what happens to them in "Rain Gods."Burke has a good feel for what life in southwest Texas is like and he uses the look and climate of that part of the state almost as an additional character. Its bleakness and isolation offer the perfect setting for the story being told, a battle between the not-so-perfect and the not-completely-bad set in an environment that can be beautiful and depressing at the same time.Rate at: 5.0
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed reading this book - it wasn't "work". I liked the main character once I got past his name but maybe that's because I'm a Chicagoan and unfamiliar with the Western atmosphere. I felt the character is similar to Dave Robicheux - this isn't a bad thing and was pleased about the ending. I'm an Elmore Leonard fan and I'm really a fan of his dialog. Mr. Burke's dialog in "Rain Gods" was comparable and very entertaining.
    • 5/5
      The book opens with Pete Flores making a 911 call that brings Hackberry Holland to an old, torn up Spanish style church in South Texas. Hackberry goes behind the church where digs up the bodies of nine young girls from Thailand. They had been murdered by Jack Collins a/k/a Preacher with a .45 caliber Thompson submachine gun that carried a 50 round pan magazine. Hugo Cistranos then used a bulldozer to pile dirt over their bodies leaving the area graded smoothly.Hack is a man in his seventies, a county Sheriff in South Texas. He retired there after the death of his second wife to escape the memories of their life together. He is also haunted by memories from Camp Five in No Name Valley where he was a prisoner in the Korean War. Preacher is a contract killer who corrects other people's grammar. His story is told through the book in bits and pieces revealing a truly evil man who lives by his own rules. Hugo Cistranos is at the top of the food chain of a number of thugs and killers.This book is a story of violence and killing full of action and surprises. It is also the story of three couples and their relationships as they take a long walk through hell in gasoline shorts. The couples have three very strong female characters. Vikkie Gaddis is Pete Flores girlfriend. She is a beautiful young woman who plays a Gibson J-200 guitar that she inherited from her father and sings songs from the Carter family. Pam Tibbs is Hack's Chief Deputy. She is a tough cop and Hack's refusal to acknowledge the feelings between them causes her constant pain. Esther Dolan is the wife of Nick Dolan. He runs a strip club and a restaurant and owns 40% of some escort services. Esther shows remarkable courage in defense of her family as Nick becomes a target of killers for his involvement in the murder of the Thai girls.The book is populated with numerous young male predators described here in one of the many masterpieces of the writer's craft that fill the book." At the same moment, one hundred miles away, three bikers were headed down a two-lane highway, full bore........ The crystal coursed in their veins, the dirty thunder of their exhaust flattening against the asphalt, the blowtorch velocity of the wind on their skin, the surge of the engines' power into their genitalia, blended together in a paean to their lives."I consider this the best book I have read by James Lee Burke to date. I listened to it on audio and then bought the print edition and read that. It is an excellent fast moving murder thriller that is Burke's stock in trade. The stories of the relationships of three couples take this book out of the usual for Burke. The characters in the book from Hack and Preacher to the bit players are well crafted with a gritty realism that shows Burke at his best.
    • 1/5
      I listened to this audiobook on a long distance road trip through the American midwest. Possibly the worst dialogue I have ever read.
    • 5/5
      Violent and gritty enough for the gentlemen, with just enough philosophy and moral ruminations to make the reader believe, or is it realize, that even the vilest criminal has soul-stirrings. Illuminated, transcendent descriptions of our incredible West. Burke's a master!! His complex, distinctive creation, The Preacher, can't be forgotten.
    • 3/5
      The quality of the writing and the interesting characters kept me going and put the book solidly into the "good read" catagory, but I found the plot confusing and I never really understood the motivation for the brutal murder and burial of 9 Asian immigrant women. It does get explained by the end, but the motivation didn't seem deep enough to host all the mayhem that populates the story.
    • 5/5
      James lee Burke never disappoints. This is the first of his books that are not of the Louisiana detective whose name I can not spell series. It won't be the last

    Book preview

    Rain Gods - James Lee Burke

    1

    ON THE BURNT-OUT end of a July day in Southwest Texas, in a crossroads community whose only economic importance had depended on its relationship to a roach paste factory the EPA had shut down twenty years before, a young man driving a car without window glass stopped by an abandoned blue-and-white stucco filling station that had once sold Pure gas during the Depression and was now home to bats and clusters of tumbleweed. Next to the filling station was a mechanic’s shed whose desiccated boards lay collapsed upon a rusted pickup truck with four flat bald tires. At the intersection a stoplight hung from a horizontal cable strung between two power poles, its plastic covers shot out by .22 rifles.

    The young man entered a phone booth and wiped his face slick with the flat of his hand. His denim shirt was stiff with salt and open on his chest, his hair mowed into the scalp, GI-style. He pulled an unlabeled pint bottle from the front of his jeans and unscrewed the cap. Down the right side of his face was a swollen pink scar that was as bright and shiny as plastic and looked pasted onto the skin rather than part of it. The mescal in the bottle was yellow and thick with threadworms that seemed to light against the sunset when he tipped the neck to his mouth. Inside the booth, he could feel his heart quickening and lines of sweat running down from his armpits into the waistband of his undershorts. His index finger trembled as he punched in the numbers on the phone’s console.

    What’s your emergency? a woman dispatcher asked.

    The rolling countryside was the color of a browned biscuit, stretching away endlessly, the monotony of rocks and creosote brush and grit and mesquite trees interrupted only by an occasional windmill rattling in the breeze.

    Last night there was some shooting here. A lot of it, he said. I heard it in the dark and saw the flashes.

    Shooting where?

    By that old church. I think that’s what happened. I was drinking. I saw it from down the road. It scared the doo-doo out of me.

    There was a pause. Are you drinking now, sir?

    Not really. I mean, not much. Just a few hits of Mexican worm juice.

    Tell us where you are, and we’ll send out a cruiser. Will you wait there for a cruiser to come out?

    This doesn’t have anything to do with me. A lot of wets go through here. There’s oceans of trash down by the border. Dirty diapers and moldy clothes and rotted food and tennis shoes without strings in them. Why would they take the strings out of their tennis shoes?

    Is this about illegals?

    I said I heard somebody busting caps. That’s all I’m reporting. Maybe I heard a tailgate drop. I’m sure I did. It clanked in the dark.

    Sir, where are you calling from?

    The same place I heard all that shooting.

    Give me your name, please.

    What name they got for a guy so dumb he thinks doing the right thing is the right thing? Answer me that, please, ma’am.

    He tried to slam down the receiver on the hook but missed. The phone receiver swung back and forth from the phone box as the young man with the welted pink scar on his face drove away, road dust sucking back through the glassless windows of his car.

    TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER, at sunset, the sky turned to turquoise; then the strips of black cloud along the horizon were backlit by a red brilliance that was like the glow of a forge, as though the cooling of the day were about to be set into abeyance so the sun’s heat could prevail through the night into the following dawn. Across the street from the abandoned filling station, a tall man in his seventies, wearing western-cut khakis and hand-tooled boots and an old-fashioned gun belt and a dove-colored Stetson, parked his truck in front of what appeared to be the shell of a Spanish mission. The roof had caved onto the floor, and the doors had been twisted off the hinges and carried inside and broken up and used for firewood by homeless people or teenage vandals. The only tree in the crossroads community was a giant willow; it shaded one side of the church and created a strange effect of shadow and red light on the stucco walls, as though a grass fire were approaching the structure and about to consume it.

    In reality, the church had been built not by Spaniards or Mexicans but by an industrialist who had become the most hated man in America after his company security forces and members of the Colorado militia massacred eleven children and two women during a miners’ strike in 1914. Later, the industrialist reinvented himself as a philanthropist and humanitarian and rehabilitated his family name by building churches around the country. But the miners did not get their union, and this particular church became a scorched cipher that few associate with the two women and eleven children who had tried to hide in a root cellar while the canvas tent above them rained ash and flame upon their heads.

    The tall man was wearing a holstered blue-black white-handled revolver. Unconsciously, he removed his hat when he entered the church, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the deep shadows inside the walls. The oak flooring had been ripped up and hauled away by a contractor, and the dirt underneath was green and cool with lack of sunlight, packed down hard, humped in places, smelling of dampness and the feces of field mice. Scattered about the church’s interior, glinting like gold teeth, were dozens of brass shell casings.

    The tall man squatted down, his gunbelt creaking, his knees popping. He picked up a casing on the end of a ballpoint pen. It, like all the others, was .45-caliber. He cleared his throat softly and spat to one side, unable to avoid the odor that the wind had just kicked up outside. He rose to his feet and walked out the back door and gazed at a field that had been raked by a bulldozer’s blade, the cinnamon-colored dirt scrolled and stenciled by the dozer’s steel treads.

    The tall man returned to his pickup truck and removed a leaf rake and a long-handled shovel from the bed. He walked into the field and sank the steel tip of the shovel blade with the weight of his leg and haunch and struck a rock, then reset the blade in a different spot and tried again. This time the blade went deep, all the way up to his boot sole, as though it were cutting through compacted coffee grounds rather than dirt. When he pulled the shovel free, an odor rose into his nostrils that made his throat close against the bilious surge in his stomach. He soaked a bandana from a canteen in his truck and wrapped it around the lower half of his face and knotted it behind his head. Then he walked slowly across the field, jabbing the inverted half of the rake handle into the ground. Every three or four feet, at the same depth, he felt a soft form of resistance, like a sack of feed whose burlap has rotted and split, the dry dirt rilling back into the hole each time he pulled the wood shaft from the surface. The breeze had died completely. The air was green with the sun’s last light, the sky dissected by birds, the air stained by a growing stench that seemed to rise from his boots into his clothes. The tall man inverted the rake, careful not to touch the tip that he had pushed below the soil, and began scraping at a depression that a feral animal had already crosshatched with claw marks.

    The tall man had many memories from his early life that he seldom shared with others. They involved images of snowy hills south of the Yalu River, and dead Chinese troops in quilted uniforms scattered randomly across the slopes, and F-80 jets flying low out of the overcast sky, strafing the perimeter to push the Chinese mortar and automatic weapons teams back out of range. The wounds on the American dead piled in the backs of the six-bys looked like roses frozen inside snow.

    In his sleep, the tall man still heard bugles blowing in the hills, echoing as coldly as brass ringing on stone.

    The spidery tines of the rake pulled a lock of black hair free from the dirt. The tall man, whose name was Hackberry Holland, looked down into the depression. He touched the rake at the edges of the rounded shape he had uncovered. Then, because of either a lack of compaction around the figure or the fact that it lay on top of other bodies, the soil began to slide off the person’s face and ears and neck and shoulders, down into a subterranean hole, exposing the waxy opalescence of a brow, the rictus that imitated surprise, one eye lidded, the other as bold as a child’s marble, a ball of dirt clenched in the figure’s palm.

    She was thin-boned, a toy person, her black blouse a receptacle for heat and totally inappropriate for the climate. He guessed she was not over seventeen and that she had been alive when the dirt was pushed on top of her. She was also Asian, not Hispanic as he had expected.

    For the next half hour, until the light had gone from the sky, he continued to rake and dig in the field that had obviously been scraped down to the hardpan by a dozer blade, then backfilled with the overburden and tamped down and graded as smoothly as if in preparation for construction of a home.

    He went back to his truck and threw the rake and shovel in the bed, then lifted his handheld radio off the passenger seat. Maydeen, this is Sheriff Holland, he said. I’m behind the old church at Chapala Crossing. I’ve uncovered the burials of nine homicide victims so far, all female. Call the feds and also call both Brewster and Terrell counties and tell them we need their assistance.

    You’re breaking up. Say again? Did I read you right? You said nine homicide—

    We’ve got a mass murder. The victims are all Asian, some of them hardly more than children.

    The guy who made the nine-one-one, he called a second time.

    What’d he say?

    I don’t think he just happened by the church site. I think he’s dripping with guilt.

    Did you get his name?

    He said it was Pete. No last name. Why didn’t you call in? I could have sent help. You’re too goddamn old for this crap, Hack.

    Because at a certain age, you finally accept and trust yourself and let go of the world, he thought. But in reply, all he said was Maydeen, would you not use that kind of language over the air, please?

    PETE FLORES NEVER quite understood why the girl lived with him. Her hair was chestnut-colored, cut short and curled on the ends, her skin clear, her blue-green eyes deep-set, which gave them a mysterious quality that intrigued men and caused them to stare at her back long after she had walked past them. At the diner where she worked, she conducted herself with a level of grace that her customers, mostly long-haul truckers, sensed and respected and were protective of. She attended classes three nights a week at a junior college in the county seat, and the previous semester had published a short story in the college literary magazine. Her name was Vikki Gaddis, and she played a big-belly J-200 Gibson that her father, a part-time country musician from Medicine Lodge, Kansas, had given her when she was twelve years old.

    Her husky voice and accent were not acquired or feigned. On occasion, when she played her guitar and sang at the diner, her customers rose from their chairs and stools and applauded. She also performed sometimes at the nightclub next door, although the patrons were unsure how they should respond when she sang Will the Circle Be Unbroken and Keep on the Sunny Side of Life.

    She was still asleep when Pete entered the paintless frame house they rented, one that sat inside the blue shadow of a hill when the sun rose above the horizon as hot and sultry as a broken egg yolk, the light streaking across the barren land. Pete’s scalp and face were pulled tight with the beginnings of a hangover, the inside of his head still filled with the sounds of the highway bar he had been in. He washed his face in the sink, the water running cool out of a faucet that drew on an aluminum cistern elevated on stilts behind the house. The hill that blocked the sunrise, almost like an act of mercy, looked made of rust and cinders and was dotted with scrub brush and mesquite trees whose root systems could barely grow deep enough to find moisture. He knew Vikki would be up soon, that she had probably waited for him last night and slept fitfully, either knowing or not knowing where he was. He wanted to fix breakfast for her, as a form of contrition or in a pretense at normalcy. He filled the coffeepot with water, and the effect of both darkness and coolness it created inside the metal was somehow a temporary balm to the pounding heat inside his head.

    He smeared margarine inside a skillet and took two eggs and a piece of sliced ham from the ice chest he and Vikki used as a refrigerator. He broke the eggs in the skillet and set the ham and a slice of sourdough bread beside them and let the skillet begin to heat on the propane stove. The smell of the breakfast he wanted to cook for Vikki rose into his face, and he rushed out the back door into the yard so he would not retch on his clothes.

    He held on to the sides of a horse tank, his stomach empty now, his back shaking, a pressure band tightening across his scalp, his breath an insult to the air and the freshness of the morning. He thought he heard the thropping downdraft of gunships and the great clanking weight of an armored vehicle topping a rise, its treads dripping sand, a CD of Burn, Motherfucker, Burn screaming over the intercom. He stared into the distant wastes, but the only living things he saw were carrion birds floating high on the wind stream, turning in slow circles as the land heated and the smell of mortality rose into the sky.

    He went back inside and rinsed his mouth, then scraped Vikki’s breakfast onto a plate. The eggs were burned on the edges, the yolks broken and hard and stained with black grease. He sat in a chair and hung his head between his knees, the kitchen spinning around him. Through the partially opened door of the bedroom, through the blue light and the dust stirring in the breeze, he could see her head on the pillow, her eyes closed, her lips parted with her breathing. The poverty of the surroundings into which he had taken her made him ashamed. The cracks in the linoleum were ingrained with dirt, the mismatched furniture bought at Goodwill, the walls a sickly green. Everything he touched except Vikki Gaddis was somehow an extension of his own failure.

    Her eyes opened. Pete sat up straight in the chair, trying to smile, his face stiff and unnatural with the effort.

    I was fixing you breakfast, but I made a mess of it, he said.

    Where you been, hon?

    You know, up yonder, he replied, gesturing in the direction of the highway. He waited for her to speak, but she didn’t. Why would people throw away their tennis shoes but take the shoestrings with them? he asked.

    What are you talking about?

    In the places where the wets go through, there’s trash and garbage everywhere. They throw away their old tennis shoes, but they take out the strings first. Why do they do that?

    She was standing up now, pulling her jeans over her panties, looking down at her fingers as she buttoned her jeans over the flatness of her stomach.

    It’s ’cause they don’t own much else, isn’t it? he said in answer to his own question. Them poor people don’t own nothing but the word of the coyote that takes them across. That’s a miserable fate for someone, isn’t it?

    What have you got into, Pete?

    He knitted his fingers together between his thighs and squeezed them so hard he could feel the blood stop in his veins. A guy was gonna give me three hundred bucks to drive a truck to San Antone. He said not to worry about anything in the back. He gave me a hundred up front. He said it was just a few people who needed to get to their relatives’ houses. I checked the guy out. He’s not a mule. Mules don’t use trucks to run dope, anyway.

    You checked him out? Who did you check him out with? she said, looking at him, her hands letting go of her clothes.

    Guys I know, guys who hang around the bar.

    Her face was empty, still creased from the pillow, as she walked to the stove and poured herself a cup of coffee. She was barefoot, her skin white against the dirtiness of the linoleum. He went into the bedroom and picked up her slippers from under the bed and brought them to her. He set them down by her feet and waited for her to put them on.

    There were some men here last night, she said.

    What? The blood drained from his cheeks, making him seem younger than even his twenty years.

    Two of them came to the door. One stayed in the car. He never turned off the motor. The one who talked had funny eyes, like they didn’t go together. Who is he?

    What did he say?

    Pete hadn’t answered her question. But her heart was racing, and she answered him anyway. That y’all had a misunderstanding. That you ran off in the dark or something. That he owes you some money. He was grinning all the time he talked. I shook his hand. He put out his hand and I shook it.

    His head looks like it has plates in it, like there’s a glitter in one eye and not the other?

    That’s the one. Who is he, Pete?

    His name is Hugo. He was in the truck cab with me for a while. He had a Thompson in a canvas bag. The ammo pan was rattling, and he took it out and looked at it and put it back in the bag. He said, ‘This sweetheart of a piece belongs to the most dangerous man in Texas.’

    He had a what in a bag?

    A World War Two submachine gun. We were stopped in the dark. He started talking on a two-way. Some guy said, ‘Shut it down. Wipe the slate clean.’ I got out to take a leak, then I climbed down in an irrigation ditch and kept going.

    He squeezed my hand hard, really hard. Wait, you ran away from what?

    Hugo hurt your hand?

    What did I just say? Are these people dope traffickers?

    No, a lot worse. I’ve got into some real shit, Vikki, he replied. I heard gunfire in the dark. I heard people screaming inside it. They were women, maybe some of them girls.

    When she didn’t answer, when her face went blank as though she were looking at someone she didn’t know, he tried to examine her hand. But she went to the kitchen screen, her back to him, her arms folded across her chest, an unrelieved sadness in her eyes as she stared at the harshness of the light spreading across the landscape.

    2

    NICK DOLAN’S SKIN joint was halfway between Austin and San Antonio, a three-story refurbished Victorian home with fresh white paint on it, set back in oak trees and pines, the balcony and windows strung with Christmas-tree lights that stayed up year-round. From the highway, it looked like a festive place, the gravel parking lot well lit, the small Mexican restaurant next door joined to the main building by a covered walkway, indicating to passersby that Nick wasn’t selling just tits and ass, that this was a gentleman’s place, that women were welcome, even families, if they were road-tired and wanted a fine meal at a reasonable price.

    Nick had given up his floating casino in New Orleans and had left the city of his birth because he didn’t like trouble with the vestiges of the old Mob or paying off every politician in the state who knew how to turn up his palm, including the governor, who was now in a federal prison. Nick didn’t argue with the world or the venal nature of men or the iniquity that most of them seemed born in. His contention was with the world’s hypocrisy. He sold people what they wanted, whether it was gambling or booze, ass on the half shell, or the freedom to fulfill all their fantasies inside a safe environment, one where they would never be held accountable for the secret desires they hid from others. But whenever a groundswell of moral outrage began to crest on the horizon, Nick knew who was about to get smacked flat on the beach.

    However, he had another problem besides the hypocrisy of others: He had been screwed at birth, given a dumpy fat boy’s body to live inside, one with flaccid arms and a short neck and duck feet, and bad eyesight on top of it, so that he had to wear thick, round glasses that made him look like a goldfish staring out of a bowl.

    He dressed in elevator shoes, sport coats that had padded shoulders, and expensive and tasteful jewelry; he paid a minimum of seventy-five dollars for his shirts and ties. His twin daughters went to private school and took piano, ballet, and riding lessons; his son was about to become a freshman at the University of Texas. His wife played bridge at the country club, worked out every day at a gym, and did not want to hear details about the sources of Nick’s income. She also paid her own bills from money she made in the stock and bond market. Most of the romance in their marriage had disappeared long ago, but she didn’t nag and was a good mother, and by anyone’s measure, she would be considered a person of good character, so who was Nick to complain? You played the cards you got dealt, duck feet or not.

    Nick didn’t argue or contend with the nature of the world. He was boisterous and assumed the role of the diffident fool if he had to. He didn’t put moves on his girls and didn’t deceive himself about the nature of their loyalties. Born-again Christians were always talking about honesty. Nick’s honest view of himself and his relationship to the world was as follows: He was an overweight, short, balding, late-middle-aged man who knew his limits and kept his boundaries. He lived in a Puritan nation that was obsessed with sex and endlessly tittering about it, like kids just discovering their twangers in the YMCA swimming pool. If anyone doubted that fact, he told himself, they should click on their television sets during family hours and check out the crap their children were watching.

    According to Nick, the only true sin in this country was financial failure. Respectability you bought with your checkbook. That was cynicism? The Kennedy family earned their fortune during Prohibition selling Bibles? Poor guys ran the United States Senate? A lot of American presidents graduated from city colleges in Blow Me, Idaho?

    But right now Nick had a problem that never should have come into his life, that he had done nothing to deserve, that his years of abuse at the hands of schoolyard bullies in the Ninth Ward of Orleans Parish should have preempted as payment for any sins he had ever committed. The problem had just walked into the club and taken a seat at the bar, ordering a glass of carbonated water and ice with cherry juice, eyeballing the girls up on the poles, the skin of his face like a leather mask, his lips thick, always suppressing a grin, the inside of his head constructed of bones that didn’t seem to fit right. The problem’s name was Hugo Cistranos, and he scared the living shit out of Nick Dolan.

    If Nick could just walk out of the front of the club into the safety of his office, past the tables full of college boys and divorced working stiffs and upscale suits pretending they were visiting the club for a lark. He could call somebody, cut a deal, apologize, offer some kind of restitution, just get on the phone and do it, whatever it took. That was what businessmen did when confronted with insurmountable problems. They talked on the phone. He wasn’t responsible for the deeds of a maniac. In fact, he wasn’t even sure what the maniac had done.

    That was it. If you didn’t know what the sick fuck had actually done, how could you be blamed for it? Nick wasn’t a player in this, only a business guy trying to divert the competition after they had threatened to drive under his escort services in Houston and Dallas, where 40 percent of his cash flow originated.

    Just walk into the office, he told himself. Ignore the way Hugo’s eyes bored into the side of his face, his neck, his back, peeling off his clothes and skin, picking the few specks of his dignity off his soul. Ignore the proprietary manner, the smirk that silently indicated Hugo owned Nick and knew his thoughts and his weaknesses and could reach out whenever he wished and expose the frightened little fat boy who’d had his lunch money taken from him by the black kids in the schoolyard.

    The memory of those days in the Ninth Ward caused a surge of heat to bloom in Nick’s chest, a flicker of martial energy that made him close one hand in a fist, surprising him at the potential that might lie inside the fat boy’s body. He turned and looked Hugo full in the face. Then, with his eyelids stitched to his forehead, Nick approached him, his lighted cigarette held away from his sport coat, his mouth drying up, his heart threading with weevil worms. The girls up on the poles, their bodies sprayed with glitter, their faces pancakelike with foundation, became smoke-wreathed animations whose names he had never known, whose lives had nothing to do with his own, even though every one of them courted his favor and always called him Nick in the same tone they would use when addressing a protective uncle. Nick Dolan was on his own.

    He rested his right hand on the bar but did not sit down, the ash from his cigarette falling on his slacks. Hugo grinned, his eyes following the trail of smoke from Nick’s cigarette down to the yellow nicotine stain layered between his index and middle finger. You still smoke three decks a day? Hugo said.

    I’m starting to wear a patch, Nick said, holding his eyes on Hugo’s, wondering if he had just lied or told the truth and sounded small and foolish and plaint, regardless.

    Marlboros will put you in a box. The chemicals alone.

    Everybody dies.

    The chemicals hide the smell of the nicotine so you won’t be thinking about the damage it’s doing to your organs. Spots on the lungs, spots on the liver, all that. It goes on in your sleep and you don’t even know it.

    I’m about to go home. You want to see me about something?

    Yeah, you could call it something. Want to go in your office?

    The cleaning woman is vacuuming in there.

    Makes sense to me. Nothing like running a vacuum cleaner in a nightclub during peak hours. Tell me the name of the cleaning service so I don’t call them up by mistake. I’ll walk outside with you. You ought to see the sky. Dry lightning is leaping all over the clouds. Have your smoke out in the fresh air.

    My wife is waiting dinner on me.

    That’s funny, since you’re notorious for always closing the joint yourself and counting every penny in the till.

    There a second meaning in that?

    Hugo drank from his carbonated water and chewed a cherry on the back of his teeth, his expression thoughtful. No, there’s no second meaning there, Nicholas. His tongue was bright red. He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and looked at the smear of color on it. I hired some extra personnel that I need your advice about. A kid that’s proving to be a pain in the ass. He leaned forward and squeezed Nick’s shoulder, his face suffused with warmth and intimacy. I think it’s gonna rain. You’ll like the fresh smell in the air. It’ll get all that nicotine out of your clothes.

    Outside, the air was as Hugo had described it, scented with the possibility of a thunderstorm and the smell of watermelons in a field on the far side of live oaks at the back of Nick’s property. Nick walked in front of Hugo into a space between a Buick and Hugo’s big black SUV. Hugo propped one arm on the fender of his vehicle, blocking Nick’s view of the club. He wore a sport shirt and pleated white slacks and shined Italian shoes. In the electric glow from the overhead lamps, his propped forearm was taut and pale and wrapped with green veins.

    Artie Rooney is light nine chippies, Hugo said.

    I don’t know anything about this, Nick said.

    Hugo scratched the back of his neck. His hair was ash-blond, streaked with red, like iodine, gelled and combed straight back so that his high forehead had a polished look resembling the prow of a ship. ‘Wipe the slate clean.’ What do those words mean to you, Nicholas?

    It’s Nick.

    This question still stands, Nick.

    They mean ‘forget it.’ The words mean ‘pull the plug.’ They don’t mean go apeshit.

    Let me see if I got your vision of things straight. We kidnap Rooney’s Thai whores, put at least one of his coyotes in a hole, then turn a bunch of hysterical slopes loose on a dirt road so I can either ride the needle or spend the next forty years in a federal facility?

    What’s that you said about a coyote?

    Nick felt something blink in his mind, a dysfunctional shutter snapping open and closing, a malfunction in his brain or in his subconscious, an impaired mechanism that for a lifetime had not stopped him from speaking or given him the right words to say until it was too late, leaving him vulnerable and alone and at the mercy of his adversaries. Why had he asked a question? Why had he just exposed himself to more knowledge of what Hugo had done on a dark road to a truckload of helpless Asian women, maybe girls as well? Nick felt as though his ectoplasm were draining through the soles of his shoes.

    I’m at a loss on this, Hugo. I got no idea what we’re talking about here, he said, his eyes sliding off Hugo’s face, his words like wet ash in his throat.

    Hugo looked away and pulled on an earlobe. His mouth was compressed, his mirth leaking from his nose like air escaping a rubber seal. You’re all the same, he said.

    Who’s the ‘you’?

    Monkey see no evil. You hire others to do it for you. You owe me ninety large, Nicholas, ten grand for each unit I had to take off Artie’s hands and dispose of. You also owe me seven grand for transportation costs. You owe me another five large for employee expenses. The vig is a point and a half a week.

    "Vig? What vig? Are you out of your mind?"

    Then there’s this other issue, a kid I hired out of a wino bar.

    What kid?

    Pete Rumdum. What difference does it make? He got off the leash.

    No, I’m not part of this. Let me by.

    It gets a little more complicated. I’ve been to the rathole he lives in. A girl was there. She saw me. So now she’s a factor. Do I have your attention?

    Nick was stepping backward, shaking his head, trying to remove himself from the closed space that seemed to be crushing the light out of his eyes. I’m going home. I’ve known Artie Rooney for years. I can work this out. He’s a businessman.

    Hugo took out his pocket comb and ran it through his hair with one hand. Artie Rooney offered me his old Caddy to put you on a crash diet. Enforced total abstinence. Fifteen to twenty pounds a day weight loss guaranteed. Inside your own box, get it? Know why he doesn’t like you, Nicholas? Because he’s a real mick and not a fraud who changes his name from Dolinski to Dolan. I’ll drop by tomorrow to get my cash. I want it in fifties, no consecutive numbers on the bills.

    The words were going too fast. Why’d you turn Artie Rooney down on the hit? Nick said, because he had to say something.

    I already got a Caddy.

    Two minutes later, when Nick walked back into his nightclub, the pounding music of the four-piece band was not nearly as loud as the thundering of Nick’s heart and the rasping of his lungs as he tried to suck oxygen past the cigarette he held in his mouth.

    Nick, your face is white. You get some bad news? the bartender said.

    Everything is great, Nick replied.

    When he sat on the bar stool, his head reeling, his duck feet were so swollen with hypertension that he thought his shoes would burst their laces.

    BEFORE HE FINALLY went to bed, Hackberry Holland had gone into the shower stall as his only salutary refuge from his experience behind the church, washing his hair, scrubbing his skin until it was red, holding his face in the hot water as long as he could stand it. But the odor of disinterred bodies had followed him into his sleep, trailing with him through the next day into the following twilight, into the onset of darkness, the hills flickering with electricity, the horn of an eighteen-wheeler blowing far down the highway like a bugle from a forgotten war.

    Federal agents had done most of the work at the murder scene, setting up a field mortuary and flood lamps and satellite communications that probably involved Mexican authorities as well as their own departmental supervisors in D.C. They were polite to him, respectful in their perfunctory fashion, but it was obvious they thought of him as a curiosity if not simply a bystander or witness. At dawn, when all the exhumed bodies had been bagged and removed and the agents were wrapping up the site, a man in a suit, with white hair and threadlike blue and red capillaries in his cheeks, approached Hackberry and shook hands in farewell, his smile forced, as though he was preparing to ask a question that was not intended to offend.

    I understand you were an attorney for the ACLU, he said.

    At one time, many years ago.

    Quite a change in career choices.

    Not really.

    I didn’t tell you something. One of our agents found some bones that have been in the ground a long time.

    Maybe they’re Indian, Hack said.

    They’re not that old.

    Maybe the shooter has used this site before. The dozer was brought in on a truck. It went out the same way. Maybe this is a very organized guy.

    But the FBI agent in charge of the exhumation, whose name was Ethan Riser, was not listening. Why did you stay out here digging up all these bodies by yourself? Why didn’t you call in sooner? he said.

    I was a POW during the Korean War. I was at Pak’s Palace, plus a couple of other places.

    The agent nodded, then said, Forgive me if I don’t make the connection.

    There were miles of refugees on the roadways, almost all of them headed south. The columns were infiltrated by North Korean soldiers in civilian clothes. Sometimes our F-80s were ordered to kill everybody on the road. We had to dig their graves. I don’t think that story ever got reported.

    You’re saying you don’t trust us? the agent said, still smiling.

    No, sir, I wouldn’t dream of saying that.

    The agent stared at the long roll of the countryside, the mesquite leaves lifting like green lace in the breeze. It must be like living on moonscape out here, he said.

    Hackberry did not reply and walked back to his truck, pain from an old back injury spreading into the lower regions of his spine.

    IN THE LATE 1960s, he had tried to help a Hispanic friend from the service who had been beaten into a pile of bloody rags on a United Farm Workers picket line and charged with assaulting a law officer. At the time Hackberry was four fingers into a bottle of Jack Daniel’s by midafternoon every day of the week. He was also a candidate for Congress and deep in the throes of political ambition and his own cynicism, both of which poorly masked the guilt and depression and self-loathing he had brought back with him from a POW camp located in a place the North Koreans called No Name Valley.

    At the jail where his friend would eventually be murdered, Hackberry met Rie Velásquez, who was also a United Farm Workers organizer, and he was never the same again. He had thought he could walk away from his friend’s death and from his meeting with the girl named Rie. But he was wrong on both counts. His first encounter with her was immediately antagonistic, and not because of her ideals or her in-your-face attitude. It was her lack of fear that bothered him, and her indifference to the opinions of others, even to her own fate. Worse, she conveyed the impression that she was willing to accept him if he didn’t ask her to take him or his politics seriously.

    She was intelligent and university-educated and stunning in appearance. He manufactured every reason possible to see her, dropping by her union headquarters, offering her a ride, all the while trying to marginalize her radicalism and dismiss and hold at bay her leftist frame of reference, as though accepting any part of it would be like pulling a thread on a sweater, in this instance unraveling his own belief system. But he never confronted the issue at hand, namely that the working poor she represented had a legitimate cause and that they were being terrorized by both growers and police officers because they wanted to form a union.

    Hackberry Holland’s political conversion did not take place at a union meeting or at Mass inside a sympathetic Catholic church, or involve seeing a blinding light on the road to Damascus. An irritable lawman accomplished the radicalization of Hackberry Holland by swinging a blackjack across his head and then trying to kick him to death. When Hackberry awoke on the concrete floor of a county lockup, his head inches from a perforated drain cover streaked with urine, he no longer doubted the efficacy of revolutionaries standing at the jailhouse door to sign up new members for their cause.

    Rie had died of uterine cancer ten years ago, and their twin sons had left Texas, one for a position as an oncologist at the Mayo in Phoenix, the other as a boat skipper in the Florida Keys. Hackberry sold the ranch on the Guadalupe River where they had raised the children, and moved down by the border. If he’d been asked why he had given up the green place he loved for an existence in a dust-blown wasteland and a low-paying electoral office in a county seat whose streets and sidewalks and buildings were spiderwebbed with heat cracks, Hackberry would have had no explanation, or at least not one he would discuss with others.

    The truth was, he could not rise in the morning from his bed surrounded by the things she had touched, the wind blowing the curtains, pressurizing the emptiness of the house, stressing the joists and studs and crossbeams and plaster walls against one another, filling the house with a level of silence that was like someone clapping cupped palms violently on his eardrums. He could not wake to these things and Rie’s absence and the absence of his children, whom he still saw in his mind’s eye as little boys, without concluding that a terrible theft had been perpetrated upon him and that it had left a lesion in his heart that would never heal.

    A Baptist preacher had asked Hackberry if he was angry at God for his loss.

    God didn’t invent death, Hackberry answered.

    Then who did?

    Cancer is a disease produced by the Industrial Age.

    I think you’re an angry man, Hack. I think you need to let go of it. I think you need to celebrate your wife’s life and not mourn over what you cain’t change.

    I think you ought to keep your own counsel, Hackberry thought. But he did not say the words aloud.

    Now, in the blue glow of early dawn and the fading of the stars in the sky, he tried to eat breakfast on his gallery and not think about the dreams he’d had just before waking. No, dreams wasn’t the right word. Dreams had sequence and movement and voices inside them. All Hackberry could remember before opening his eyes into the starkness of his bedroom was the severity of the wounds in the bodies of the nine women and girls he had found buried by a bulldozer behind the church. How many people were aware of what a .45-caliber round could do to human tissue and bone? How many had ever seen what a .45 machine-gun burst could do to a person’s face or brain cavity or breasts or rib cage?

    There was a breeze out of the south, and even though his St. Augustine grass was dry and stiff, it had a pale greenish aura in the early dawn, and the flowers in his gardens were varied and bright with dew. He didn’t want to think about the victims buried behind the church. No, that wasn’t correct, either. He didn’t want to think about the terror and the helplessness they had experienced before they were lined up and murdered. He didn’t want to brood on these things because he had experienced them himself when he had been forced to stand with his fellow POWs on a snowy stretch of ground in zero-degree weather and wait for a Chinese prison guard to fire his burp gun point-blank into their chests and faces. But because of the mercurial nature of their executioner’s bloodlust, Hackberry was spared and made to watch while others died, and sometimes he wished he had been left among the dead rather than the quick.

    He believed that looking into the eyes of one’s executioner in the last seconds of one’s life was perhaps the worst fate that could befall a human being. That parting glimpse into the face of evil destroyed not only hope but any degree of faith in our fellow man that we might possess. He did not want to contend with those good souls who chose to believe we all descend from the same nuclear family, our poor, naked, bumbling ancestors back in Eden who, through pride or curiosity, transgressed by eating forbidden fruit. But he had long ago concluded that certain kinds of experiences at the hands of our fellow man were proof enough that we did not all descend from the same tree.

    Or at least these were the thoughts that Hackberry’s sleep often presented to him at first light, as foolish as they might seem.

    He drank the coffee from his cup, covered his

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