Hackberry Holland did not learn of the killings near the Santiago Mountains from another law enforcement agency, because they were not reported the night they occurred or the following morning, either. He learned of them from a questionable source, one in whom he had already induced a sizable dose of paranoia. In fact, he had a hard time concentrating on the telephone conversation. It was raining, and he had forgotten to take down the flag outside his office window. The flag, soggy as a towel, hung twisted and forlorn against a gray sky, its chain vibrating against the pole like a damaged nerve. “Mr. Dowling, I’ve heard nothing about a shooting in this county or anywhere around here,” he said. “It’s been surprisingly quiet.”
“Of course you didn’t. Josef doesn’t want cops crawling all over his property,” Temple Dowling replied.
“You say two men were killed?”
“Right. Two security guys. Somebody cut their noses out of their faces.”
“Sounds a bit strange, doesn’t it? I mean, why is it you know about this but nobody else does?”
“Because maybe I got one or two people inside Josef’s organization.”
“What do you want me to do about this unreported homicide that only you seem to know about?”
“Go out to the game ranch. Investigate the crime. Stuff a hand grenade up his ass. What do I care? Why not just do your fucking job?”
“Because somehow you’re at risk?”
“Josef believes I put a hit on him.”
“Listen to what you’re saying, Mr. Dowling. Two guys got killed outside Sholokoff’s house, but no attempt was made to harm anybody inside the house. Does that seem like a rational scenario to you?”
“That’s because a bunch of hunters had just flown in. Look, my source says Josef went apeshit. He had his grandchildren in the house.” There was a pause. “His guys are coming after me.”
Hackberry could hear the tremor in Dowling’s voice, the frightened boy no longer able to hide behind arrogance and cruelty. “First, you have your own security service, Mr. Dowling. Why not make use of it? If a crime occurred in the place you describe, it’s out of my jurisdiction. Second, maybe it’s time for you to grow up.”
“Time for me to-”
“Everybody dies. Why not go down with the decks awash and the guns blazing? You’ve probably made millions profiteering off of war. Get a taste of the real deal and scorch your name on the wall before you check out. It’s not a bad way to go.”
“You’re a son of a bitch.”
Hackberry rubbed his forehead and started to hang up, then placed the receiver against his ear again. “If you think you’re in danger, get out of town.”
“I’m already out of town. It doesn’t matter. Sholokoff has a network all over the country.”
“I think you’re imagining things.”
“You don’t understand Josef. He doesn’t just do evil. He loves it. That’s the difference between him and the rest of us. Jack Collins is probably a lunatic. Josef isn’t. He creates object lessons nobody ever forgets. He has people taken apart.”
“He does what?”
Perhaps due to his fundamentalist upbringing, R. C. Bevins was not a believer in either luck or coincidence but saw every event in his life as one that required attention. The consequence was that he never dismissed any form of human behavior as implausible and never thought of bizarre events in terms of their improbability. The sheriff had once told R.C. that if a UFO landed on the prairie, two things were guaranteed to happen: Everyone who witnessed the landing would grab his cell phone to dial 911, and R.C. would knock on the spaceship door and introduce himself.
R.C. had pulled into a convenience store and gas station on a county road just south of the east-west four-lane that paralleled the Mexican border, and had gone inside and bought a chili dog and a load of nachos and jalapeno peppers and a Dr Pepper and had just started eating lunch at a table by the front window when he saw a pickup stop and let out a passenger. The passenger limped slightly, as though he had a stitch in his side. He wore shades and an unlacquered wide-brim straw hat, like one a gardener might wear. His nose was a giant teardrop, his jeans hiked up too high on his hips, his suspenders notched into his shoulders, the way a much older man might wear them. The man went into the back of the store and took a bottle of orange juice and a ham-and-cheese sandwich from the cooler and a package of Ding Dongs from the counter. He paid, sat down, and began eating at a table not far from R.C.’s, never removing his shades. R.C. nodded at him, but the man did not look up from his food.
“Bet you could fry an egg out there,” R.C. said.
“That about says it,” the man replied, chewing slowly, his mouth closed, his gaze seemingly fixed on nothing.
“My uncle says that during the drought of 1953, it got so dry here he saw a catfish walking down a dirt road carrying its own canteen.”
“That’s dry.”
“You looking for a ride? ’Cause the bread-delivery man is fixing to head back to town.”
“No, I’m visiting down the road there. South a piece.” The man drank from his orange juice and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and began eating his sandwich again.
“Did you see any salt and pepper up there at the counter?” R.C. asked.
“I think I did. Where the ketchup and such are. In that little tray.”
“You want some?”
“No, sir, I’m fine.”
R.C. went to the counter by the coffee and cold-drink dispensers and began sorting through the condiments. “Do y’all have any hot sauce?” he said to the cashier.
“It’s there somewhere,” the cashier replied.
“I sure cain’t find it.”
The cashier walked over and picked up the hot sauce and handed it to R.C. He was a short man with a sloping girth who always showed up at work in a dress shirt and an outrageous tie and with polished shoes. He had a tiny black mustache that expanded like grease pencil when he grinned. “Glad it wasn’t a snake.”
“Keep looking straight at me,” R.C. said.
The cashier’s face clouded, but he kept his eyes locked on R.C.’s.
“You know that old boy over yonder?” R.C. said.
“I think he was in yesterday. He bought some Ding Dongs and a newspaper.”
“He was by himself?”
“He came here with another man. The other fellow stayed in the car.”
“What’d the other guy look like?”
“I didn’t pay him much mind.”
“What kind of car?”
The cashier looked into space and shook his head. “It was skinned up. It didn’t have much paint on it. I don’t know what kind it was.”
“You ever see it before?”
The cashier rubbed his eye. “No, sir,” he said. “Are we fixing to have some trouble here? ’Cause that’s something I really don’t need.”
“No. Did the guy in the car buy gas with a credit card?”
“If he did, I didn’t see it. He got air.”
“What?”
“He went to the air pump. I remember that ‘cause he was the last to use it. Somebody ran over the hose, and I had to put an out-of-order sign on it. Ain’t nobody used it since.”
R.C. went back to his table and set the bottle of hot sauce down, then snapped his fingers as though he had forgotten something. He went outside to his cruiser and picked up a clipboard off the seat, then walked past the air pump. The concrete slab around it was covered with a film of mud and dust that had dried into a delicate crust. A set of familiar tire tracks was stenciled across it. “Michelins,” R.C. said under his breath.
R.C. went back to his table with the clipboard. “I got to do these dadburn time logs,” he said to the man at the next table.
“I bet that’s what we’ll all be doing when somebody drops a nuclear missile on us,” the man said.
“I never thought of it like that. I think you got your hand on it.”
“Hope we get some rain. This is about the hottest place I’ve ever been,” the man said.
“You know what General Sherman said when he was stationed here? He said if he owned both Texas and hell, he’d rent out Texas and live in hell,” R.C. said.
The man tilted up his orange juice and drank it empty, swallowing smoothly, never letting a drop run off the side of his mouth. R.C. went back to eating, his long legs barely fitting under the table, his jaw filled with food, one eye on his clipboard. “This stuff is a royal pain in the ass,” he said. “I’m going back on patrol. If they want my time logs filled out, they can fill them out their own self.”
“If I were you, I’d put the times in there somebody wants and not worry about it. That’s how organizations are run. You just got to make things look right. Why beat yourself up over it?”
“You sound like a guy who’s been around.”
“Not really.”
“Where you staying at, exactly?”
“A little vacation spot a buddy of mine has got rented. It’s just a place to go hunting for rocks and arrowheads and such.”
“Look, is somebody coming to pick you up? You looked like you were limping.”
“I’ll hitch a ride. People here’bouts are pretty nice.”
“I don’t mind driving you home. That’s part of the job sometimes.”
“No, I was in an accident a while back. I don’t like to start depending on other people. It gets to be a habit too easy.”
R.C. picked up the remnants of his nachos and chili dog and threw them in the trash, then sat down at the table with the man, who was now feeding a Ding Dong into his mouth. “You seem like a right good fellow,” he said. “The kind of guy who don’t want to hurt nobody but who might get into something that’s way to shit and gone over his head.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“I always figured if a guy makes a mistake, he ought to get shut of it as quick as he can and keep on being the fellow he always was.”
“That could be true, but I think you’ve got somebody else in mind.”
“You’re not from Texas, but you’re from down South somewhere, right?”
“Me and a few million others.”
“But you weren’t raised up to keep company with criminals. It’s got to grate on you. I reckon that’s why you hitched a ride here today.”
“You want a Ding Dong?”
“Not right now,” R.C. said, and fitted one end of his handcuffs onto the man’s left wrist and snicked the ratchet into the locking mechanism. “Mind if I call you Noie?”
“I’ve answered to worse.”
“You have a friend who drives a Trans Am that has Michelin tires on it?”
“Can’t say as I do.”
“Where’s Preacher Collins at, Noie?”
The man squinted thoughtfully and scratched at an insect bite on the back of his neck with his free hand. “Who?” he said.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Maydeen said, standing in Hackberry’s doorway.
He looked up from his desk and waited.
“R.C. says he’s got Noie Barnum hooked up in the back of his cruiser,” she said.
Hackberry stared at her blankly.
“He says Barnum walked into a convenience store down by the four-lane,” she said. “He’d hitched a ride to have lunch there.”
“How does R.C. know it’s Barnum?”
“He says the guy looks just like his photo, except he’s a little leaner. He’s got a limp and maybe has some broken ribs.”
“The guy admits he’s Noie Barnum?”
“R.C. didn’t say. He just says it’s him.”
“What about Jack Collins?”
“R.C. said there were Michelin tire tracks where Collins’s car was parked yesterday. I didn’t get it all, Hack. Want me to notify the FBI?”
“No.”
“You don’t?”
“Did you hear me?”
“Yeah, I did. How about losing the tone?”
He stood up from his desk, staring out the window into the brilliance of the day, at the wind whipping the flag on the pole, at the hard blueness of the sky above the hills. His right hand opened and closed at his side. “Tell R.C. to bring him through the back.”
“Hack?”
“What is it?”
“You always say we do it by the numbers.”
“What about it?”
“Pam told me about you almost shoving a broken pool cue down a bartender’s throat in that Mexican cantina.”
“R.C.’s life was hanging in the balance. Why are you bringing this up?”
“I could have done the same thing to the bartender, maybe worse, and so could Pam or Felix and a few others in the department. We wouldn’t be bothered about it later, either. But we’re not you. All of us know that, even though you don’t. You go against your own nature.”
“Where’s Pam?”
“In the restroom, the last time I saw her.”
“Believe it or not, Maydeen, sometimes I have my reasons for doing the things I do. We’re not the only people who want to get their hands on Noie Barnum. The less anyone knows about his whereabouts, the safer he is. You got me?”
“Yes, sir, I expect so.”
Hackberry looked down the street to see if R.C.’s cruiser had turned into the intersection yet. He tried to clear his head, to think straight, to keep the lines simple before he gave up his one certifiable chance to nail Jack Collins. “Fill in Pam and get the trusties out of the downstairs area. I want the prisoners in the cells at the end of the upstairs corridor moved to the tank. Barnum goes into total isolation. No contact with anyone. His food is brought to him by a deputy. No trusty gets near him. We’re in total blackout mode regarding his presence. Simply said, he doesn’t exist. You copy that?”
“I guess that means no phone call.”
He gave her a look.
“Got it, got it, got it,” she said.
Hackberry went out the back door and waited for R.C. The alleyway was empty in both directions. Think, he told himself. Don’t blow this one. Why would Barnum be in a convenience store by himself? Collins wouldn’t allow him to go wandering about on his own. They either had a fight or Barnum got sick of Collins’s ego-maniacal rhetoric and decided to take a stroll down the road and find some other company. But why had he stayed with Collins in the first place? To find Krill? To find some Al Qaeda operatives in Latin America and even the score for the death of his half sister? That made more sense than anything else.
R.C.’s cruiser turned in to the alleyway, the flasher off. Hackberry looked at all the rear windows of the building. He saw a face at one of the windows in the upstairs corridor. A deputy or a trusty? R.C. helped his prisoner out of the backseat of the cruiser, and the face went away. The prisoner’s wrists were cuffed behind him, the tendons in his neck corded with either embarrassment or anger. In the sunlight, there were pinpoints of sweat on his forehead.
“I’m Sheriff Holland, Mr. Barnum,” Hackberry said. “You are Noie Barnum?”
“Your deputy called me Noie. But I didn’t tell him that was my name.”
“Have it any way you like, sir. You’re in protective custody, but you’re not under arrest. Do you understand the difference?”
“Yes, you’re saying I don’t have the constitutional right to a phone call or a lawyer.”
“No, I’m saying this is a safe place for you.”
“I think I’d just rather hike down to that cafe we passed and have a piece of pie and a cup of coffee and be on my way, if you don’t mind.”
“That’s not an option, Mr. Barnum. I also need to advise you that you’re starting to piss me off.”
“I don’t see why.”
“I’ll explain. You’re one skip and a jump from being charged as an accessory in several homicides, all of them involving your companion Jack Collins. I dug up nine of his female victims. When we get time, I’ll show you their postmortem photographs. The photos don’t do justice to the realities of an exhumation-the stench of decomposition and the eight-ball stare and that sort of thing-but you’ll have some sense of what a spray of forty-five-caliber bullets can do to human tissue.”
“It’s true?” the prisoner asked.
“What?”
“What you just said. Jack did that?”
Pam Tibbs had just come out the back door. “Who the hell you think did it, son?” she asked.
The prisoner tried to hold his eyes on hers, but his stare broke, and he sucked the moisture out of his cheeks and swallowed.
Pam and Hackberry took the handcuffed man up the steel spiral stairs to the second floor and walked him down the row of cells to the end of the corridor. Pam whanged her baton against a cell door when two men came to the bars. Hackberry unhooked the prisoner, and he and Pam Tibbs stepped inside the room with him.
“You have a lavatory and a toilet and a bed and a chair and a window that lets you see the street,” Hackberry said. “I apologize for all the graffiti and drawings of genitalia on the walls. We repaint every six months, but our clientele are a determined bunch.”
“The other cells have bars. Why am I in this one?”
“The only people you’re going to talk to are us, Mr. Barnum,” Hackberry said. “I have a feeling you and Preacher were holed up down by the border or just on the other side of it. But chances are he’s taken off. Is that right? He’s way down in Coahuila by now?”
“You call him Preacher?”
“I don’t call him anything. Others do,” Hackberry said. “You’re a Quaker, right?”
“A man’s religion is a private matter.”
“You deny your faith?” Hackberry said.
“No, sir, I don’t. As you say, I’m a Quaker.”
“And your namesake sailed out on the Flood?”
“Yes, sir, my christened name is Noie. Same spelling as in the King James.”
“Can you tell me, with your background, why in the name of suffering God you hooked up with a man like Jack Collins?”
“Because he befriended me when nobody else did. Because he bound up my wounds and fed and protected me when others passed me by.”
“Do you know how many innocent people have been hurt or killed because they think you have the design for the Predator drone?” Hackberry said.
“I escaped from a bunch of Mexican killers. They’d held me prisoner for weeks. How could I be carrying the design to a Predator drone? How could anyone have ideas that are that stupid?”
“An FBI agent by the name of Ethan Riser called you the modern equivalent of the Holy Grail,” Hackberry said. “The design is in your head. You’re a very valuable man, Mr. Barnum. Ethan Riser could probably explain that to you better than I, except he’s dead. He’s dead because Jack Collins blew his face and skull apart with a Thompson submachine gun. Ethan Riser was a good man and a friend of mine. Have you ever seen anybody machine-gunned, Mr. Barnum?”
“I found out about your friend when it was too late to do anything about it.”
“Are you a deep-plant, sir?” Hackberry said.
“A what?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I was about to go public with some information about the numbers of innocent people we’ve killed in the drone program, but I went into the desert first to think about it. That’s when I got kidnapped by Krill and his friends. They found my government ID and a letter from a minister about my concerns over the Predator program, and they thought they’d sell me to Al Qaeda. Then they decided that was too much trouble and they’d sell me to some Mexican gangsters. That was when another fellow and I broke loose.”
“You thought you were going to bring down Al Qaeda by yourself?”
“I was aiming to get some of them, that’s for sure. But I was done helping kill third-world people. I got to say something here. I don’t know everything that goes on in Jack’s head, but somewhere inside him, there’s a better man than the one you see.”
“Keep telling yourself that crap,” Pam said.
“Chief Deputy Tibbs isn’t very objective about Jack, Noie. That’s because he tried to machine-gun her,” Hackberry said.
Noie Barnum looked at her blankly.
“What do you know about Josef Sholokoff?” Hackberry asked.
“I don’t recall anybody by that name.”
“He’s a Russian criminal who wants to sell you to the highest bidder,” Hackberry said. “We think he may have crucified a minister by the name of Cody Daniels. You ever hear of him?”
“No, I haven’t,” Noie said. “A fellow was crucified?”
“You seem blissfully ignorant of all the wreckage swirling around you. Does that bother you at all?” Hackberry said.
“You’re damn right it does. You stop talking to me like that.”
“There’s a ranch about six miles below the four-lane. The south end of the property bleeds into Mexico. I think that’s where y’all were hiding out. Jack is probably long gone, and he’s not driving that Trans Am anymore, either. But I need to know. Is that where y’all were holed up?”
“Ask Jack when you catch him.”
“We don’t abuse prisoners here,” Pam said, stepping closer to Barnum, one finger barely touching his sternum.
“Ma’am?” he said.
“I just wanted you to take note of that fact,” she said. “It’s why I’m not pounding you into marmalade. But you open your mouth like that one more time, and I promise you, all bets are off.”
Downstairs, five minutes later, Pam came into Hackberry’s office and closed the door behind her. “I’m backing your play, Hack, whatever it is. But I think you’re taking an awful risk here,” she said.
“We don’t owe the feds diddly-squat,” he replied. “We apprehended Barnum. They didn’t. As far as I’m concerned, they’re on a need-to-know basis. Right now I don’t figure they need to know anything.”
“This is a national security issue. They’re going to eat you alive. If they don’t, your enemies around here will.”
“That’s the breaks.”
“God, you’re stubborn.”
“I got a call from Temple Dowling. He says Josef Sholokoff believes Dowling put a hit on him.”
“Why’s he think that?”
“Because somebody killed a couple of Sholokoff’s men at his game farm.”
“Why didn’t we hear anything about it?”
“Sholokoff didn’t report it.”
“What did you tell Dowling?”
“To get out of town. That he was on his own,” Hackberry said.
“What’s the problem?”
“I was pretty hard-nosed with him. Maybe I took satisfaction in his discomfort.”
“Dowling is a pedophile and deserves anything that happens to him.”
“He said Sholokoff takes people apart.”
“In what way?”
“Physically, piece by piece,” Hackberry said.
He realized her attention was focused outside the window. A man in rumpled slacks, wearing canvas boat shoes without socks and his shirttail hanging out, was crossing the street hurriedly, a brown paper bag folded under his arm. “What’s wrong?” Hackberry asked.
“That guy out there. He was just released.”
“What about him?”
“He’s a check writer. Loving and Jeff Davis counties have bench warrants on him, but they didn’t want to pay the costs for getting him back.”
“I’m still not following you.”
“He was waiting to be taken downstairs when R.C. brought Barnum in. I remember he was watching us move everybody down to the tank. He was at the window, too, looking down in the alley.”
“He probably wouldn’t know who Barnum is.”
“No, I saw his jacket. He was in Huntsville. He got clemency on a five-bit for sending his cell partner to the injection table. He’s a professional snitch.”
Hackberry thought about it. “Leave him alone. If he has any suspicions, we don’t want to confirm them.”
“Sorry, I had my hands full up there.”
“Forget it,” he said.
She looked at him for a long time before she spoke. “You want them to come after Barnum, don’t you?”
“I haven’t thought about it. I’m not that smart,” he said. “You think I made a target out of Temple Dowling?”
“You’re in the wrong business, kemo sabe, but I love you just the same,” she replied.
What a difference a day and a change of topography could make, Temple Dowling told himself as he gazed through the lounge window of the Santa Fe hotel he and three of his men had checked in to. The evening sky was turquoise and ribbed with pink clouds, a rainbow arching across a canyon in the west, the sun an orange ball behind the mountains. The bartender brought him another vodka Collins packed with shaved ice and cherries and lemon and lime slices, and when Temple lifted it to his lips, the coldness slid down his throat like balm to his soul. Somehow his feelings of failure and humiliation at the hands of that clown Holland had evaporated during the flight to New Mexico. In fact, Temple was confident enough to smile at his foibles, as though someone else had temporarily occupied his skin and admitted his fear of Josef Sholokoff. It was nothing more than a silly lapse, Temple told himself. He had been tired, worn out by worry, beset on all sides by an army of incompetent employees and government bureaucrats and hayseed cops, Holland in particular. Why had Temple’s father ever thought that idiot could be a congressman, a man who probably couldn’t find his dork unless he tied a string on it? Temple sipped from his Collins and dipped a taco chip in a bowl of guacamole and chewed on it. Then an image he didn’t want to remember floated before his eyes-being discovered by Holland and his chief deputy in the Mexican brothel with two underage girls.
He quickly transformed his emotion into one of righteous outrage. Temple Dowling didn’t turn them into prostitutes. Poverty and hunger did. Was that his fault? Should they starve? Would that make the world a better place? What gave Holland the right to look down on him? Wasn’t he intelligent enough to understand that most men who are attracted to children seek innocence in their lives?
He stopped, his mind seizing up as though he had experienced a brain freeze. He shouldn’t have used the word “children.” He was never attracted to children. He was not a pedophile. He just wanted to be with teenage girls while they were blooming into women. What finer creation was there than a young girl? What greater tragedy was there than seeing them left to the mercies of America’s street culture? Or seeing them turned over to degenerates like Sholokoff, who made addicts of them and used them in porn films? Why was Temple Dowling the scapegoat? He had never treated a woman or girl badly in his life.
He drank his glass empty. The sky had darkened over the mountains, as though a lavender rain were starting to fall where the sun had just set. Where were his men?
“Would you like another, sir?” the bartender asked. He wore a white jacket and a red bow tie and black pants. His face had no color, not even the shadow of a beard, but his hair was as black and liquid in appearance as melted plastic.
“Yeah, hit me again,” Temple replied. “What’s all that noise next door?”
“It’s a young people’s organization of some kind.” The bartender’s cheeks were sunken, his mouth like a button.
“Listen to it. That’s a lot of kids.”
“Can I order you something from the grill?”
“They seem to be having fun,” Temple said, still distracted by the celebratory mood next door.
“The hotel gives them the space for their meetings one night a week.”
“That’s pretty nice.” Temple gazed out the door at the teenagers going in and out of the lobby, the shadows of the potted palms sliding off their skin and hair and the flowers some of the girls were wearing.
“It’s called Alla-something,” the bartender said.
“Can you order me a steak?”
“Yes, sir. Right away.”
“I like it pink in the middle,” Temple said.
He worked on his vodka and waited for his food and listened to the pianist play “Claire de Lune.” The pianist was dressed in a summer tux with a red boutonniere, his long fingers floating above the keys in a cone of blue light. Santa Fe was a grand place to be. The Spanish ambience, the wooden colonnades and earthen jars on the terrazzo entrances to the shops along the street, the stars twinkling above the vastness of the mountains-why should a man be afraid in a country as wonderful as this? Or why should a man be ashamed of what he was? He agreed with the liberals and libertines on this one. A man didn’t choose his sexual inclinations. They chose him. Didn’t Jesus say there are those who are made different in the womb?
The girl who came into the lounge from the lobby and sat down next to him at the bar had the face of a pixie, with a pug nose and an uplifted chin and thick dark red hair that was tied in back. She wore a sequined cowboy shirt and tight stonewashed jeans tucked into boots that came almost to her knee. “Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” Temple said.
“Can you help me out?”
“You kill anybody?”
“I’d like to. At least if I have to go back in there.”
“Where?” he asked.
“To the Alateen meeting.”
“What’s Alateen?”
“A meeting that’s a guaranteed cure for insomnia. I got sentenced to it by the court.”
“Why’d the judge send you there?”
“My boyfriend totaled his car and left me unconscious inside it. My boyfriend is not only a needle-dick but a lying shit. I told the judge if he believed my boyfriend, he was a shitbird, too, but I wasn’t sure whether he qualified as a needle-dick. What’s that music?”
“Debussy, I think. You know, Claude Debussy?”
“Who’s that?”
“He was a great composer.”
She was chewing gum, her eyes rolling, her mouth indolent and somehow vulnerable. The sound of her gum wet and smacking in her cheek made him swallow. She smiled lazily, one eye crinkling at the corner. “Will you buy me a drink?”
“Are you legal age?”
“Why do you think I asked you to buy me one?”
“What are you having?”
“I don’t care. Something with candied cherries in it. Something that’s cold and warm at the same time.”
When the bartender served the steak, Temple ordered another Collins for himself and an old-fashioned for the girl. The bartender lowered his eyes with his hands folded, not unlike an undertaker who doesn’t want to broach a difficult subject.
“She’s my niece,” Temple said. “Nobody would believe she’s twenty-two.”
“Very well, sir,” the bartender said, and went to the end of the bar and took a tumbler from a rack on the back counter.
“That was impressive,” the girl said. “I had an uncle like that. He could get people to do things for him and make them feel like they were doing themselves a favor. You know how he’d do that?”
“Tell me.”
“He already knew what they wanted to do. They only needed permission from someone. It was usually about money. Or maybe sex. But one way or another, they were coming across for him. He used to say, ‘Put a smile on their faces, and they’ll follow you over a cliff.’”
“What happened to him?”
“Nothing. He owns a bunch of massage parlors in Los Angeles. Is that a Rolex?”
Temple looked at his watch, then realized how long he had been in the lounge. Where were his men? They had been acting strangely ever since two of them had been dumb enough to get themselves popped by Preacher Jack. “I never noticed. I have about a dozen watches I wear. Do you ride horses?”
“Sometimes. I barrel-raced when I was in Four-H. I was a hot-walker at Ruidoso Downs. Talk about a horny bunch. You ought to be in the bar after the seventh race.”
“Yeah, but that’s not your crowd. I bet you go to college.”
“If that’s what you call working at the McDonald’s inside Wal-mart. How about that for being a two-time loser? Your steak is getting cold.”
“You want one?”
“I’m a vegan. My whole life changed after I gave up meat and milk products. I thought my needle-dick boyfriend was the problem, but I think it was my diet.”
“What problem?”
“My organisms were messed up.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“Meat and cheese and barnyard shit like that are toxic to your erogenous development.” The waiter placed a coaster in front of her and set down her old-fashioned. She wrapped her gum in her napkin. “Anyway, thanks for the drink. I can’t take that group next door. You know their problem?”
“No,” he replied.
She took a drink from her glass and her eyes brightened and her cheeks filled with color, in the same way a thirsty plant might respond immediately to water. He could feel the coldness of her breath when she exhaled. “They feel unloved,” she said.
“You have a lot of insight for such a young woman.”
“Yeah, that’s why I’m in charge of the french-fry basket.”
“You smell like orange blossoms.”
“Maybe that’s because I’m chewing an orange rind.” She turned on the stool toward him, her knee hitting his. She let her eyes hold on his. “I bummed a ride here with a friend, but he’s gonna stay at the meeting for another hour. I live six miles away, and I don’t have money for a cab. I’d like a ride, but when I get home, I go in by myself.”
“You’re the captain of your soul?”
“No, I’m just not somebody’s backseat fuck.”
He picked up a small cooked tomato on the tines of his fork and placed it in his mouth and chewed slowly. “I wouldn’t ever say or even think something like that about you,” he said.
“So you’re gonna give me a ride?”
“If you’ll do one thing for me.”
Her eyes shifted sideways with a level of dependence that made his heart drop. “What’s that?” she said.
“Walk through the open-air jewelry market with me. I’m a sucker for Indian junk. I need an expert hand to guide me.”
“You have a daughter?”
“No.”
“I thought that’s what you were gonna tell me.”
“Why?”
“Most of the time they say I remind them of their daughter. They can’t do enough for you.”
“Who?”
“The kind of guys who like to grope young girls in the back of the church bus,” she replied, picking up her purse. “Think I’m kidding? Ask yourself why any middle-aged man wants to make a career out of being a youth minister or a park director or a guy who teaches leather craft to rug rats. Because he likes the way the restroom smells after little kids have pissed all over the bowl? Give me a break.”
“How old are you?”
“Buy me a veggie burger and I’ll tell you. Let’s go, I won’t bite,” she said, squeezing his arm.