“Easy for you to say ‘should go home.’ Krill was at my house. Krill wants me to baptize some dead children he’s got buried out in the desert. He gave me the feeling you won’t do it, and so it’s getting put on me.”
“Of cou
rse I won’t do it.”
“So why should it fall on me?”
“I don’t know. Talk to Sheriff Holland.”
Cody Daniels swayed slightly, obviously trying to concentrate. “Sheriff Holland threatened me. I’m not one of his big fans.”
“Look at me.”
“Ma’am?”
“I said look at me.”
“What the hell you think I’m doing?”
“Why are you so angry at yourself and others?”
The sky was gray, and the wind was blowing in the parking lot, and pieces of newspaper were flapping and twisting through the air. Cody Daniels’s eyes seemed to search the sky as though he saw meaning in the wind and the clouds and the flying scraps of paper imprinted with tracks of car tires. “I’m not angry at anybody. I just want to go about my ministry. I want to be let alone.”
“No, you carry a terrible guilt with you, something you won’t tell anybody about. It’s what gives other people power over you, Reverend Daniels. It’s why you’re drunk. It’s why you’re blaming everybody else for your problems.”
“I was saved a long time ago. I don’t have to listen to anything you say.”
She dropped the tailgate on the back of her truck and loaded her groceries in the bed, hoping he would be gone when she turned around again. She closed the tailgate and latched it with the chain, her gaze focused on a blue-collar family getting in their automobile, the children trying to pull inside the stringed balloons they had gotten at a street carnival. Cody Daniels had not budged. “Let me get by, please,” she said.
“I could have dropped the dime on you any time I wanted and had you arrested,” he said.
“For what?”
“Smuggling wets, aiding and abetting dope mules, maybe hiding out a fellow name of Noie Barnum, a guy who might end up in the hands of Al Qaeda.”
She tried to walk around him, but he stepped in front of her. His breath made her wince. “I saw the man with the machine gun kill those two men down below your place,” he said. “It was Preacher Jack Collins.”
“So what?”
“If you ask me, not everything he’s done is all bad.”
“Say that again.”
“Nits make lice.”
“Excuse me, sir, but you’re disgusting.”
“Those Thai women didn’t have any business in this country. Just like those Mexicans you’re bringing in. Every one of them is a breeder, wanting to have their babies here so they can be U.S. citizens.”
Anton Ling’s eyes were burning, her jaw clenched. She held her gaze on him as though watching a zoo creature behind a pane of glass. He stepped back, a twitch in his face. “Why you staring at me like that?”
“It had to do with a woman, didn’t it?” she said.
“What?”
“You hurt a woman very badly. Maybe even killed her. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“You spread lies about me, I’ll come down there and—”