“R.C. is a tough kid. Give him some credit,” she said.
“What’s that mean?”
“Put it in neutral, Hack.”
“Cover my back and lose the bromides.”
“You got it.”
Hackberry had already gotten out of the Jeep and crossed the sidewalk and entered the cantina before Pam had reached the curb. The bartender with the enormous swastika was stacking chairs on a table by the small dance floor in back. He grinned when he saw Hackberry. “Hey, amigo, you decided to come back and have dinner with me! Welcome once again. You brought the lady, too.”
“Who wouldn’t love a place like this? Excuse me just a second,” Hackberry said.
“What are you doin’, señor?”
“Not much. When I played baseball, I was a switch-hitter. I sometimes wonder if I still have it,” Hackberry said. He pulled a pool cue off the wall rack and grasped the thinly tapered end with both hands and whipped the heavy end across the bartender’s face. The cue splintered with the same hand-stinging crack as a baseball bat when it catches a ninety-mile-an-hour pitch at the wrong angle. The weighted end of the cue rocketed into the wall, and the bartender crashed over the table into the plastic-cased jukebox, blood pouring from his nose.
The bartender placed the flats of his hands on the floor and tried to straighten himself against the jukebox. Hackberry raised his right boot fifteen inches into the air and stomped it down into the bartender’s face. The man’s head pocked a hole the size of a grapefruit in the jukebox. “Where’s my deputy?” Hackberry said.
“I don’t know,” the bartender said.
“You want another one?” Hackberry said.
Three men at a table by the dance floor got up quickly and went out the back door. A fourth man emerged from the bathroom and looked at the scene taking place by the jukebox and followed them outside. Hackberry could hear a whirring sound in his head and behind him the sound of Pam Tibbs chewing gum rapidly, snapping it, her mouth open. “Hack, dial it down,” she said.
“No, Bernicio here wants to tell us where R.C. is. He just wants the appropriate motivation. Right, Bernicio? You have to explain to your friends why you cooperated with your gringo dinner guests.” He brought his boot down again.
“Oh, shit,” Pam said, her voice changing.
Hackberry turned and saw two Mexican policemen in unpressed green uniforms come through the front door and walk the length of the bar. Both of them wore lacquered-billed caps and were short and dark-skinned. Both wore brass badges and shiny black name tags on their shirt pockets and semiautomatic pistols on their hips. One of them wore thick-soled military boots that were spit-shined into mirrors, the laces starched white. He had tucked the cuffs of his trousers into the boots, as a paratrooper might.
“¿Quépasa, gringo?” asked the policeman with the shined boots.
Hackberry opened his badge holder and held it up for both policemen to see. “My deputy was kidnapped from this cantina. We were having a discussion with Bernicio as to my friend’s whereabouts. Thank you for your assistance.”
“Chinga tu madre. Tus credenciales valen mierda, hombre,” the policeman in shined boots said.
“My badge is worth shit? I should fuck my mother?” Hackberry said. “I’m not sure how I should interpret that.”
“Venga,” the policeman said, crooking two fingers.
“With respect, we’re not going anywhere with y’all except maybe to find my friend,” Hackberry said. He repeated himself in Spanish and then said in English and Spanish, “Right now we’re wasting time that we don’t have. My friend’s life is in jeopardy. The man on the floor is a criminal. You know that and so do I. We are all officers of the law, separated only by a few miles of geography. I ask your cooperation, and I say all these things to you out of respect for your office and the importance of your legal position in the community.”
“We are not interested in your evaluations of our community. You’re coming with me, gringo,” the policeman replied, this time in English, once again crooking two fingers. “You have no authority here, and you have assaulted an innocent man.”
“How’s this for authority, dickhead?” Pam Tibbs said, pulling her .357 Magnum from her holster and aiming it with both hands at the policeman’s face.
“You are very unwise,” the policeman said.
“That’s right,” Pam replied. She cocked the hammer on her revolver with her thumb. “I have little judgment. That’s why I’m two seconds from flushing your grits.”
“Flushing? What do you mean, ‘flushing’?”
“Don’t test her, partner,” Hackberry said, surprised at the level of caution in his voice.
“No entiendo,” the policeman said.
Hackberry could feel a band of tension spreading along one side of his head. It was of a kind that he had experienced only a few times in his life. It stretched the blood veins along the scalp into knotted twine. You felt it seconds after hearing the spatter of small-arms fire, a sound that was as thin and sporadic and innocuous as the popping of Chinese firecrackers. Or you felt it when someone shouted out the word “Incoming!” Or when it wrapped itself around your head like piano wire as a monstrosity of a human being in a quilted coat slathered with mud on the front and mucus on the sleeves pulled back the bolt on a Soviet-manufactured burp gun and lifted the muzzle into your face.