“No, we’ve got no visuals on anything,” the sheriff in Brewster County said.
“Have you talked to the other bikers?”
“Yeah, they say their bud saw somebody flashing something at them from the rocks. Their bud was a lone wolf and liked to get into it with other people. By the way, we found his vest not far from where the agent died. Collins is here, isn’t he? In my county?”
“That’d be my guess. Is the FBI there yet?”
“Like flies on shit. There’s another detail I ought to pass on. There was a melted cell phone in the ashes of the fire. I suspect it was the FBI agent’s. It was too deep inside the burn ring to have fallen there. Why would the shooter throw the guy’s cell phone in the fire?”
“Fingerprints?”
“Maybe, but he didn’t bother to pick up the brass.”
“The day you understand Jack Collins is the day you check yourself in to rehab for the rest of your life,” Hackberry said.
“Where do you think he’s hid out?”
“The Unabomber lived in Lincoln, Montana, for ten years. He had no plumbing or electricity in his cabin. Forest Service personnel think he shot at their planes. The locals considered him a regular guy. Maybe Collins isn’t hiding. Maybe he’s out there in full view. It’s a sign of the times. The standards for normalcy find a new low with each passing day.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Who said it was?”
After Hackberry hung up, he called R. C. Bevins and Pam Tibbs into his office and told them of the conversation he’d just had.
“I’m sorry, Hack,” Pam said.
“There is nothing for us to feel sorry about. We honor Ethan’s memory by nailing the bastard who killed him,” Hackberry said. “R.C., I want you to go up to Brewster and get a topography map and look up the land records of every piece of property within five miles of the crime scene.”
“What am I looking for?” R.C. asked.
“Collins likes to take on the personae of obscure writers. Google the names on the land titles and see what pops up. Pam, you and I need to do something about Josef Sholokoff. For two years his name has been coming up in our investigation of Collins’s background. Sholokoff used Collins as a hit man, and he was also the business partner of Temple Dowling. Plus, Anton Ling says Sholokoff was mixed up with shipping arms to the Contras in the 1980s. He’s gotten a free pass for over twenty years, I think in part because he was a useful tool for some guys in the government.”
“What do you want to do about him?” she asked.
“He’s a Russian criminal. Maybe he needs a reminder of what life in Russia can be like,” Hackberry said.
After Pam and R.C. had left his office, he felt no better for his rhetoric and could not rid himself of the words the sheriff in Brewster had used to describe the wounds to Ethan Riser’s body. What had Ethan said to Collins that had filled him with such animus? Collins had always been cold-blooded and methodical when he killed, not driven by emotion or impetuosity. Before dying, Ethan had gotten to him. A remark about his mother? Maybe, but not likely. Collins had no illusions about the woman who had raised him. It was something else. Something that had to do with his image of himself. What greater bane was there for a narcissist than deflation of his ego? In his mind, Collins believed himself a Titan, a warrior-angel with a wingspan that could blot out the moon. Ethan had been well read, intelligent, and con-wise and had thought of Collins as a noisy, misogynistic nuisance who would eventually be greased off the planet. Somehow, before he died, he told Collins that in the great scheme of things, Collins had the wingspan of a moth and was hardly worth the effort of swatting with a rolled magazine. With luck, Hackberry might have a chance to deliver the same insult.
Something else was bothering him. Historians wrote of battles as epic events involving thousands of soldiers acting in concert, all of them directed by a brilliant strategist such as Alexander or Napoleon or Stonewall Jackson. But for the grunts on the line, the reality was otherwise. They took home a limited perspective, a few shards of memory, flashes of light, a name being called out, the whirring sound of a projectile flying past one’s ear. In the larger context of the battle, the individual’s perspective was little more than a sketch on the back of one’s thumbnail. The invasion at Inchon saved United Nations troops from being pushed into the sea. But Hackberry remembered only one detail from it. A group of marines under the command of a young naval lieutenant had captured a lighthouse. They were aided by Korean civilians. Had they not held the lighthouse, the peninsula would have been lost. In retaliation, the North Koreans began executing civilians. Some of the civilians armed themselves with captured weapons and fought back at a railway station, where they filled suitcases from the baggage room with dirt and barricaded themselves inside. They should have survived, but they didn’t. A shell from either a railroad gun or an offshore battery hit the depot and killed everyone inside. The shell must have contained phosphorus, because the bodies of the dead were burned uniformly black, as though they had been roasted on a slow fire, the skin swelling until it burst.
Hackberry had never forgotten the image of the dead Koreans and their frozen posture inside the ruins of the building. Nor would he ever forget the image of Ethan Riser dying in a spray of .45-caliber bullets fired into his face by Jack Collins. People said time healed. If it did, Hackberry thought, the pocket watch he had inherited from his father must have been defective.
“Pam?” he said through the open door without getting up.
“Yes, sir?” she answered.
“See if Anton Ling is home. If she is, tell her we’re on our way out.”
“What’s up?” Pam said, standing in the doorway.
“It’s time for Miss Anton to get honest about her past.”
“You talking about that Air America bullshit?”
“No, arms to northern Nicaragua, courtesy of Josef Sholokoff. Would you stop using that language?”
Pam looked out the window at a woman coming up the sidewalk. “She must be psychic,” Pam said.