“Did you read the paper this morning?”
“Something happen?”
“If I come in here again, refuse to serve me,” Hackberry said. “I’d really appreciate that.”
Halfway to the office, his cell phone vibrated again. “Sheriff Holland,” he said.
“It’s me, Sheriff.”
“Yeah, I thought it might be you, R.C.”
“How you doin’?”
“Fine.”
“I’m parked at this cabin that’s between a creek and a bluff. You cain’t see it except from the air. Feds are all over the place, but I found something they missed. It’s a checker. They didn’t know what it was.”
“I’m not quite tracking you.”
“It’s a homemade checker, one somebody carved out of wood. I’m not explaining myself real good. The property is in the name of W. W. Guthrie, but nobody around here seems to know what he looks like or where he’s from. When the feds got here, the cabin and the house were clean. I went out to the barn and saw the same Michelin tire tracks we saw at Anton Ling’s place. Then I went inside, and this fed was looking at a little round wood button that he found behind the kitchen door. You following me?”
“Not really.”
“I’ll try again. On the bottom of it were the initials N.B. For ‘Noie Barnum.’ On the top was a K. The fed didn’t know what that meant. I told him it was K for ‘king.’ So he says, ‘Yeah, it must have rolled behind the door.’ So I went into the bedroom and found another one, except this one was wedged in the side of the dresser. That whole place was broom-sweep clean, Sheriff. The second checker, the one stuck in the dresser, wasn’t left there by mistake. When I showed the fed what I’d found, he looked pretty confused.”
“Noie Barnum isn’t a willing companion of Jack Collins?” Hackberry said.
“Or he’s covering his ass,” R.C. replied.
Or he has his own agenda, Hackberry thought. “You did a fine job, bud. Come on in,” he said.
Minutes later, he called both Maydeen and Pam into his office.
“Is this about my language?” Maydeen said. “If it is, I’m sor—”
“Forget your language. The feds have treated us like dipshits. Find out everything you can about Noie Barnum,” he said.
KRILL SQUATTED DOWN on a bare piece of ground a few feet from the common grave where he had buried his three children. The grave was marked by a Styrofoam cross wrapped with a string of multicolored plastic flowers. He upended an unlabeled bottle of mescal and drank from it against the sunset, the light turning to fire inside the glass. A copy of the San Antonio Express-News was weighted down on the ground with rocks he had placed on each corner of the front page, the paper riffling with wind. Krill drank again from the bottle, then pressed a c
ork into the neck with his thumb and gazed at the sun descending into a red blaze behind the hills.
Negrito squatted next to him, his greasy leather hat flattening the hair on his forehead. “Don’t pay no attention to what’s in that newspaper,” he said.
“They’re gonna put it on us, hombre. It means trouble.”
“That means trouble? What do you call killing a DEA agent?”
“He wasn’t an agent. He was an informant and a corrupt Mexican cop. Nobody cares what we did to him. Reverend Cody was a minister.”
“We didn’t do it to him, man.”
“But our prints are there, estúpido.”
“That ain’t what’s bothering you, Krill. It’s something else, ain’t it?”
“He baptized my children. Nobody else would do that. Not even La Magdalena. To treat him with disrespect now is to treat my children with disrespect.”
“That don’t make sense.”