“You like to read novels. I’ve got a story for you, better than any fiction. Did you know that when Ma Barker and her son Fred were surrounded by the FBI, they executed each other with submachine guns? They sat across from each other in straight-back chairs down by the Everglades and blew each other all over the walls. How about that for a tight mother-son relationship? They were even buried in the same casket.”
“You fear a woman’s wrath, Sheriff Holland? The man who does will surround himself with manipulators and prostitutes and will never have a real woman in his life. The level of his anger hides the degree of his need. I thought you were wise in the ways of the world, but I’m starting to have my doubts.”
“Ethan Riser was my friend, you arrogant son of a bitch.”
“Ah, now we get down to the real issue.”
“You emptied your magazine into him after he was dead. His face was unidentifiable. He said something to you before he died, something you couldn’t abide, didn’t he? What was it, Collins? That you were despised inside the womb?”
“To be honest, I couldn’t quite make out Agent Riser’s words in all that shooting. The Thompson makes a heck of a racket.”
Hackberry could feel his hand gripping the phone receiver tighter and tighter, a bilious taste welling up in his throat. “No, it wasn’t about your mother. It wasn’t about your pathetic sex life, either. It had something to do with your vision of yourself, the Orkin man posing as Jesus. Ethan was a student of both history and Shakespeare. He reached back into his own reference and us
ed it on you, didn’t he? What made it doubly injurious was the fact that you acquired your literary background the hard way, and he used it to make you look like a fool. He called you a clown, didn’t he? A collection of tattered rags flapping in the wind, a stick figure with a carved pumpkin for a head. That’s you, Collins. Everyone knows it except you, you moron. Even the dead people who follow you around know it. You’re an object of pity. You think women like Gaddis and Dolan and Ling would be in a room with you unless you were holding a gun on them? Don’t call here again, even to surrender yourself. A phone conversation with you is like someone putting spittle in my ear. I don’t know how else to describe it. You have that effect on people.”
Hackberry replaced the receiver in the phone cradle and stared at it, his hand shaking on the desk blotter.
“That was a beaut,” Pam said from the doorway. “Think you got to him?”
Hackberry shook his head. “There’re no handles on Collins. I had no design in mind.”
“You could have fooled me.”
He looked at her for a long time. “Be careful,” he said.
“Of Collins?”
“Of everything. We can’t lose our good people.”
“Nothing is going to happen to me,” she said.
“Don’t say that. It’s bad luck.”
She came into his office and closed the door behind her. “The minister from my church dropped by. He said he wanted to warn me about a rumor he’d heard.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That whatever it was, it was probably true, and I wasn’t interested in hearing it.”
He folded his hands behind his head and put one boot on the corner of the desk. “You’re heck on wheels, kiddo.”
“Call me that after quitting time and I’ll hit you.”
“I believe it,” he replied.
IN THE DARKNESS the game ranch was a surreal place that seemed more like African dry land drenched in moonlight and shadowed by an enormous mountain that was over six thousand feet in elevation. The sand in the streambeds was white, the rocky sides of the declivities as sharp as knives, the land rustling with desert greenery and tabled with slabs of sedimentary rock that looked like the marbled backs of albino whales. The steel fence that enclosed the ranch seemed to roll for miles across the countryside, and the mesh was so thick that it took Krill’s men twenty minutes to scissor an opening in it with the bolt cutters. Out in the darkness, they could hear large animals banging around in the brush, hooves clattering on rocks, and they wondered if the noise would give warning to Josef Sholokoff and his entourage at the big stone house in the valley.
Krill led his men single-file through the slit in the fence, his M16 now equipped with a bipod and slung on his right shoulder, his eyes locked on the lighted compound down below. The wind was up, bending the trees and the tall grasses, which was not good for men threading their way through trees and foliage. When the wind blew, everything in the environment moved, even the shadows, everything except Krill and his men. But bad luck was an element to which a man adjusted and did not allow himself to be overcome by. Negrito was another matter. Suddenly, he had become an expert on all matters of importance and would not shut up: “This place has got rattlesnakes and Gila monsters in it ... Those big animals you hear snuffing, that’s rhinos. One wrong step and squish ... A puta for one of the Russian’s men told you where he was at? How dependable is that? What if he ain’t there? What if we kill a bunch of guys and don’t get the Russian? We got to wipe the slate clean, Krill. We turn the house down there into a cemetery.”
“Once again you have shown your great wisdom,” Krill said. “But now you must be quiet.”
“I am operating as your loyal lieutenant and adviser, my jefe.”
“Yes, yes, I know. But you talk like a bat flapping its wings in a cave, filling the air with sound that means nothing. You must cease this constant talking. It’s like glass in my ears.”
Negrito’s BB eyes seemed to grow closer to the bridge of his nose. “I’m here to serve you, nothing more. I worry about this mission. We are killing the Russian because he killed the minister who baptized your children. But this all has it origins with La Magdalena. If she had baptized them as you asked, we would not be having these problems. The Russians are dangerous. If you kill one of them, you kill them all. They come out of prisons worse than Mexico’s. They fuck their mothers and kill their children. Many of them were in insane asylums.”
“Where do you get these ideas, hombre?”