Hackberry closed the cell phone and looked at Pam.
?What?? she said.
?We?re not supposed to do anything until he calls us back.? He stared at her, his eyes not quite focused.
?Finish your thought,? she said.
?Remind me not to take your advice anymore.?
?Anything else??
?Screw Clawson. We bust Jack Collins,? he said.
ISAAC CLAWSON PARKED his car a half block from the Traveler?s Rest motel, put on a rain hat and coat, covering the butt of his holstered semiautomatic, and walked the rest of the way. It was almost dusk, and the wind was blowing in the streets, scouring dust into the sky. He heard the rumble of thunder just as a solitary raindrop struck his face. The decrease in barometric pressure and the sudden cooling of the day and the raindrop that he wiped on his hand and looked at seemed so unusual and unexpected after a week of triple-digit heat that he wondered if somehow the change in weather signaled a change in his life.
But that was a foolish way to think, he told himself. The great change in his life had come irrevocably in the night when two sheriff?s deputies had appeared at the door of his suburban home, removing their hats, and tried to tell him in euphemistic language that a young woman thought to be his daughter had been left locked with her fiancé inside the trunk of a burning automobile. From that moment on, Isaac knew the events of his future life might be modifiers of his mood or his worldview or the degree of anger he woke with in the false dawn, but nothing would ever give him back the happiness he had once taken for granted.
In fact, if there was any release from that night back in Tulsa, it came to him only when he canceled the ticket of someone he could associate in his mind with the two degenerates who had murdered his daughter.
He looked at his watch. It was 7:19, and the street lamps had come on in the motel parking lot. A rain shower was sweeping across the city, the clouds pierced with columns of sunlight, the air smelling of wet flowers and trees and the odor that rain makes when it touches warm concrete in summer.
He glanced up at the lavender hue of the heavens and opened his mouth and felt a raindrop hit his tongue. What a foolish thing to do, like a kid discovering spring, he thought, taking himself to task again.
The motel clerk was a rail of a man, dressed like a cowboy, in a black shirt with roses sewn on it and gray trousers with stripes, the cuffs tucked inside Mexican stovepipes stenciled with red and green flower petals. He wore a flesh-colored Band-Aid at the corner of one eye.
Clawson started to reach for his ID and instead rested his hand on the counter. ?Got a nonsmoking room for two?? he asked.
?Need a king or a pair of queens??
?My wife and I would like two
-oh-nine if it?s available. We stayed there the night our son graduated from college.?
The adhesive on the clerk?s Band-Aid was loose, and he pressed it back tight against the skin with the back of his wrist. He looked at his computer screen. ?That one is occupied. I could put you in two-oh-six.?
?Let me ask my wife. We?re kind of sentimental about our boy?s graduation.?
?I know what you mean,? the clerk said.
?You hurt your eye??
?Yeah, put a stick in it. Not too smart, I guess.?
After Isaac Clawson went back outside, the clerk looked in the mirror. The Band-Aid on his face had come almost completely loose, exposing a pair of tattooed blue teardrops at the corner of his eye. He flattened the Band-Aid into place once more and picked up the telephone, punching in only three digits.
Clawson picked up a free shopper?s guide from a newspaper box and held it over his head as he walked into the motel parking lot, as though going to his automobile to confer with his wife. Then he cut around the far side of the motel and entered an outdoor breezeway in the center of the building and mounted the stairs. The clouds were purple in the west, the sun like a yellow rose buried inside them, the sky streaked with rain. In weather like this, his father used to say the devil was beating his wife. Why was Isaac having thoughts like these now, about his boyhood, about his family? Why did a great change in his life seem to be at hand?
THERE HAD BEEN an eight-vehicle pileup by an intersection of I-35 and I-10, a chemical tanker jackknifing and sloshing its load across six lanes of traffic. Hackberry had clamped his magnetized portable flasher on the roof of his truck cab and was trying to thread his way along the road?s shoulder to an exit by a shopping center. He handed his cell phone to Pam. ?Try Clawson again,? he said.
She got Clawson?s voice mail. She closed the cell phone but kept it in her lap. ?Want to call the locals for backup?? she asked.
?For Clawson??
She thought about it. ?No, I guess he wouldn?t appreciate that too much.?
?Hang on,? Hackberry said.
He swung across the swale, bouncing hard through the bottom, spinning grass and dirt off the rear tires as he powered up the far side. He went the wrong way on the road shoulder, then cut across another swale onto an entrance to I-10 that was free of congestion, the truck slamming down on the springs. Pam kept one hand fastened on the dashboard.