?Did you see a man who has a shaved head and octagonal-shaped glasses and looks like a weight lifter??
?Today? I don?t recollect anybody like that.?
?You know who Preacher Jack Collins is??
?I know some preachers, but not one by that name.?
?I hear the A.B. is for life. Is that true??
?Sir??
?Those blue teardrops by your eye, the ones under your Band-Aid.?
?Yes, sir, I had some trouble when I was younger.?
?But the Aryan Brotherhood is for life, correct??
?No, sir, not for me, it isn?t. I put all that behind me.?
?You were in Huntsville??
?Yes, sir.?
?Give me the key to two-oh-nine. Don?t pick up that phone while we?re here. If it rings, let it ring off the wall. If you?ve lied to me, you?ll wish you were in lockdown back at the Walls.?
The clerk had to sit down when Hackberry and Pam went out of the office.
ISAAC CLAWSON HAD always subscribed to the belief that a person?s life was governed by no more than two or three choices that usually seemed of little consequence at the time one made them. He had also wondered how many thoughts a man could experience in under a second, at least if his adrenaline level didn?t blow his circuits first.
But was this moment in his life really one that presented him a viable choice? What was the governing principle for any lawman caught in his situation with an armed adversary? That one was easy. You never surrendered your weapon. You hung tough, you kept your enemy talking, you brassed it out, you created an electric storm of ?spray-and-pray fire? no sane person would choose to walk into. If all that failed, you ate the bullet.
What were Shakespeare?s words? ?By my troth, I care not; we owe God a death, and let it go which way it will, he who dies this year is quit for the next.? Yes, that was it. By accepting your mortality, you walked right through its shadow into the light on the far side.
But the lesson of Shakespeare and the principles Isaac Clawson had learned at Quantico and as many as five other training programs weren?t entirely applicable here. If he was executed in room 209, his killer would walk free and kill again and again. In fact, there would probably be no prosecutable evidence to link Clawson?s death to Preacher Jack Collins. Clawson had been acting alone, confirming his colleagues? perception that he was a driven man teetering on the edges of nervous collapse. Maybe some of his colleagues and superiors might even be glad Jack Collins had rid them of an agent no one felt at ease with.
If Isaac had just one more season to run, he could find Jack Collins and the others who had murdered the Thai women and girls and take them off the board one by one, each of them in some way payback for the death of his daughter. Even his worst detractors conceded that no one at ICE was more dedicated and successful in hunting down the traffickers in misery who were metastasizing on America?s southern border.
?Last chance, hoss,? the voice said behind him.
?You think you can pop a federal agent and just blow town? They?ll have to pick you up with tweezers.?
?Looks to me like they?ve done a piss-poor job of it so far.?
?You?re the one they call Preacher??
?You violated the Fourth Amendment. A man?s rental lodging is the same as his home. Y?all don?t abide by your own Constitution. That?s why you?re not deserving of respect. I say y?all are hypocrites, sir. I say a pox on your house.?
Isaac Clawson spun in a half-circle, swinging his semiautomatic at arm?s length, the rain blowing through the door into his face. The figure he saw standing against the wall to one side of the door seemed out of context, unrelated to the events transpiring around him. It was the cleaning woman, or what he had thought was a woman, in a head scarf and a smock, a two-barrel nickel-plated derringer aimed with her left hand, her right hand supporting herself heavily on a chair back as though she were in pain.
Isaac was sure he squeezed off a round. He must have. His finger had tightened inside the trigger guard. He had not flinched; his eyes were wide open. He should have heard the report and felt the solid kick against the heel of his hand and seen the barrel jump with the recoil, the ejected casing tinkling on the floor.
Instead, he had seen a pinpoint of brightn
ess leap from the muzzle of the derringer. The bright circle of light made him think of fire leaking through a metal surface that had been superheated beyond its tolerance, its stress level giving way to the roaring furnace it tried to contain.
He felt a finger touch his brow, and he saw hands reaching toward him from a cool fire that somehow had been rendered harmless, as though the flames had been robbed of their heat and could have no more effect on living tissue than waving shadows could, and he knew that this time he had done something right, that he could pull his daughter and her fiancé from the burning automobile and undo the cruelty and suffering the world had visited upon them.
But as he reached for his daughter?s hands, he realized his life would always be defined by inadequacy and failure. It was his daughter?s hands that grasped his, not the other way around, extending out of a white radiance, slipping up higher on his wrists, seizing them with superhuman strength, pulling him into a place where resistance and rage and even the desire to make choices seemed to have dissolved into nothingness a million years ago.