Rain Gods (Hackberry Holland 2)

?They?re in.?

?They?re in??

?You heard me.?

?What about Holland??

?I?ll give it some thought.?

?I think he saw me. I pulled off the road to case his place. I thought he was asleep. He came outside and saw my car. But it was too dark for him to get my tag or see my face. If we leave him alone, he?ll forget about it.?

?You didn?t tell me that.?

?So I just did. Use your head, Jack. Artie Rooney hijacked Josef Sholokoff?s whores. Who do you think Rooney is gonna put that on? You got the rep from L.A. to Miami. Mexican cops think you walk through walls. Artie gets on the phone, tells Sholokoff you?re a psycho, tells him you?re working for Nick Dolan, and gets you permanently out of his hair. You taught me to be a fly on the wall, Jack.?

?Want to spell that out??

?That agent you capped wasn?t just a fed, he was from ICE. They?re fanatics, worse than Treasury agents. You got any idea of how hot you are??

?You just said ?you.??

?Okay, ?we.??

?Call me when you find Vikki Gaddis.?

?Is this girl worth clipping? Think about it. A waitress from a truck stop??

?Did I say anything about clipping her? Did you hear me say that??

?No.?

?You find her, but you don?t touch her.?

?Why should I want to touch her? It?s not me who?s got??

?Got what??

?An obsession. Like a tumor on the brain. The size of a carrot.?

Again Preacher let his silence speak for him; it was a weapon Bobby Lee never knew how to deal with.

?You still there??

?Still here,? Preacher said.

?You?re the best there is, Jack. Nobody else could have done what you did behind the church. It took guts to do that.?

?Say again??

?To step across the line like that, to grease every one of them, to burn the whole magazine and bulldoze them under and mark it off. It takes maximum cojones to do a mass whack like that, Jack. That?s why you?re you.?

This time Preacher?s silence was not of his own volition. He took the cell phone from his ear and opened his mouth to clear a blockage in his ear canal. The side of his face felt both numb and hot to the touch, as though he had been stung by a bee. He stared at the gray rock. The lizard was gone, and at the base of the rock, he saw a spray of tiny purple flowers that looked like tiny violets. He

wondered how any flower that lovely and delicate could grow in the desert.

?You still there? Talk to me, man,? he heard Bobby Lee?s voice say. Preacher closed his cell phone without replying. He picked up the Thompson and ran a bore brush through the barrel and swabbed it with a clean oil patch. He folded a piece of white paper and inserted it in the open chamber, reflecting the sunlight up through the rifling. The inside of the barrel was immaculate, the whorls of light an affirmation of the gun?s mechanical integrity and reliability. He lifted up the drum and snapped it cleanly into place under the barrel and laid the gun across his lap, his palms resting on the wood stock and steel frame. He could hear whirring sounds in his head, like wind blowing in a cave or perhaps the voices of women whispering to him through the ground, whispering inside the wildflowers.

AT THAT SAME moment, one hundred miles away, three bikers were headed down a two-lane highway, full-bore, their arms wrapped with jailhouse tats, the points of their shoulders bright with sunburn. Sometimes, out of boredom, they lazed across the solid yellow stripe or stopped at a roadside rathole for a beer and a grease burger or caught a live hillbilly band at a shitkicker nightclub or steak house. But otherwise, they burned their way across the American Southwest with the dedication of Visigoths. The crystal that coursed in their veins, the dirty thunder of their exhaust flattening against the asphalt, the blowtorch velocity of the wind on their skin, the surge of the engines? power into their genitalia, blended together in a paean to their lives.