?Some people have a way of putting themselves in the middle of electric storms, Sheriff.?
?I don?t think the problem is mine. Your colleagues want Collins as a conduit to this Russian out on the West Coast. I think they might want to use Dolan as bait. In the meantime, I?m a hangnail.?
This time Ethan Riser was silent.
?You?re telling me I?m bait, too?? Hackberry said.
?I can?t speak for the actions of others. But I sleep nights. I do so because I treat people as honestly as I can. Watch your ass, Sheriff. Guys like us are old school. But there?s not many of us left.?
A FEW MINUTES later, Hackberry filled a Styrofoam cup with black coffee, dropped three sugar cubes in it, and removed a folded-up checkerboard and a box of wood checkers from his bottom desk drawer. He walked up the old steel stairs to the second floor and pulled up a chair to Danny Boy Lorca?s cell. He sat down and placed the coffee and the checkerboard inside the bars and unfolded the checkerboard on the concrete floor. ?Set ?em up,? he said.
?I fell off the wagon again,? Danny Boy said, sitting up on the edge of his bunk, rubbing his face. His skin was as dark as smoked leather, his eyes dead, like coals that have been consumed by their own fire.
?One day you?ll quit. Between now and then, don?t fret yourself about it,? Hackberry said.
?I dreamed it rained. I saw a dried-out field of corn stand up straight in the rain. I had the same dream for three nights.?
Hackberry?s eyes crinkled at the corners.
?You don?t pay no attention to dreams, huh?? Danny Boy said.
?You bet I do. Your move,? Hackberry said.
THE THREE BIKERS checked in to a motel next to a truck stop and nightclub, partially because the portable sign in front of the nightclub said LADIES FREE TONIGHT?TWO-FERS 5 TO 8. They showered and changed into fresh clothes and drank Mexican beer at the bar and picked up a woman who said she worked at the dollar store in town. They also picked up her friend, who was sullen and suspicious and claimed she had a ten-year-old boy waiting alone at home.
But when Tim showed the friend his tin Altoids box packed to the brim with a lovely white granular cake of nose candy, she changed her mind and joined him and her girlfriend and the other two bikers for a couple of lines, some high-octane weed, and an order-in pizza back at the motel.
Tim had rented a room at the end of the building, and while his companions and their new friends went at it full-throttle on two beds, he drank a soda outside and crushed the can in one hand and threw it in the trash. He sat on a bench under a tree throbbing with cicadas and opened his cell phone. He could hear the bedstead banging against the motel wall and the cacophonous laughter of the two dimwits his friends had picked up, as if their laughter were outside them and not part of anything that was funny. He put an unlit cigarette in his mouth and tried to clear his head. What would the smart money do in a situation like this? You didn?t blow a hit for Josef Sholokoff. You also didn?t mess up when you took on a guy like Jack Collins, at least if he was as good as people said he was.
The eaves of the motel were lit with pink neon tubing. The light was fading from the sky, and the air was purple and dense and moist, with a smell of dust in it that suggested a drop in the barometer, perhaps even a taste of rain. The fronds on a palm tree by the entrance to the motel straightened and rattled in the wind. He thought about going back inside and trying out one of the dimwits. No, first things first. He dialed a number on his cell phone. While he listened to the ring, he wondered what was keeping the pizza man with their order.
?Hugo??
?Yeah, who?s this??
?It?s Tim.?
?Tim who??
?Tim who works for Josef. Lose the charade. You want an update or not??
?You got Preacher??
?We?re working on it.?
?Explain that.?
?We had him boxed, but he disappeared. I don?t know how he did it.?
?Preacher is onto you but he got away? Do you have any idea what you?re telling me??
?It sounds like you overloaded on your Ex-Lax.?
?You listen, asshole??
?No, you listen. The guy has got no wheels and no house to go back to. We?ll find him. In the meantime??
?What do you mean, he has no house to??