?What business is it of yours??
?It isn?t, Jack,? Bobby Lee said. ?Those guys you had to deal with in the motel room? They were Josef Sholokoff?s people??
?They didn?t have time to introduce themselves.?
?I have to line out something to you. About Liam. It?s eating my lunch. I set him up in that café. I called him on my cell and said that Holland had made him. I split and let him take the fall.?
Preacher gazed at Bobby Lee, his legs crossed, his wrists hanging off the arms of the chair. ?Why you telling me this, boy??
?You said I was like a son to you. You meant that??
Preacher crossed his heart, not speaking.
?I got a bad feeling. I think you and me might go down together. But I don?t see that I?ve got a lot of choices right now. If we get cooled out, I don?t want a lie between us.?
?You?re a mixed bag of cats, Bobby Lee.?
?I?m trying to be straight up with you. You?re a purist. There?s not many of your kind around anymore. That doesn?t mean I like eating a bullet.?
?Why do you think we?re going to get cooled out??
?You tried to machine-gun a deputy sheriff. Then you had a chance to clip the sheriff and didn?t. I think maybe you?ve got a death wish.?
?That?s what Sheriff Holland probably thinks. But you?re both wrong. In this business, you recognize the great darkness in yourself, and you go inside it and die there, and then you don?t have to die again. Why do you think the Earp brothers took Doc Holliday with them to the OK Corral? A man coughing blood on his handkerchief with one hand and covering your back with a double-barrel ten-gauge won?t ever let you down. So you fed ole Liam to the wolves, did you??
Bobby Lee looked away from Preacher. Then he corrected his expression and stared straight into Preacher?s face. ?Liam made fun of me after I stood up for him. He said I was lots of things, but I would never be a soldier. What was that about a great darkness inside us??
If Bobby Lee?s question registered on Preacher, he chose to ignore it. ?I?m going to rebuild my house, Bobby Lee. I?d like for you to be part of that. I?d like for you to feel you belong here.?
?That makes me proud, Jack.?
?You look like you want to ask me something.?
?Maybe we could put some flowers on your mother?s grave. Where?s she buried??
The wind was thumping the tent so hard, Bobby Lee could not be sure what Preacher said. He asked him to repeat the statement.
?I never quite get through to you,? Preacher shouted.
?The wind?s howling.?
?She?s underneath your feet! Where I planted her!?
ON THE FAR end of the same burning, windswept day, one on which the monsoonal downpour had been baked out of the topsoil and dust devils formed themselves out of nothing and spun across the plains and, in the blink of an eye, broke apart against monument rocks, Vikki Gaddis walked from the Fiesta motel to the steak house where she waited tables and sometimes sang with the band. The sky had turned yellow as the heat went out of the day, the sun settling into a melted orange pool among the rain clouds in the west. In spite of the humidity and dust, she felt a change was taking place in the world around her. Maybe her optimistic mood was based on the recognition that no matter what a person?s situation was, eventually it would have to change, for good or bad. Perhaps for her and Pete, change was at hand. There was a greenish tint to the land, as though a patina of new life had been sprinkled on the countryside. She could smell the mist from the grass sprinklers on the center ground and the flowers blooming in the window boxes of the motel at the intersection, a watered date-palm oasis in the midst of a desert, a reminder that a person always had choices.
Pete had told her of his conversation with the sheriff whose name was Hackberry Holland and the offer of protection the sheriff had made. The offer was a possibility, a viable alternative. But to step across a line into a world of legal entanglement and processes that were irreversible was easier said than done, she thought. They would be risking the entirety of their future, even their lives, on the word of a man they didn?t know. Pete kept reassuring her that Billy Bob would not have given him Hackberry?s name if he were not a good person, but Pete had an incurable trust in his fellow man, no matter how mu
ch the world hurt him, to the point where his faith was perhaps more a vice than a virtue.
She remembered an incident that had occurred when she was a little girl and her father had been awakened at two in the morning by the chief of police in Medicine Lodge and told to pick up an eighteen-year-old black kid who had escaped from a county prison in Oklahoma. The boy, who had been arrested for petty theft, had crawled through a heating duct in January and had almost been fried before he kicked a grille from an air vent that, by sheer chance, gave onto an unsecured part of the building. He had ridden a freight train into Kansas with two twisted ankles and had hidden out in his aunt?s house, where in all probability he would have been forgotten, since his criminal status was marginal and not worth the expense of finding and bringing him back.
Except the escapee had the IQ of a seven-year-old and phoned the county prison collect and asked the jailer to mail his possessions to Medicine Lodge. He made sure the jailer wrote down his aunt?s correct address. A ninety-day county bit had now been augmented by a mandatory minimum of one year in McAlester Pen.
Three days later, Vikki watched her father and an Oklahoma sheriff?s deputy lead the escapee in an orange jumpsuit and waist and leg chains to the back of an Oklahoma state vehicle and lock him to a D-ring inset in the floor. The escapee was limping badly and could not have weighed over a hundred pounds. His arms were like sticks. His skin seemed to be possessed of a disease that leached it of color. His hair had been cut so that it resembled a rusty Brillo pad glued to his scalp.
?What?s gonna happen to him, Daddy?? Vikki had asked.
?He?ll be cannibalized.?