?See those trees down yonder with the flowers inside their branches?? Preacher said. ?Some people call them rain trees. Others say they?re mimosas. But a lot of people call them Judas trees. Know why??
?Jack, I?m not up on that crap, you know that.? And for just a moment the confidence and sense of familiarity in his own voice almost convinced Hugo that things were as they used to be, that he and Jack Collins were still business partners, even brothers in arms.
?The story is that Judas was in despair after he betrayed Jesus. Before he hanged himself, he went out on a cliff in the desert and flung his thirty pieces of silver into the darkness. Every place those coins landed, a tree grew. On each tree were these red flowers. Those flowers represent the blood of Jesus. That?s the story of how the Judas tree came to be. You cold? You want a coat??
?Talk to him, Bobby Lee.?
?It?s out of my hands, Hugo.?
Jack winked at Hugo, then pushed the send button with his thumb and placed the phone in Hugo?s palm.
Hugo shrugged, his expression neutral, as though he were placating an unreasonable friend. The five rings that he hoped would deliver him to voice mail were the longest rings he had ever heard. When he thought he was home free, Artie Rooney picked up.
?That you, Hugo?? Artie said.
?Yeah, I??
?Where are you? I heard that crazy sonofabitch kidnapped Nick Dolan?s old lady.?
?I did what you said. Everything is fine.?
Preacher pulled the cell phone from Hugo?s hand and pressed it against his ear.
?I hope he went out shivering like a dog passing broken glass,? Rooney said. ?Tell me Mrs. Dolan was with him. Make my day perfect. Don?t hold back on me, Hugo. I want every detail. You parked one in her mouth, right? I?m getting hard thinking about it.?
Preacher folded the cell phone in his palm and dropped it in the pocket of his trousers. He stared out at the dust and mist blowing across the canyon, his expression contemplative, his mouth like a surgical wound. He stuck his little finger in one ear and removed something from his ear canal. Then he smiled at Hugo.
?Everything okay?? Hugo said.
?Right as rain,? Preacher said.
?Because words can get mixed up over the phone, or people can misunderstand each other.?
?No problem, Hugo. Take a walk with me.?
?Walk where??
?A man should always have choices. Ever read Ernest Hemingway? He said death is only bad when it?s prolonged and humiliating. When I brood on things like this, I take a walk.?
?I don?t get what you?re saying. Where we going??
?That?s the point. It?s for you to choose. Pancho Villa always gave his prisoners a choice. They could stand against a wall with a blindfold over their eyes or take off running. If it was me, I don?t think I?d run. I?d say screw that. I?d eat a round from one of those Mausers. Winchesters and Mausers were the standard issue for Villa?s troops. Did you know that??
?Jack, let?s talk a minute. I don?t know what Artie said, but he gets excited sometimes. I mean, you?d think that two hundred grand I brought you was drained out of his veins. He?s always yelling about what you did to his hand, like he didn?t bring it on himself, which everybody knows he did. Come on, Jack, slow down here. It?s a matter of keeping things in perspective, like the lady in your car there, I know you want to care for her and everybody knows you?ve always been a gentleman that way and you got a code most people in the life don?t have, wait, we don?t need to keep walking anywhere, let?s just stay right here a second, I mean right here where we?re talking, I?m not real big on heights, I never have been, I?m not afraid, I just want to be reasonable and make sure you understand I always thought you and Bobby Lee here were stand-up, and look, man, you got your two hundred large and I?m never gonna breathe a word about this stuff, you got my word, you want me to blow the country, you want my condo in Galveston, you name it, hey, Jack, come on, whoa, I?m telling you the truth, I get vertigo, my heart won?t take it.?
?Don?t fault yourself for this, Hugo. You?ve made a choice. Bobby Lee and I respect that,? Preacher said. ?Keep looking at me. That?s right, you?re a stand-up guy. See, it?s nothing to be afraid of.?
Hugo Cistranos stepped backward onto a shelf of air, his eyes closed and his fingers extended in front of him, like a blind man feeling in the dark. Then he plummeted three hundred feet, straight down, through the top of a cottonwood into the streambed filled with rocks that were the color of dirty snow.
27
HACKBERRY DID NOT get back home until almost ten that night. When he tried to sleep, the insides of his eyelids were dry and abrasive, as though there were sand in them or his corneas had been burned by the flash of an arc welder. Each time he thought he was successfully slipping off to sleep, he would feel himself jerked awake by the images of the dead men in the game farm?s lounge or, less dramatically, by the banality of an evil man who, when dying, had grieved over the wasted pot roast that had come from the exotic animal he had paid five thousand dollars to kill.
The tape Pam Tibbs had retrieved from the security camera had proved of little help. It had shown the arrival of a Honda and a Ford pickup truck. It had shown the back of a man wearing a fedora and a suit coat and slacks that flattened against his body in the wind. It had shown two tall unshaved men in colorful western shirts and bleached tight-fitting jeans that accentuated their genitalia. One of the tall men carried an elongated object wrapped loosely in a raincoat. The tape also showed a man in a dented and sweat-ringed top hat, his face shadowed, his striped overalls starched and pressed.
But it did not show the license tag on the pickup truck, and it showed only one letter and one number on the Honda: an S and the numeral 2. The value of the tape was minimal, other than the fact that the S and 2 confirmed that the vehicle Pete Flores had attacked with rocks was being driven by Jack Collins and perhaps was even registered to him, although under an alias.
Maybe the grouping of the letters and the numbers on the plate would narrow down the list provided earlier by the Texas DMV. In the morning Hackberry would call Austin again and start over. In the meantime, he had to sleep. He had learned long ago as a navy corpsman that Morpheus did not bestow his gifts easily or cheaply. The sleep that most people yearned for rarely came this side of the grave, except perhaps to the very innocent or to those willing to mortgage tomorrow for tonight. Tying off a vein, watching the blood rise inside a hypodermic needle, staining a mint-bruised mug of crushed ice with four fingers of Black Jack Daniel?s were all guaranteed to work. But the cost meant taking up residence in a country no reasonable person ever wanted to enter.