?What does he want with our flag??
?Ask him.?
?Where is he now??
?I?m not real sure. He went to your house.?
?Don?t tell me that.?
?What can Dolan do at your house??
?I gave Vikki Gaddis and Pete Flores an approximate idea where we were going. I thought Collins might have said something to Gaddis that would link him to the properties he?s bought and sold under an alias.?
?That was the right thing to do, Hack. Don?t worry about it.?
?Early in the morning, get on the horn to Riser.?
?What do you want me to tell him??
?Give him all the information we have on Collins. Tell him to send the cavalry or stay home. It?s his call.?
?Hack??
?What??
?Pam thinks Collins is trying to steal your soul.?
?So??
?Pam?s feelings are not objective.?
?What are you telling me??
?Don?t take chances with Collins.?
?The man has a hostage.?
?In one way or another, they all do. It?s what they use most effectively against us. You blow that bastard out of his socks.?
?Maydeen, you?re a good woman, but you?ve got a serious character defect. I can never be quite sure where you stand on an issue.?
After he closed his cell phone, he continued to sit on the side of the bed in the dark, the long day starting to catch up with him. Someone had left the engine running on a diesel-powered vehicle immediately outside Hackberry?s window. The sound vibrated through the wall and floor, staining the air with noxious fumes and a ceaseless hammering that was like a deliberate assault on the sensibilities. It was the signature act of the modern correspondent of the classical Vandal?senseless and stupid and at war with civilization, like someone graffiti-spraying a freshly painted white wall or smearing his feces on someone?s furniture.
Nazis were not ideologues. They were bullies and sackers of civilization. Their logos and ethos were that simple. Hackberry felt that he had lived into a time when gangbangers who sold crack to their own people and did drive-bys with automatic weapons were treated as cultural icons. Concurrently, outlaw white bikers muled crystal meth into every city in the United States. When they went down, it was only because they were murdered by their own kind. They were like creatures that had been incarnated from a Mad Max script. And like any form of cognitive dissonance in a society, they existed because they were given sanction and even lionized.
Who was to blame? Maybe no one. Or maybe everyone.
He opened the door and stepped out on the concourse. A bright red oversize pickup truck with an extended cab was parked two feet from him. The sound of the diesel engine was so loud he had to open and close his mouth to clear his ears. He could hear a party roaring two doors down. He walked out onto the lawn by the parking lot and picked up a brick from the border of the flower garden. The brick felt cool and heavy in his hand and smelled faintly of moist soil and chemical fertilizer.
He returned to the pickup truck and broke the driver?s window with the brick, setting off the alarm. Then he reached inside and unlocked the door and ripped the wiring from under the dashboard. He tossed the brick into a shrub.
A minute later, the driver, an unshaved man in greasy denims, was at his truck, aghast. ?What the fuck?? he said.
?Yeah, too bad,? Hackberry said. ?I?d file a report if I was you.?
?You saw it??
?A guy with a brick,? Hackberry said.