Rain Gods (Hackberry Holland 2)

?What about it??

?You haven?t said much, that?s all.?

He looked straight ahead at the hills, at the mesquite ruffling in the wind, at the immensity of the countryside, beveled and scalloped and worn smooth by wind and drought and streaked with salt by receding oceans, a place where people who may have even preceded the Indians had hunted animals with sharpened sticks and crushed one another?s skulls over a resource as uncomplicated in its composition as a pool of brown water.

?You bothered by last night?? she said.

?No.?

?You think you took advantage of an employee??

?No.?

?You just think you?re an old man who shouldn?t be messing with a younger woman??

?The question of my age isn?t arguable. I am old.?

?You could fool me,? she said.

?Keep your eyes on the road.?

?What you are is a damn Puritan.?

?Fundamentalist religion and killing people run in my family,? he said.

For the first time that morning, she laughed.

But Hackberry could not shake the depression he was in, and the cause had little to do with the events of the previous night at the motel. After returning from Korea, he had rarely discussed his experiences there, except on one occasion when he was required to testify at the court-martial of a turncoat who, for a warmer shack and a few extra fish heads and balls of rice in the progressive compound, had sold his friends down the drain. Even then his statements were legalistic, nonemotional, and not autobiographical in nature. The six weeks he had spent under a sewer grate in the dead of winter were of little interest to anyone in the room. Nor were his courtroom listeners interested, at least at the moment, in a historical event that had occurred on a frozen dawn in the third week of November in the year 1950.

At first light Hackberry had awakened in a frozen ditch to the roar of jet planes splitting the sky above him, as a lone American F-80 chased two Russian-made MiGs back across the Yalu into China. The American pilot made a wide turn and then a victory roll, all the time staying south of the river, obeying the proscription against entering Red Chinese airspace. During the night, from across a snow-filled rice paddy spiked with brown weeds, the sound of bugles floated down from the hills, from different crests and gullies, some of them blown into megaphones for amplification. No one slept as a result.

At dawn there were rumors that two Chinese priso

ners had been brought back by a patrol. Then someone said the Korean translator didn?t know pig flop from bean dip about local dialects and that the two prisoners were ignorant rice farmers conscripted by the Communists.

One hour later, a marching barrage began that would forever remain for Hackberry as the one experience that was as close to hell as the earth is capable of producing. It was followed throughout the day by a human-wave frontal assault comprised of division after division of Chinese regulars, pushing civilians ahead of them as human shields, the dead strung for miles across the snow, some of them wearing tennis shoes.

The marines packed snow on the barrels of their .30-caliber machine guns, running the snow up and down the superheated steel with their mittens. When the barrels burned out, they sometimes had to unscrew and change them with their bare hands, leaving their flesh on the metal.

The ditch was littered with shell casings, the BAR man hunting in the snow for his last magazine, the breech of every M-1 around Hack locking open, the empty clip ejecting with a clanging sound. When the marines were out of ammunition, Hackberry remembered the great silence that followed and the hissing of shrapnel from airbursts in the snow and then the bugles blowing again.

Now, as he gazed through the windshield of the cruiser, he was back in the ditch, and the year was 1950, and for a second he thought he heard a series of dull reports like strings of Chinese firecrackers popping. But when he rolled down the window, the only sound he heard was wind. ?Stop the car,? he said.

?What is it??

?There?s something wrong with that scene. The old man said the Mexicans working here were illegals. But the vehicles are new and expensive. Undocumented workers don?t set up a permanent camp where they work, either.?

?You think Collins is actually there??

?He shows up where you least expect him. He doesn?t feel guilty. He thinks it?s the rest of us who have the problem, not him.?

?What do you want to do??

?Call the locals for backup, then call Ethan Riser.?

?I say leave the feds out of it. They?ve been a cluster-fuck from the jump. Where you going??

?Just make the calls, Pam,? he said.