Rain Gods (Hackberry Holland 2)

Hackberry turned around and raised one fist in the air, hoping that Pete Flores would recognize the universal military signal to stop. But either Flores did not see him, or the driver, who was undoubtedly Nick Dolan, chose to keep coming.

Hackberry shifted his direction, crossing behind Pam Tibbs, his .45 revolver on full cock, the Beretta stuffed through the back of his gun belt. ?I?m going to clear the first tent. Cover me,? he said.

He opened his Queen pocketknife with his teeth and walked quickly to the back of the tent, taking long strides, watching the other tents and the two parked vehicles, both of which had tinted windows. The blade of his knife could shave hair off his arm. He sliced the cords that were tied to the tent?s support poles and steel ground pins and watched the shape go out of the tent as it collapsed in a pile.

Nothing moved under its folds. He crossed behind Pam Tibbs, lifting his eyes to the cave entrance on the mountainside. The pile of building debris was behind them now, the bulldozed stucco powdering, the broken asbestos feathering in the wind. If Collins opened up on them, the only cover available would be the pickup truck or the SUV, and he could not be sure either of them was unoccupied.

He felt naked in the way a person feels naked in a dream, in a public place, before a large audience. But the sense of nakedness in his and Pam?s circumstances went beyond that. It was the kind of sensation a forward artillery observer experiences when the first round he has called in for effect strikes home and his position is exposed. It was the kind of nakedness a navy corpsman feels when he runs through automatic-weapons fire to reach a wounded marine. The sensation was akin to having one?s skin pulled off in strips with a pair of pliers.

Then he realized that regardless of the criminal background of his antagonists, at least one of them had made the mistake of all amateurs: His vanity or his libido or whatever megalomaniacal passion defined him was more important to him than the utilitarian simplicity of a stone killer and survivor like Jack Collins.

One man was wearing lizard-skin cowboy boots, chrome-plated on the heels and toes. They flashed with a dull silvery light beneath the running board on the far side of the pickup truck.

?Three o?clock, Pam!? Hackberry said.

At the same moment the man behind the truck fired an Uzi or a MAC-10 across the hood, then moved back quickly behind the cab. But his one-handed aim was sloppy, and the bullets hit the trash pile and stitched the water drum and cut a line across the hardpan, flicking dirt into the air and ricocheting off rocks and whining into the distance with the diminished sound of a broken bedspring.

Hackberry aimed his .45 with both hands and fired through the tinted window on the driver?s side, cascading glass onto the seats and blowing out the opposite window. He fired two more rounds, one through the window on the extended cab, one through the back door, leaving a clean-edged, polished indentation and hole the size of a quarter. But the three rounds he had let off did no good. The man with the automatic weapon moved behind the back of the cab and sprayed the whole area blindly, probably as masking fire for either the other Hispanic man, who was nowhere in sight, or Jack Collins up in the cave.

The shooting stopped. Hackberry had pulled back to the edge of the trash pile, and Pam was somewhere off to his left, in the shadows or behind the concrete foundation of the destroyed house. In all probability, the shooter was changing magazines. Hackberry got down on his hands and knees, then on his stomach. He heard a metallic click, like a latching steel mechanism being inserted into a socket. He extended his .45, gripping it with both hands, his elbows propped in the dirt, the pain along hi

s spine flaring into his ribs.

Hackberry saw the chrome-sheathed lizard-skin boots of the shooter move from behind the back tire. He sighted down the long barrel of his .45 at the place where the blue-jean cuff of the shooter?s right pants leg met the top of his foot. He pulled the trigger.

The shooter screamed when the 230-grain round tore through his boot. He fell to the ground and yelled out again, holding his destroyed foot and ankle, blood welling through his fingers, his other hand still gripping his weapon.

Pam Tibbs ran toward the truck, her pump shotgun held in front of her, the safety off, lifting the barrel, stepping sideways in an arc around the hood of the truck, almost like an erratic dancer, coming into position so that she stood in full view of the shooter. All the time she was yelling, as though to a man with neither sight nor hearing, ?Give it up! Give it up! Give it up! Do it now! Do it now! Throw it away! Hands straight out on the ground! You must do it now! No, you do not do that! Both hands in the dirt! Did you hear me??

Then she squeezed the trigger. Five feet away, the man who would not release his weapon ate a pattern of buckshot as wide as his hand and watched his brains splatter across the side panel of his truck.

When Hackberry got to her, she had already jacked the spent shell from the chamber and was shoving another one into the magazine with her thumb, her hands still trembling.

?Did you see the other guy?? he said.

?No, where is he?? she said. Her eyes were as round as marbles, jittering in their sockets.

?I didn?t see him. We?re exposed. Get behind the truck.?

?Where?s Collins??

?In the cave. Get behind the truck. Did you hear me??

?What?s that sound??

?What sound?? he said. But the .45 rounds he had fired had left his ears ringing, and he couldn?t make out her words.

?It?s that idiot Dolan,? she said.

They couldn?t believe what they saw next. Nick Dolan?s SUV had veered off the dirt track, swinging wide of the concrete slab on which the stucco house had once stood, and was now coming full-bore across the hardpan, rocks and mud flying up into the undercarriage, the frame jolting on the springs.

?Has he lost his mind?? Pam said.

Nick Dolan plowed through the tent closest to the mountain, ripping it loose from its steel pins, wrapping the polyethylene material and destroyed aluminum poles across the grille and hood. But inside the sounds of the tent tearing and the tie ropes breaking and the steel pins whipping back against the SUV, Hackberry had heard a solid weight impact sickeningly against the SUV?s hood.

Nick slammed on his brakes, and the tangle of material and tent poles and a broken cot rolled off his vehicle into the dirt, with the body of the second Hispanic man inside.

?I saw him go into the tent. He had a gun,? Nick said from the window. A pair of binoculars hung from his neck.