Rain Gods by James Lee Burke Page B

live in his sleep the rest of his life if Hugo killed her. And what about the soldier? Nick had recognized the elongated blue and silver combat infantryman badge on his chest. Nick could feel tears welling into his eyes but couldn’t decide if they were for himself or for the Thai women machine-gunned by somebody named Preacher Collins or for Vikki Gaddis and her boyfriend.
     
    He lay down in the middle of his lawn, his arms and legs spread in the shape of a giant X, a weight as heavy as a blacksmith’s anvil crushing his chest.
     
     
    WHEN HACKBERRY LOOKED out his office window and saw a silver car with a mirror wax job coming hard up the street, blowing dust and newspaper into the air, the sun bouncing off the windshield like the brassy flash of a heliograph, he knew that either a drunk or an outsider who couldn’t read speed limit signs or government trouble was about to arrive in the middle of his afternoon, free curbside delivery.
     
    The man who got out of the car was as tall as Hackberry, his starched white shirt form-fitting on his athletic frame, his shaved and polished head gleaming under an afternoon sun that looked like a yellow flame. A dark-skinned man with a haircut like a nineteenth-century Apache’s sat hunched over in the backseat, both arms pulled down between his legs, as though he were trying to clutch his ankles. The dark-skinned man’s eyes were slits, his lips purple with either snuff or bruises, the back of his neck pocked with acne scars.
     
    Hackberry put on a straw hat and stepped outside into the shade of the sandstone building that served as his office and the jail. The man with the shaved head held up his ID. The lidless intensity in his eyes and the tautness in his facial muscles made Hackberry think of a banjo string wound tightly on a wood peg, the tension climbing into a tremolo. The man said, “Isaac Clawson, ICE. I’m glad you’re in your office. I don’t like to chase a local official around in his own county.”
     
    “Why is Danny Boy Lorca on a D-ring?”
     
    “You know him?” Clawson said.
     
    “I just used his name to you, sir.”
     
    “What I mean is, do you know anything about him?”
     
    “About once a month he walks from the beer joint down to the jail and sleeps it off. He lets himself in and out.”
     
    “He’s the drinking buddy of Pete Flores. He says he doesn’t know where Flores is.”
     
    “Let’s have a talk with him,” Hackberry said. He opened the back door of the sedan and leaned inside. The smell of urine welled into his face. There was a skinned place on Danny Boy’s right temple, like a piece of fruit that had been rubbed on a carrot grater. There was a dark area in his wash-faded jeans, as though a wet towel had been pressed into his groin.
     
    “Have you seen Pete Flores around?” Hackberry said.
     
    “Maybe two weeks back.”
     
    “Y’all were drinking a little mescal together?”
     
    “He was eating in Junior’s diner on the four-lane. That’s where his girlfriend works at.”
     
    “We think some guys are trying to hurt him, Danny. You’d be doing Pete a big favor if you helped us find him.”
     
    “I ain’t seen him since what I just told you.” Danny Boy’s eyes slid off Hackberry’s and fastened on Clawson’s, then came back again.
     
    Hackberry straightened up and closed the door. “I think he’s telling the truth,” he said.
     
    “You psychic with these guys?”
     
    “With him I am. He doesn’t have any reason to lie.”
     
    Clawson took off his large octagonal glasses and wiped them with a Kleenex, staring down the street, a deep wrinkle between his eyes. “Can we go inside?”
     
    “It’s full of cigarette smoke. What’d you do to Danny Boy?”
     
    “I didn’t do anything to him. He’s drunk. He fell down. When I picked him up, he started to swing on me. But I didn’t do anything to him.” Clawson opened the back door and used a handcuff key to free Danny Boy from the D-ring inset in the floor, then wrapped his fingers under Danny Boy’s arm and