Rain Gods (11 page)

N
ICK DOLAN FELT he might have dodged a bolt of lightning. Hugo Cistranos had not shown up at the club or followed him to his vacation home on the Comal River. Maybe Hugo was all gas and flash and Afghan hash and would just disappear. Maybe Hugo would be consumed by his own evil, like a candle flame cupping and dying inside its own wax. Maybe Nick would finally get a break from the cosmic powers that had kept him running on a hamster wheel for most of his life.

Just outside the city limits of San Antonio, Nick lived in a neighborhood of eight-thousand-to-ten-thousand-square-feet homes, many of them built of stone, the yards cordoned off by thick green hedges, the sidewalks tree-shaded. The zoning code was strict, and trucks, trailers, mobile homes, and even specially outfitted vehicles to transport the handicapped could not be parked on the streets or in driveways overnight. But Nick cared less about the upscale, quasi-bucolic quality of his neighborhood than he did about the latticework enclosure and patio he had built with his own labor behind his house.

The palm trees that towered overhead had come from Florida, their root balls wrapped in wet burlap, the excavations they were dropped into sprinkled with dead bait fish and bat guano. The grapevine that wound through the latticework had been transplanted from his grandfather’s old home in New Orleans. The flagstones had been discovered during the construction of an overpass and brought by a friendly contractor to Nick’s house, four of them chiseled with a seventeenth-century Spanish coat of arms. His hedges flowered in spring and bloomed until December. In the center of his patio were a glass-topped bamboo table and bamboo chairs, all of it shaded by Hong Kong orchid trees rooted inside redwood barrels that had been sawed in half.

In the cooling of the day, Nick loved to sit at the table in fresh white tennis togs, a glass of gin and tonic and cracked ice in his hand, an orange slice inserted on the lip of the glass, and read a book, a best seller whose title he could drop in a conversation. The breeze was up tonight, the lavender sky flickering with heat lightning, the freshly clipped ends of the flowers in his hedge like thousands of pink and purple eyes couched among the leaves. Nick had smoked only nineteen cigarettes that day, a record. He had many things to be thankful for. Maybe he even had a future.

Inside the fragrance of his enclosure, he felt himself drowsing off, the weight of his book pulling itself from his hand.

His head jerked up, his eyes opening suddenly. He rubbed the sleep out of his face and wondered if he was having a bad dream. Hugo Cistranos was standing above him, grinning, his forearms thick and scrolled with veins, as though he had been wrist-curling a barbell. “Looks like you got quite a sunburn on the river,” he said.

“How’d you get in my yard?”

“Through the hedge.”

“Are you nuts coming here like this?”

Nick’s scalp constricted. He had just done it again, admitting guilt and complicity about things he hadn’t done, indicating he and Hugo had a relationship of some kind, one based on shared experience.

“Didn’t want to embarrass you at the club. Didn’t want to ring the bell and disturb your family. What’s a guy to do, Nicholas? We’ve got mucho shit-o to work through here.”

“I don’t owe you any money.”

“Okay, you owe it to my subcontractors. Put it any way you want. The vig is running as we speak. My chief subcontractor is Preacher Jack Collins. He’s a religious fanatic who did the hands-on work behind the church. Nobody knows what goes on inside his head, and nobody asks. I just delivered him his Honda and paid his medical expenses. Those services are all on your tab, too, Nicholas.”

“I don’t use that name.”

“No problemo, Nick-o. Know why I had to pay Preacher’s medical expenses? Because this broad here put two holes in him.”

Hugo placed a four-by-five color photograph on the glass tabletop. Nick stared down at the face of a girl with recessed eyes, her chestnut hair curled at the tips. “Ever see this cutie?” Hugo asked.

Nick’s scalp constricted again. “No,” he replied.

“How about this kid?” Hugo said, placing another photo next to the girl’s. A soldier in a United States Army dress uniform, an American flag on a staff as a backdrop, stared up at Nick.

“I never saw this person, either,” Nick said, studiously not letting his eyes drift back to the girl’s photograph.

“You said that pretty quick. Take another look.”

“I don’t know who they are. Why are you showing these pictures to me?”

“Those are two kids who can bring a lot of people down. They have to go off the board, Nick. People got to get paid, too, Nick. That means I’m about to be your new business partner, Nick. I’ve got the papers right here. Twenty-five percent of the club and the Mexican restaurant and no claim on anything else. It’s a bargain, little buddy.”

“Screw you, Hugo,” Nick said, his face dilating with the recklessness of his own rhetoric.

Hugo opened a manila folder and sorted through a half-inch of documents, as though giving them final approval, then closed the folder and set it on the table. “Relax, finish your drink and have a smoke, talk it over with your wife. There’s no rush.” He looked at his wristwatch. “I’ll send a driver for the papers, say, tomorrow afternoon, around three. Okay, little buddy?”

NICK HAD HOPED he would never see the girl named Vikki Gaddis again. His nonnegotiable rules for himself as the operator of a skin joint and as the geographically removed owner of escort services in Dallas and Houston had always remained the same: You paid your taxes, and you protected your girls and never personally exploited them.

Nick’s rules had preempted conflicts with the IRS and purchased for him an appreciable degree of respect from his employees. About eighteen months back, he had run a want ad in the San Antonio newspapers for musicians to play in the Mexican restaurant he had just built next to his strip club. Five days later, when he was out in the parking lot on a scalding afternoon, Vikki Gaddis had driven off the highway in a shitbox leaking smoke from every rusted crack in the car body. At first he thought she was looking for a job up on the pole, then he realized she hadn’t seen the ad but had been told he needed a folksinger.

“You’re confused,” Nick said. “I’m opening a Mexican restaurant. I need some entertainment for people while they’re eating dinner. Mexican stuff.”

He saw the disappointment in her eyes, a vague hint of desperation around her mouth. Her face was damp and shiny in the heat. Heavy trucks, their engines hammering, were passing on the highway, their air brakes hissing. Nick touched at his nose with the back of his wrist. “Why don’t you come on in the restaurant and let’s talk a minute?” he said.

Nick had already hired a five-piece mariachi band, one complete with sombreros and brocaded vaquero costumes, beer-bellied, mustached guys with brass horns that could crack the tiles on the roof, and he had no need of an Anglo folksinger. As he and the girl walked out of the sun’s glare into the air-conditioned coolness of the restaurant, the girl swinging her guitar case against her hip, he knew that an adulterer had always lived inside him.

She wore white shorts and a pale blue blouse and sandals, and when she sat down in front of his desk, she leaned over a little too far and he wondered if he wasn’t being played.

“You sing Spanish songs?” he said.

“No, I do a lot of the Carter Family pieces. Their music made a comeback when Johnny Cash married June. Then the interest died again. They created a style of picking that’s called ‘hammering on and pulling off.’”

Nick was clueless, his mouth hanging open in a half-smile. “You sing like Johnny Cash?”

“No, the Carters were a big influence on other people, like Woody Guthrie. Here, I’ll show you,” she said. She unsnapped her guitar case and removed a sunburst Gibson from it. The case was lined with purplish-pink velvet, and it glowed with a virginal light that only added to Nick’s confused thoughts about both the girl and the web of desire and need he was walking into.

She fitted a pick on her thumb and began singing a song about flowers covered with emerald dew and a lover betrayed and left to pine in a place that was older than time. When she chorded the guitar, the whiteness of her palm curved around the neck, and she depressed a bass string just before striking it, then released it, creating a sliding note that resonated inside the sound hole. Nick was mesmerized by her voice, the way she lifted her chin when she sang, the muscles working in her throat.

“That’s beautiful,” he said. “You say these Carter guys were an influence on Woody Herman?”

“Not exactly,” she replied.

“I already got a band, but maybe come back in a couple of weeks. If it doesn’t work out with them—”

“You have an opening for a food server?” she asked, putting away her guitar.

“I got two more than I need. I had to hire the cook’s sisters, or she was gonna walk on me.”

The girl snapped the locks on her case and raised her eyes to his. “Thanks, you’ve been real nice,” she said.

An image was forming in his mind that turned his loins to water. “Look, I got a place next door. Slap my face if you want. The money’s good, the girls working for me don’t have to do anything they don’t want to, I throw drunks and profane guys out. I try to keep it a gentlemen’s club even if some bums get in sometimes. I could use a—”

“What are you saying?”

“That I got an opening or two. That maybe you’re in a tight spot and I can help you out till you find a singing job.”

“I’m not a dancer,” she said.

“Yeah, I knew that,” he said, his face small and tight and burning. “I was just letting you know my situation. I only got so many resources. I got kids of my own.” He was stuttering, and his hands were shaking under the desk, his words nonsensical even to himself.

She was getting up, reaching for the handle on her guitar case, the back of one gold thigh streaked with a band of light.

“Ms. Gaddis—”

“Just call me Vikki.”

“I thought maybe I was doing a good deed. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“I think you’re a nice man. I enjoyed meeting you,” she said. She smiled at him, and in that moment, in order to be twenty-five again, Nick would have run his fingers one at a time through a Skilsaw.

Now, as he sat amid trellises and latticework that were green and thick with grapevine grown by his grandfather, an honest and decent man who had sold shoestrings from door to door, he tried to convince himself the girl in the photo was not Vikki Gaddis. But it was, and he knew it, and he knew her face would 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.”