and horsefly spray and worming syringes and hoof clippers and wood rasps, the poplar trees he had planted as windbreaks, his pale, closely clipped lawn that looked like a putting green in a desert, his flower beds that he constantly weeded and mulched and fertilized and watered by hand every morning. He could see every inch of the world he had created to compensate for his solitude and to convince himself the world was a grand place and well worth fighting for and, in so doing, had found himself without someone to enjoy it beside in equal measure.

But maybe it was presumptuous of him to conclude that his ownership of the ranch was more than transitory. Tolstoy had said the only piece of earth a person owned was the six feet he claimed with his death. The gospel of Matthew said He makes His sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust. Just across the border was a moral insane asylum where drug dealers did drive-bys in SUVs on entire families, where coyotes stole the life savings of peasants who simply wanted to work in the United States, and where any freshly created hump in the countryside could contain a multiple burial.

Wasn?t the potential for devolvement back into a simian society always extant within? Hackberry had seen American soldiers sell out their own in a prison camp south of the Yalu. The purchase price had been a warm shack to sleep in, an extra ball of rice, and a quilted coat with lice eggs in the seams. A trip into any border town gave one little doubt that hunger was the greatest aphrodisiac. It wouldn?t take much to create the same kind of society here, Hackberry thought. The collapse of the economy, the systemic spread of fear, the threat of imagined foreign adversaries would probably be enough to pull it off. But one way or another, his home and his ranch and the animals on it and he himself would become dust blowing in the wind.

He stood up from his wicker chair and leaned his shoulder against one of the lathe-turned wood posts on the porch. The sun had burned into a red spark between two hills, and again he thought he smelled impending rain in the south. He wondered if all old men secretly searched for nature?s rejuvenation in every tree of lightning pulsing silently inside a storm cloud, in every raindrop that struck a warm surface and reminded one of how good summer could be, of how valuable each day was.

The chime of his cell phone interrupted his reverie.

?Hello?? he said.

?It?s Ethan. I hear you?re having problems with anonymous callers.?

?Remember the guy who called in the nine-one-one warning about Vikki Gaddis? My bet is he?s from around New Orleans.?

?You a dialectical linguist??

?On the tape, the caller sounded like he had a pencil between his teeth. The guy who called me had an accent like the Bronx or Brooklyn, except not quite. You only hear that accent in New Orleans or close by. I think this is the same guy who called while he was drunk.?

?Your dispatcher said this guy gave you a lead on Jack Collins.?

?The caller said Collins has taken an undue interest in me. I don?t give a lot of credence to that, but I do think the caller is obsessed with guilt and is hooked up with Arthur Rooney.?

?I think you?re underestimating Collins?s potential, Sheriff. From everything we know about him, he believes he?s the victim, not the perpetrator. You know the story of Lester Gillis??

?Who??

?Baby Face Nelson, a member of the Dillinger gang. He carried the photos and addresses and tag numbers of cops and FBI agents everywhere he went. He passed two agents in their car and made a U-turn and ran them off the road and killed both of them with seventeen bullet holes in him. I think Collins is the same kind of guy, except probably crazier. Get this: Baby Face Nelson had the last rites of the Catholic Church and had his wife wrap his body in a blanket and leave him in front of a cathedral because he didn?t want to be cold.? Riser started laughing.

?Arthur Rooney is originally from New Orleans, isn?t he?? Hackberry said.

?The Ninth Ward, the area that got hit hardest by Katrina.?

?Can you get me the names of his old business associates??

?Yeah, I guess I could do that.?

?Guess??

?I?ve got certain parameters I have to abide by.?

?Your