to tell me something. How?d you get to those bikers? How?d you set that up, man??
?Whores sell information. They also sell out their johns if the price is right. Some of them take a high degree of pleasure in it,? Preacher said.
As Hugo?s heart slowed, he realized an opportunity had just presented itself, one he had not thought about earlier. ?I?m your friend, Jack. I?ve always looked up to you. Be careful when you?re down there on the border. That sheriff and his deputy, the ones who nailed Liam? They were here.?
?This fellow Holland??
?Yeah, he was talking to Artie. About you, man. Artie told him he never heard of you, but this guy has you made for the deal behind the church. I think he?s got political ambitions or something. He was asking ugly questions about your family, about your mother in particular. What the fuck does that guy care about your mother??
Hugo could hear the wind between his ear and the cell phone, then the connection went dead.
Got you, you crazy sonofabitch, he said to himself.
He slipped on his shades and watched the little boy?s red Frisbee sail gently aloft, out over the waves, seagulls cawing emptily around it.
PETE WALKED DOWN the road in the dark, under the pink stucco arch painted with roses, past the closed-down drive-in theater and the circular building with service windows constructed to resemble a bulging cheeseburger and the three Cadillacs that appeared to be buried nose-first in the hardpan. The wind was up, and the combination of dust and humidity it created felt like the filings from damp sandpaper in his hair and on his skin. At the edge of town, he followed a train spur northeast, walking along the edge of the embankment onto a wide flat plain where the main track pointed miles into the distance, the night sky gleaming on the rails.
A half hour later, as he walked into a basin, he heard a double-header coming at low speed down the track, the flat-wheelers and empty grain cars rocking on the grade. He moved out into the scrub brush until the first locomotive passed, then began to run beside the open door of an empty flat-wheeler. Just before the car wobbled past a signal light mounted on a stanchion, he leaped inside the car, pushing his weight up on his hands, rolling onto a wood floor that smelled of chaff and the warm, musky odor of animal hides.
He lay on his back and watched the hills and stars slip by the open door. He did not remember when he had slept an entire night without dreaming or waking suddenly, the room filling with flashes that had nothing to do with car lights on a highway or electricity in the clouds. The dreams were inhabited by disparate elements and people and events, most of them seemingly disconnected but held together in one fashion or another by color and the nauseating images the color suggested?the wet rainbow inside a bandage that had been peeled off an infected wound, a viscous red spray erupting from the hajjis who had been crawling on a disabled tank, trying to pry open the hatches, when Pete let off on them with Ma Deuce, a .50-caliber that could shred human beings into dog food. The victims in the dreams were many but not necessarily people he had known or seen?soldiers, children, sunken-faced old women and men whose teeth were an atrocity to look at. Paradoxically, for Pete, sleeplessness was not the problem; it was the solution.
Except he couldn?t hold a job. He daydreamed and dropped wrenches in machinery, couldn?t concentrate on what others were saying, and sometimes could not count the change in the palm of his hand. In the meantime, Vikki Gaddis was not only financially supporting him but had become the target of a collection of killers because of his irresponsibility and bad judgment.
He found a piece of burlap on the boxcar floor and stuffed it under his head and fell asleep. For some reason he didn?t understand, he felt himself rocking off to sleep, almost like an embryonic creature being carried safely inside its mother?s womb.
When he woke, he could see the lights on the outskirts of Marathon. He rubbed the sleep out of his face and dropped from the flat-wheeler onto the ground. He waited for the train to pass him, then crossed the tracks and found the two-lane road that led into town and eventually to his cousin?s used-car lot.
It was located