see me in cuffs, huh??

?Get out of my sight,? Hackberry said.

ON THE WAY back to the department, with Pam Tibbs behind the wheel, the weather started to blow. Directly to the north, giant yellow clouds were rising toward the top of the sky, dimming the mesas and hills and farmhouses in the same way a fine yellow mist would. Hackberry rolled down his window and stuck his hand into the wind stream. The temperature had dropped at least ten degrees and was threaded with flecks of rain that struck his palm like sand crystals.

?When I was about twelve years old and we were living in Victoria, we had a downpour on a sunny day that actually rained fish in the streets,? he said to Pam.

?Fish?? she said.

?That?s a fact. I didn?t make it up. There were baitfish in the gutters. My father thought a funnel cloud probably picked up a bunch of water from a lake or the Gulf and dropped it on our heads.?

?Why are you thinking about that now??

?No reason. It was just a good time to be around, even though those were the war years.?

She removed her sunglasses and studied the side of his face. ?You?re acting a little strange this morning.?

?Better keep your eyes on the road,? he said.

?What do you want to do with that phone number Ouzel gave you??

?Find out who it belongs to, then find out everything you can about the location.?

?What are you planning to do, Hack??

?I?m not big on seeing around corners,? he replied. He heard her drum her fingers on the steering wheel.

At the office, Maydeen Stoltz told him that Danny Boy Lorca had been picked up for public drunkenness and was sleeping it off in a holding cell upstairs. ?Why didn?t somebody just drive him home?? Hackberry asked.

?He was flailing his arms around in the middle of the street,? she replied. ?The Greyhound almost ran over him.?

Hackberry climbed the spiral steel stairs at the back of the building and walked to the cell at the far end of the corridor where overnight drunks were kept until they could be kicked out in the morning, usually without charges. Danny Boy was asleep on the concrete floor, his mouth and nostrils a flytrap, his hair stained with ash, his whole body auraed with the stink of booze and tobacco.

Hackberry squatted down on one haunch, gripping a steel bar for balance, a bright tentacle of light arching along his spinal cord, wrapping around his buttocks and thighs. ?How you doing, partner?? he said.

Danny Boy?s answer was a long exhalation of breath, tiny bubbles of saliva coming to life at the corner of his mouth.

?Both of us have got the same problem, bub. We don?t belong in the era we live in,? Hackberry said. Then he felt shame at his grandiosity and self-anointment. What greater fool was there than one who believed himself the overlooked Gilgamesh of his times? He had not slept well during the night, and his dreams had taken him back once again to Camp Five in No Name Valley, where he had peered up through a sewer grate at the gargoyle-like presence of Sergeant Kwong and his shoulder-slung burp gun and quilted coat and earflapped cap, all of it backlit by a salmon-pink sunrise.

Hackberry retrieved a tick mattress from a supply closet and laid it out in front of Danny Boy?s cell and lay down on top of it, his knees drawn up before him to relieve the pressure on his spine, one arm across his eyes. He was amazed at how fast sleep took him.

It wasn?t a deep sleep, just one of total rest and detachment, perhaps due to his indifference toward the eccentric nature of his behavior. But his iconoclasm, if it could be called that, was based on a lesson he had learned in high school when he spent the summer at his uncle Sidney?s ranch southeast of San Antonio. The year was 1947, and a California-based union was trying to organize the local farmworkers. Out of spite, because he had been threatened by his neighbors, Uncle Sidney had hired a half-dozen union hands to hoe out his vegetable acreage. Somebody had burned a cross on his front lawn, even nailing strips of rubber car tires on the beams to give the flames extra heat and duration. But rather than disengage from his feud with homegrown terrorists, Uncle Sidney had told Hackberry and an alcoholic field picker named Billy Haskel, who had pitched for Waco before