the war, to mount the top of the charred cross on the roof of the pickup and chain-boom the shaft to the truck bed. Then Uncle Sidney and Billy Haskel and Hackberry had driven all around the county, confronting every man Uncle Sidney thought might have had a hand in burning a cross on his lawn.

At the end of the day, Uncle Sidney had told Hackberry to dump the cross in a creek bed. But Hackberry had his own problems. He had been ostracized by his peers for dating a Mexican girl he picked tomatoes with in the fields. He asked his uncle if he could keep the cross on the truck for a few more days. That Saturday night he took his Mexican girlfriend to the same drive-in theater where he had already lost a bloody fistfight after the one occasion when he had tried to pretend the color line for Mexicans was any different than it was for black people.

As the twilight had gone out of the sky and the theater patrons had filtered to the concession stand in advance of the previews, Hackberry?s high school friends had assembled around the pickup, leaning against its surfaces, drinking canned beer, touching the boomer chain on the cross, touching the blackened shell-like wood of the cross itself, talking louder and louder, their numbers swelling as an excoriated symbol of rejection became a source of ennoblement to all those allowed to stand in its presence. That moment and its implications would stay with Hackberry the rest of his life.

Perhaps only fifteen minutes had passed before he opened his eyes and found himself looking squarely into Danny Boy Lorca?s face.

?Why were you waving your arms in the middle of the street?? Hackberry said.

??Cause all my visions don?t mean anything. ?Cause everything around us is kindling waiting to burn. A drunk man can flip a match into the weeds on the roadside and set the world on fire. Them kind of thoughts always make me go out there flapping my arms in the wind.?

Danny Boy didn?t say where ?there? was, and Hackberry didn?t ask. Instead, he said, ?But you did your job. It?s on us if we don?t listen to guys like you.?

?Then how come I got this gift? Just to be a wino in a white man?s jail??

?Think of it this way. Would you rather be sleeping overnight in my jailhouse or be one of those people who have no ears to hear??

Danny Boy sat up, his thick hair like a helmet on his head, the bleariness in his eyes unrelieved. He looked at the ceiling and out into the corridor and at the clouds of yellow dust moving across the skylight. Then his head turned as he focused on Hackberry?s face. His eyes seemed to possess the frosted blue sightlessness of a man with severe cataracts. ?You?re gonna find the man you been looking for.?

?A guy named Preacher??

?No, it?s a Chinaman, or something like a Chinaman. The guy you always wanted to kill and wouldn?t admit it.?

?WE?VE GOT THE location of the phone number,? Pam said from the top of the steel stairs. ?It?s a game farm up by the Glass Mountains.? Her gaze wandered over Hackberry?s face. ?Have you been asleep??

?I dozed off a little bit,? he said.

?You want to contact the sheriff in Pecos or Brewster??

?See who?ll give us a cruiser at the airport.?

?We?re not sure Cistranos is at the game farm.?

?Somebody is there. Let?s find out who they are.?

?There?s something else. Maydeen got a call from a guy who wouldn?t identify himself. He wouldn?t talk to anyone but you. His number was blocked. She told him to hold on while she got a pad and wrote down his remarks. He hung up on her.?

?Who do you think it was??

?He said you and he had unfinished business. He said you and he were the opposite sides of the same coin. He said you?d know what he meant.?

?Collins??

?Know anybody else who makes phone calls like that??

?Get the plane ready,? he said.

An hour later, they lifted off into bad weather, wind currents that shook the single engine?s wings and fuselage and quivered all the needles on the instrument panel. Later, down below, Hackberry could see the sharp crystalline peaks known as the Glass Mountains, the column-like mesas rising red and raw out of volcanic rubble or alluvial flood plain that had gone soft and pliant and undulating, as tan as farmland along the Nile, dotted with green brush, all of it