code.”

“Your food’s getting cold. Better eat up.”

“Here’s the rest of it. After nine-eleven, Immigration and Naturalization merged with Customs and became ICE. They’re one of the most effective and successful law enforcement agencies we have under Homeland Security. The great majority of their agents are professional and good at what they do. But there’s one guy hereabouts who is off the leash and off the wall.”

“This guy Clawson?”

“That’s right, Isaac Clawson. Years ago two serial predators were working out of northern Oklahoma. They made forays up into Kansas, the home of Toto and Dorothy and the yellow brick road. I won’t describe what they did to most of their victims because you’re trying to eat your breakfast. Clawson’s daughter worked nights at a convenience store. These guys kidnapped both her and her fiancé from the store and locked them in the trunk of a car. Out of pure meanness, they set fire to the car and burned them alive.”

“You’re telling me Clawson’s a cowboy?”

“I’ll put it this way: He likes to work alone.”

Hackberry had set down his knife and fork. He gazed out the back door at the poplar trees. The sky was dark, and dust was blowing out of a field, the tips of the poplars bending in the wind.

“You okay, Sheriff?”

“Sure, why not?”

“You were a corpsman at the Chosin?”

“Yep.”

“The country owes men and women like you a big debt.”

“Not to me they don’t,” Hackberry said.

“I had to come here this morning.”

“I know you did.”

Ethan Riser got up to leave, then paused at the door. “Love your flowers,” he said.

Hackberry nodded and didn’t reply.

He wrapped the uneaten pork chops in foil and placed them in the icebox, then put on a gray sweat-ringed felt hat and in the backyard scraped the eggs off the platter for his bird dog and two barn cats that didn’t have names and a possum that lived under the house. He went back in the kitchen and took a sack of corn out of the icebox and walked down to the poplar trees and scattered the corn in the grass for the doe and her fawn. The grass was tall and green in the lee of the trees, channeled with the wind blowing out of the south. Hackberry squatted down and watched the deer eat, his face blanketed with shadow, his eyes like those of a man staring into a dead fire.

6

NICK 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