of detail in your research, sir?”

Clawson looked at his watch. “I’ve had about all of this I can take,” he said. “It’s against my better judgment, but I’m going to kick your man loose. I’ll be back. You can count on it.”

“Turn around, you pompous motherfucker,” Pam Tibbs said.

“Say that again?” Clawson said.

“You learn some manners or you’re going to wish you were cleaning chamber pots in Afghanistan,” Pam said.

Hackberry put on his hat and walked away, forming a pocket of air in one jaw.

ACROSS THE HIGHWAY, at an open-air watermelon stand, a man wearing black jeans and unpolished black hobnailed boots and wideband suspenders and a Grateful Dead T-shirt, the fabric washed so many times it was ash-gray, sat at a plank table in ninety-six-degree shade, the wind popping the canvas tarp above his head. A top hat rested crown-down beside him on the bench. He carved the meat out of his watermelon rind with his pocketknife and slipped each chunk off the back of the blade into his mouth, watching the scene by the side of Isaac Clawson’s vehicle play itself out.

When the people across the highway had gone their separate ways, he put on his hat and walked away from the watermelon stand to use his cell phone. His swollen lats and long upper torso and short legs gave him the appearance of a tree stump. A moment later, he returned to the table, wadded up his melon rinds in damp newspaper, and stuffed the newspaper and the rinds in a trash barrel. A cloud of blackflies swarmed out of the barrel into his face, but he seemed to give them little notice, as though perhaps they were old friends.

8

THE SALOON WAS old, built in the nineteenth century, the original stamped-tin ceiling still in place, the long railed bar where John Wesley Hardin and Wild Bill Longley drank still in use. Preacher Jack Collins sat in the back against a wall, behind the pool table, under a wood-bladed fan. Through a side window he could see a clump of banana trees, their fronds beaded with drops of moisture that looked as heavy and bright as mercury. He watched the waiter bring his food from a service window behind the bar. Then he shook ketchup and salt and pepper and Louisiana hot sauce on the fried beef patty and the instant mashed potatoes and the canned string beans that constituted his lunch.

He raised his eyes slightly when the front door opened and Hugo Cistranos entered the saloon and walked out of the brilliant noonday glare toward Preacher’s table. But Preacher’s expression was impassive and showed no recognition of the events taking place around him, not even the arrival of his food at the table or the fact that Hugo had stopped at the bar and ordered two draft beers and was now setting them on the table.

“Hot out there,” Hugo said, sitting down, sipping at his beer, pushing the second glass toward Preacher.

“I don’t drink,” Preacher said.

“Sorry, I forgot.”

Preacher continued eating and did not ask Hugo if he wanted to order.

“You eat here a lot?” Hugo said.

“When they have the special.”

“That’s the special you’re eating now?”

“No.”

Hugo didn’t try to sort it out. He looked at the empty pool table under a cone of light, the racked cues, a hard disk of pool chalk on a table, the cracked red vinyl in the booths, a wall calendar with a picture of the Alamo on it that was three years out of date, the day drinkers humped morosely over their beer glasses at the bar. “You’re an unusual kind of guy, Jack.”

Preacher set his knife on the edge of his plate and let his eyes rove over Hugo’s face.

“What I mean is, I’m glad you’re willing to work with me on this problem I’m having with Nick Dolan,” Hugo said.

“I didn’t say I would.”

“Nobody wants you to do anything you don’t want to, least of all me.”

“A sit-down with the owner of a skin joint?”

“Dolan wants to meet you. You’re the man, Jack.”

“I have a hole in my foot and one in my calf. I’m a gimp. Sitting down with a gimp is going to make him pay the money he owes you? You cain’t handle that yourself?”

“We’re gonna take fifty percent of his nightclub and his restaurant. Ten percent of it will be yours, Jack. That’s for the late payment I owed you. Later, we’ll talk about the escort services Nick owns in Dallas and Houston. Five minutes after