Clawson was sitting in the passenger seat of his car, the door open, his feet on the gravel driveway; he was talking into a cell phone. The handkerchief wadded up in his left hand was almost entirely red. He closed the cell phone and dropped it on the seat.

“Did you call for the paramedics?” Hackberry said.

“No, I called my wife. I’m supposed to meet her in Houston tonight.”

“I’ll take you to emergency receiving.”

“You were a navy corpsman, Sheriff. Do what you need to do. This didn’t happen. I slipped on the metal stairs at the motel.”

Hackberry waited for him to go on.

“You heard me,” Clawson said.

“That’s the way you want it?”

“We take down the guys who killed those Asian women and Junior Vogel. Nothing gets in the way of that objective. You tell your deputy what I said.”

“No, you tell her.”

“Bring her out here,” Clawson said.

“You don’t take her to task.”

Clawson cleared his throat and pressed his handkerchief to a deep cut that was bleeding through his eyebrow. “No problem.”

“Let’s take a look at your head, partner,” Hackberry said.

10

NICK DOLAN SWALLOWED a tranquilizer and a half glass of water, took Esther into his office, and closed the door behind him. With the dark velvet drapes closed and the air-conditioning set to almost freezing levels, there was an insularity about his office that made Nick feel not only isolated and safe but outside of time and place, as though he could rewind the video and erase all the mistakes he had made in his journey from the schoolyard playground in the Lower Ninth Ward to the day he bought into an escort service and the attendant association with people like Hugo Cistranos.

He told Esther everything that had happened during his abduction—the ride in the SUV down the highway to the empty farmhouse, Preacher Jack Collins sitting next to him, the New Orleans button man Hugo Cistranos and the strange kid in a top hat sitting in front, the moon wobbling under the surface of a pond whose banks glistened with green cow scat. Then he told Esther how the man called Preacher had spared him at the last moment because of her name.

“He thinks I’m somebody out of the Bible?” she said.

“Who knows what crazy people think?” Nick said.

“There’s something you’re leaving out. Something you’re not talking about.”

“No, that’s it. That’s everything that happened.”

“Stop lying. What did these men do in your name?”

“They didn’t do it in my name. I never told them to do what they did.”

“You make me want to hit you, to beat my fists bloody on you.”

“They killed nine women from Thailand. They were prostitutes. They were being smuggled across the border by Artie Rooney. They machine-gunned them and buried them with a bulldozer.”

“My God, Nick,” she said, her voice breaking in her throat.

“I didn’t have anything to do with this, Esther.”

“Yes, you did.” Then she said it again. “Yes, you did.”

“Hugo was supposed to deliver the women to Houston. That’s all it was.”

“All it was? Listen to yourself. What were you doing with people who smuggle prostitutes into the country?”

“We’ve got a half-interest in a couple of escort agencies. It’s legal. They’re hostesses. Maybe some other stuff goes on, but it’s between adults, it’s a free country. It’s just business.”

“You’ve been running escort services?” When he didn’t reply, she said, “Nick, what have you done to us?” She was weeping quietly in the leather chair now, her long hair hanging in her face. Her discomposure and fear and disbelief, and the black skein of her hair separating her from the rest of the world, made him think of the women lined up in front of Preacher’s machine gun, and his lips began to tremble.

“You want me to fix you a drink?” he said.

“Don’t say anything to me. Don’t touch me. Don’t come near me.”

He was standing over her, his fingers extended inches from the crown of her head. “I didn’t want anybody hurt, Esther. I thought maybe I’d get even with Artie for a lot of the things he did to me when I was a kid. It was dumb.”

But she wasn’t hearing him. Her head was bent forward, her face completely obscured, her back shaking inside her blouse. He took a box of Kleenex from his desk and set it on her lap, but it fell from her knees without her ever noticing it was there. He stood in the darkened coldness of his office, the jet of frigid air from the wall duct touching