Rain Gods by James Lee Burke

boss.”
     
    Preacher’s right hand opened and closed behind his back. He sucked in slightly on his bottom lip. “How far up the dirt road to the highway?”
     
    “Ten minutes, no more.”
     
    Preacher swallowed drily and slid his palm over the grips of the .45. Then his stare broke, and he felt a line of tension like a fissure divide the skin of his face in half. He pulled his wallet from his back pocket and labored on the crutches to the kitchen table. He splayed open the wallet and began counting a series of bills onto the table. “There’s eleven hundred dollars here,” he said. “You educate that little girl with it, you buy her decent clothes, you get her teeth fixed, you send her to a doctor and not to some damn quack, you buy her good food, and you burn a candle at your church in thanks you got a little girl like this. You understand me?”
     
    “You don’t got to tell me those things, boss.”
     
    “And you get her a grammar book, too, plus one for yourself.”
     
    Preacher worked his wallet into his pocket and thumped across the floor on his crutches and out the screen into the yard, under a purple and bloodred sky that seemed filled with the cawing of carrion birds.
     
    He fell behind the wheel of the Honda and started the engine. Jesus came out the back screen of his house, a can of Coca-Cola in his hand.
     
    “Some guys just don’t know how to leave it alone,” Preacher said under his breath.
     
    “Boss, can you talk to Rosa? She’s crying.”
     
    “About what ?”
     
    “She heard you talking in your sleep. She thinks you’re going to hell.”
     
    “You just don’t get it, do you?”
     
    “Get what, boss?”
     
    “It’s right yonder, all around us, in the haze of the evening. We’re already there,” Preacher said, gesturing at the darkening plain.
     
    “You one unusual gringo, boss.”
     
     
    WHEN HACKBERRY HOLLAND woke inside a blue dawn on Saturday morning, he looked through his bedroom window and saw the FBI agent Ethan Riser in his backyard, admiring Hack’s flower beds. The FBI agent’s hair was as thick and white as cotton, the capillaries in his jaws like pieces of blue and red thread. The iridescent spray from Hackberry’s automatic sprinklers had already stained Riser’s pale suit, but his concentration on the flower beds seemed so intense he was hardly aware of it.
     
    Hackberry dressed in a pair of khakis and a T-shirt and walked barefoot onto the back porch. There were poplar trees planted as a windbreak at the bottom of his property, and inside the shadows they made on the grass he could see a doe and her fawn watching him, their eyes brown and moist inside the gloom.
     
    “You guys get up early in the morning, don’t you?” he said to the FBI agent.
     
    “I work Sundays, too. Me and the pope.”
     
    “What do you need, sir?”
     
    “Can I buy you breakfast?”
     
    “No, but you can come inside.”
     
    While the agent sat at his kitchen table, Hackberry started the coffeemaker and broke a half-dozen eggs in a huge skillet and set two pork chops in the skillet with them. “You like cereal?” he said.
     
    “No, thanks.”
     
    At the stove, Hackberry poured a bowlful of Rice Krispies, then added cold milk and started eating them while the eggs and meat cooked. Ethan Riser rested his chin on his thumb and knuckle and stared into space, trying not to look at his watch or show impatience. His eyes were ice-blue, unblinking, marked by neither guile nor doubt. He cleared his throat slightly. “My father was a botanist and a Shakespearean actor,” he said. “In his gardens he grew every kind of flower Shakespeare mentions in his work. He was also a student of Voltaire and believed he could tend his own garden and separate himself from the rest of the world. For that reason, he was a tragic man.”
     
    “What did you want to tell me, sir?” Hackberry said, setting his cereal bowl in the sink.
     
    “There were two sets of prints on the Airweight thirty-eight the road gang supervisor gave you. We