“My little girl made you a present, boss.”

“I’m diabetic. I cain’t eat sugar.”

“You want to sit down? You look like you’re hurting, 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 matched one set to the prints of Vikki Gaddis we took from her house. The other set we matched through the California driver’s license database. They belong to a fellow by the name of Jack Collins. He has no criminal record. But we’ve heard about him. His nickname is Preacher. Excuse me, are you listening?”

“I will be as soon as I have some coffee.”

“I see.”

“You take sugar or milk?” Hackberry said.

Ethan Riser folded his arms and looked out the window at the deer among the poplar trees. “Whatever you have is fine,” he said.

“Go ahead,” Hackberry said.

“Thank you. They call him Preacher because he thinks he may be the left hand of God, the giver of death.” Ethan Riser waited, his agitation beginning to show. “You’re not impressed?”

“Did you ever know a sociopath who didn’t think he was of cosmic importance? What did this guy do before he became the left hand of God?”

“He was a pest exterminator.”

Hackberry began pouring coffee into two cups and tried to hide his expression.

“You think it’s funny?” Riser said.

“Me?”

“You said you were at Pak’s Palace. I did some research. That was a brick factory where Major Pak hung up GIs on the rafters and beat them with clubs for hours. You were one of them?”

“So what if I was or wasn’t? It happened. Most of those guys didn’t come back.” Hackberry scraped the eggs and meat out of the skillet onto a platter. Then he set the platter on top of the table. He set it down harder than he intended.

“We hear this guy Preacher is a gun for hire across the border. We hear he doesn’t take prisoners. It’s a free-fire zone down there. More people are being killed in Coahuila and Nuevo León than in Iraq, did you know that?”

“As long as it doesn’t happen in my county, I’m not interested.”

“You’d better be. Maybe Collins has already killed Pete Flores and the Gaddis girl. If he’s true to his reputation, he’ll be back and brush his footprints out of the sand. You hearing me on this, Sheriff?”

Hackberry blew on his coffee and drank from it. “My grandfather was a Texas Ranger. He knocked John Wesley Hardin out of his saddle and pistol-whipped him and put him in jail.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Mess with the wrong people and you’ll get a shitpile of grief, is what it means.”

Ethan Riser studied him, just short of being impolite. “I heard you were a hardhead. I heard you think you can live inside your own zip 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.”