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“Get up!” Jeff said, grabbing Ishmael under one arm. “Did you hear me? You get your goddamn ass out of that chair.”
Ishmael ran his body into Jeff’s and knocked him on the floor, then kicked him in the face, breaking his lips against his teeth. Then he stomped Jeff’s head with the sole of his shoe, again and again, bouncing it off the bricks, until Jeff’s eyes rolled. Ishmael fell back against the wall, the room spinning, his legs aflame. Outside, thousands of tree frogs were singing. He heard the trapdoor drop heavily from the ceiling in the tunnel and smack against solid stone, shaking the walls in the room.
“Jeff, get up here! Bring the Lewis!” Arnold Beckman shouted.
HACKBERRY GOT OUT of the motorcar first and went through the breezeway to the back of the building and cut the telephone wires with his bowie knife. With the butt of the knife, he broke out a pane in the French doors on Beckman’s office and unlocked the dead bolt and stepped inside, over the broken glass. Darl and Andre followed.
Hackberry pulled his revolver and worked his way through the furniture to a door in the rear wall and turned the handle slowly and let the door swing back on its own. The room was too dark for him to see inside, but he was sure he heard someone go out another door and slam it behind him. He was sweating inside his clothes now. Even though the air outside was almost wintry, the room seemed as hot as a closed barn in July, the air pressurized, the walls damp, the silence like fingernails on a blackboard.
He felt Andre bump against him. They had made a mistake. They had gone in together and bunched up in the process. His father had been with the Fourth Texas at Petersburg and seen the Yankees, many of them black, pour into the breach known as the Crater, piling on top of one another, slipping helplessly down the clay slopes into the mire, while the Confederates regrouped and slaughtered them en masse. Hackberry turned around and motioned Andre and Darl out the door. “Go around back,” he whispered. “Three minutes from now, break a window. With something big. A brick.”
“Why?” Andre said.
“Do it,” Hackberry said, pressing his hand against Andre’s shoulder, feeling the man’s body tense. “We don’t herd up. Three minutes.”
Andre nodded, and he and Darl went back out the door into Beckman’s office. Hackberry felt his way through the room, tripping on a table that had a typewriter on it. He pulled open the door to the next room. There was no glimmer of electricity in the clouds, no moonrise, no red spark at the bottom of the sky, no sound of tree frogs drumming, nothing but darkness and a heady, sweet odor that made him think of San Francisco and Chinamen and alleyways that led to subterranean dens.
You make a dollar where you can, don’t you, Mr. Beckman? he thought.
But his discussion was a distraction and a luxury he couldn’t afford. He had no way of knowing how many men were in the building or if his son was there or somewhere else. Worse, he didn’t know if Ishmael was even alive. David had cried out, Absalom, Absalom, my son Absalom, would God I had died for thee. But Absalom was a traitor unto his father, and Ishmael was nothing of the sort. Ishmael had been cas
t out, betrayed by Hackberry, left to grow up in poverty while his father lived on a magnificent ranch on the Guadalupe in the arms of a Jezebel. How does a man rid himself of memories like those? Answer: He doesn’t.
Hackberry realized his palm was sweating on the grips of the Peacemaker. Think, he told himself. Don’t mess this one up. Pay any price, sustain any injury, any disfigurement, eat your pain, willingly give your life without regret, get your son back, and if you cannot get him back, make the men who did this suffer the torment of the damned.
He was breathing so hard that he was starting to hyperventilate. He felt along the line of stacked boxes and found a knob on the next door. As he eased it open, he looked into the face of a man almost his height, wearing a coat and a broad-brimmed slouch hat, a man with wide shoulders and a white shirt and an odor like sweat and detergent that had dried in his clothes. Hackberry swung the barrel and cylinder of the Colt .45 across the side of the man’s head, then hit him again, this time raking it across his nose. The man went down hard, trying to hold on to Hackberry’s slicker. Hackberry kicked at him and heard him cry out as he struck a piece of furniture in the dark.
Hackberry knelt beside him and felt for his face, then inserted the point of his bowie knife in one of the man’s nostrils. “Where’s Ishmael Holland?” he said. “Where is my son?”
The man on the floor didn’t respond.
“I’ll make a slit-nose out of you,” Hackberry said. “The way the Indians did it. You’ll never want to look in a mirror again.” He pushed the knife deeper. The tall man didn’t move. Hackberry set down the knife and grabbed him by the shirt and shook him. “Did you hear me?”
He fished in his coat pocket for a box of matches and scratched one across the striker and held it aloft. One of the man’s eyes was almost shut; the other had eight-balled. A single rivulet of blood ran from a triangular-shaped wound in his temple where he had probably struck the corner of a desk. Hackberry had seen the man’s face before. It belonged to one of the three who had put Ishmael in the geek cage at the carnival. Hackberry dropped the dead match on the man’s face.
He got to his feet and walked to the next door. It was partially open, and he could see light glowing from under a rug on the floor. He stood outside the door with his back against the wall, the Colt Peacemaker hanging from his hand. “Can you hear me, Beckman?”
Hackberry’s breath was coming hard in his chest, his eyes stinging with moisture, his nose itching miserably. He counted to five and felt his heart quiet, his breathing slow. “Your telephone lines are cut. We have all your exits covered. We control the access to your road. If the right things don’t happen here, I’ll set fire to the building and make sure you don’t get out. You don’t have to speak. If you’re hearing me, just tap twice on a hard surface.”
In the silence that followed, Hackberry pulled off his slicker as quietly as he could. “Turn to stone? I figured as much,” he said. “For a rich man, you don’t seem to have much smarts. Like maybe you were taking a leak behind a cloud when God passed out the brains. You’re going to give my boy back or you’re going to die, and maybe in pieces. I’ve got a Haitian out there who scares the doo-doo out of me.”
There was no reply.
Hackberry felt for a lamp on a desk and pushed the door open with his boot and threw the lamp into the room. He heard the lamp break apart.
“I guess I’ll have to come in after you,” he said. “I hate to do that. You don’t want to catch a ball from a Peacemaker. How about it? Let’s shut this whole business down and get a drink.”
He thought he could hear sounds under the floor, a door opening and shutting, a muffled voice. He hung his slicker on the tip of his pistol and extended it past the opening in the door, rustling its folds. Three rounds popped in the darkness like small firecrackers, from either a .22 or a .32, flapping the slicker. Just as Hackberry jumped back from the frame, flinging the slicker off his gun barrel, someone kicked the door shut and bolted it, and he realized there was more than one man in the room. Maybe the whole building was a beehive.
Then he heard a sound like a great mechanical weight crashing loose from its fastenings and slamming into a hard surface beneath the building, shaking the walls. Someone shouted down a stairway. He tried to picture what was happening but couldn’t.
He looked back over his shoulder through the series of doors he had opened, and saw that the moon had broken out of the clouds and was shining on the front yard and the motorcar. He worked his way back toward Beckman’s office and thought he saw Darl in the shadows of the live oak, trying to position himself, aiming one of his blue-black double-action revolvers. What or whom had he seen?
Hackberry had not anticipated the next few moments. But neither had the young men of Europe and Great Britain the first time they went over the top and charged into an invention that operated as efficiently and thoroughly as a scythe cutting wheat, nubbing it down to the dirt with one clean sweep.
THE FIRST BURSTS came from a downstairs window, the tracer rounds floating like strips of molten steel across the landscape. But either the angle was bad or the shooter’s position was vulnerable or the shooter decided to take the high ground and command the entire area. Hackberry heard him run up a stairway and cross the floor and begin firing from a window in front, the rounds whanging into the motorcar, blowing the glass out of the windows and headlights, stenciling the radiator, exploding the tires on the rims. When the shooter released the trigger, the motorcar was pocked with holes as bright as newly minted quarters.
Hackberry pressed his back against the side wall of Beckman’s office and tried to see around the window frame. Had Andre and Darl taken cover behind the motorcar or inside it? Were they wounded or dead? The shooter began firing again from a window that was not directly overhead but somewhere close to it, the empty casings bouncing and rolling across the floor. He was obviously trying to divide his fire between the live oak and the motorcar, the tracer rounds burning inside the tree trunk. The rate of fire was too rapid and too long to be a Browning. It had to be a Lewis. What was the rate of fire? Five hundred rounds a minute? Hackberry couldn’t remember. Where were Darl and Andre? And what about the cup? Had it been blown apart after almost two thousand years of wandering?
