Feast Day of Fools

by James Lee Burke

  “We talked to Danny Boy Lorca already,” Riser said. “He gave us the name of this guy Krill. Have any idea who he is?”

  Hackberry hung his hat on the back of his chair and sat down to eat. “Nothing real specific other than the fact he’s a killer.”

  “We think he takes hostages and sells them,” Riser said. “The guy we want is the guy who was on the other end of the cable locked on the dead man’s wrist. We think he’s the federal employee we’ve been looking for.”

  “What kind of federal employee is he?”

  Riser went silent. Hackberry put down his fork and knife. “Tell you what, Ethan,” he said. “This is my home. People can be rude whenever and wherever they want. But not in my kitchen and not at my table.”

  “He’s a Quaker who should have been screened out of the job he was assigned to. It’s the government’s fault.”

  “I guess Jefferson should have gotten rid of Benjamin Franklin at first opportunity.”

  “Franklin was a Quaker?” When Hackberry didn’t answer, Riser said, “Your flowers are lovely. I told you my father was a botanist, didn’t I? He grew every kind of flower mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays.”

  Hackberry got up from the table and poured his breakfast into the trash can and wiped his hands on a piece of paper towel. “I’m running late. Can you let yourself out?” he said.

  “I’ve tried to put you in the loop.”

  “Is that what y’all call snake oil?” Hackberry said.

  THROUGH HER WINDSHIELD Pam Tibbs saw the oversize pickup on a winding stretch of isolated two-lane road that was spiderwebbed with heat cracks and broken so badly in places that it was hardly passable. The road went nowhere and had little utilitarian value. The sedimentary formations protruding in layers from the hillsides had been spray-painted by high school kids, and the areas under the mesas where the kids parked their cars at night were often littered with beer cans and used condoms. The road dipped over a rise and ended at the entrance to a cattle ranch that had gone out of business with the importation of Argentine beef in the 1960s.

  Through the cruiser’s windshield, Pam saw the pickup weave off the road, skidding gravel down a wash. Then the driver overcorrected and continued haphazardly down the centerline, ignoring the possibility of another vehicle coming around a bend, as though he were studying a map or texting on a cell phone or steering with his knees. Pam switched on her light bar and closed the distance between her cruiser and the truck. Through the pickup’s back window, she saw the driver’s eyes lock on hers in the rearview mirror.

  When the driver pulled to the shoulder, Pam parked behind him and got out on the asphalt, slipping her baton into the ring on her belt. The truck was brand-new, its hand-buffed waxed yellow finish as smooth and glowing as warm butter, a single star-spangled patriotic sticker glued on the bumper. The driver opened his door and started to get out.

  “Stay in your vehicle, sir,” Pam said.

  The driver drew his leg back inside the truck and closed the door, snugging it tight. Pam could see his face in the outside mirror, his eyes studying her. She heard his glove compartment drop open.

  Pam unsnapped the strap on her .357 Magnum. “Put your hands on the steering wheel, sir. Do not touch anything in your glove box.” She moved forward but at an angle, away from the driver’s window, her palm and thumb cupped over the grips of her holstered revolver. “Did you hear me? You put your hands where I can see them.”

  “I was getting my registration,” the driver said.

  “Do not turn away from me. Keep your hands on the wheel.”

  His hair was gold and cut short, his sideburns long, his eyes a liquid green. She moved closer to the cab. “What are you doing out here?” she asked.

  “Taking a drive. Looking through my binoculars.”

  “Turn off your engine and step out of your vehicle.”

  “That’s what I was trying to do when you told me to get back inside. Which is it?”

  “You need to do what I say, sir.”

  “It’s Reverend, if you want to be formal.”

  “You will step out of the vehicle and do it now, sir,” she said.

  “I have a pistol on the seat. I use it for rabbits. I’m no threat to you.”

  She pulled her revolver from its holster and aimed it with both hands at his face. “Put your right hand behind your head, open the door, and get down on the ground.”

  “Have you heard of the Cowboy Chapel? Don’t point that at me.” He looked straight into the muzzle of her gun. “I respect the law. You’re not going to threaten me with a firearm. My name is Reverend Cody Daniels. Ask anybody.”

  She jerked the door open with one hand and stepped back. “Down on the ground.”

  “I will not do that. I will not tolerate your abuse, either. I did nothing to deserve this.”

  She was holding her .357 with both hands again, the checkered grips biting into her palms. “This is your last chance to avoid a very bad experience, sir.”

  “Do not call me ‘sir.’ You’re deliberately being disrespectful in order to provoke me. I know your kind, missy.”

  She was gripping the pistol so tightly, she could feel the barrel tremble. Her temples were pounding, her scalp tight, her eyes stinging with perspiration. She stared at the driver in the silence. The skin around his mouth was bloodless, his gaze iniquitous, dissecting her face, dropping to her throat and her breasts rising and falling inside her shirt. When she didn’t move or speak, his eyes seemed to sweep the entirety of her person, noting the loops of sweat under her arms, a lock of her hair stuck on her damp forehead, the width of her hips, the way her stomach strained against her gun belt and the button on her jeans, the fact that her upper arms were as thick as a man’s. She saw a smile wrinkle at the corner of his mouth. “You seem a mite unsettled, missy,” he said. “Maybe you should be in another line of work.”

  “Thank you for saying that,” she replied. She pulled her can of Mace from her belt and sprayed it in his face and jerked him out of the cab, then sprayed him again. He flailed his arms blindly, his eyes streaming tears, then he slapped at her hands as a child might, as though he were being violated. She threw him against the side of the truck, kicking his feet apart, stiff-arming him in the back of the neck, the tensions of his body coursing like an electric current through her palm.

  When he continued to struggle, she slipped her baton from the ring on her belt and whipped it behind his calves. He dropped straight to his knees, as though his tendons had been cut, his mouth open wide, a cry breaking from his throat.

  She pushed him facedown on the ground and cuffed his wrists behind him. His left cheek was printed with gravel, his mouth quivering with shock. He wrenched up his head so he could see her. “No hot coal will redeem your tongue, woman. You’re a curse on the race. A pox on you and all your kind,” he said.

  She called in her location. “I’ve got a lulu here. Ask Hack to pull all the reports we have on somebody who was shooting at illegals,” she said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  HACKBERRY HOLLAND SAT behind his desk and listened to Pam Tibbs’s account of the arrest. Outside the window, the American flag was straightening and popping in the wind, the chain rattling on the pole. “What’s our minister friend doing now?” he asked.

  “Yelling for his phone call,” she replied. “How do you read that stuff about a hot coal on my tongue?”

  “It’s from Isaiah in the Old Testament. Isaiah believed he was a man of unclean lips who dwelled in an unclean land. But an angel placed a burning coal on his tongue and removed his iniquity.”

  “I’m iniquitous for not letting him kill himself and others in an auto accident?”

  “The sheriff in Jim Hogg told me about this guy a couple of months ago. Cody Daniels was a suspect in the bombing of an abortion clinic on the East Coast. He might not have done it himself, but he was at least one of the cheerleaders. He roams around the country and tends to headquarter in places where there’s not much mon
ey for law enforcement. I didn’t know he was here.”

  She waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. “You think he could be the guy taking potshots at the illegals coming across the border?” she said.

  “Him or a hundred others like him.” Hackberry took off his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Did he threaten you in a specific way?”

  “On the way in, he told me I was going to hell.”

  “Did he say he was going to put you there or see you there?”

  “No.”

  “Did he touch the gun on the seat?”

  “Not that I saw.”

  “Did he make a threatening gesture of any kind?”

  “He refused to get out of the vehicle while telling me he was armed.”

  “He told R.C. you hit him in the head after you cuffed him.”

  “He fell down against the cruiser. What are you trying to say, Hack?”

  “We don’t need a lawsuit.”

  “I don’t know if I’m more pissed off by this nutcase or what I’m hearing now.”

  “It’s the kind of lawsuit that could cost us fifty thousand dollars in order to be right.”

  Hackberry looked up at her in the silence. Pam’s eyes were brown, with a reddish tint, and they became charged with light when she was either angry or hurt. She hooked her thumbs in her gun belt and fixed her attention outside the window, her cheeks spotted with color.

  “I’m proud of the way you handled it,” he said. “You did all the right things. Let’s see if our man likes his accommodations.”

  Hackberry and Pam Tibbs climbed the steel spiral steps in the rear of the building and walked down a corridor of barred cells, past the old drunk tank, to a barred holding unit that contained nothing but a wood bench and a commode with no seat. The man who had identified himself as Reverend Cody Daniels was standing at the window, silhouetted against a sky that had turned yellow with dust.

  “I understand you were potting jackrabbits from your pickup truck,” Hackberry said.

  “I did no such thing,” Cody Daniels replied. “It’s not against the law, anyway, is it?”

  “So you were cruising down the road surveilling the countryside through your binoculars for no particular reason?” Hackberry said.

  “What I was looking for is the illegal immigrants and drug transporters who come through here every night.”

  “You’re not trying to steal my job, are you?”

  “I go where I’ve a mind to. When I got up this morning, this was still a free country.”

  “You bet. But you gave my chief deputy a hard time because she made a simple procedural request of you.”

  “Check the video camera in your squad car. Truth will out, Sheriff.”

  “It’s broken.”

  “Pretty much like everything in this town. Mighty convenient, if you ask me.”

  “What are you doing in my county?”

  “Your county?”

  “You’d better believe it.”

  “I’m doing the Lord’s work.”

  “I heard about your activities on the East Coast. We don’t have any abortion clinics here, Reverend, but that doesn’t mean we’ll put up with your ilk.”

  Cody Daniels approached the bars and rested one hand on the cast-iron plate that formed an apron on the bottom of the food slot. The veins in his wrists were green and as thick as night crawlers, his knuckles pronounced, the back of each finger scarred where a tattoo had been removed. He held Hackberry’s gaze. “I have the ability to see into people’s thoughts,” he said. “Right now you got more problems than your department can handle. That’s why you select the likes of me as the target of your wrath. People like me are easy. We pay our taxes and obey the law and try to do what’s right. How many drug dealers do you have locked up here?”

  “There’s a kernel of truth in what you say, Reverend, but I’d like to get this issue out of the way so you can go back to your job and we can go back to ours.”

  “I think the real problem is you got a romantic relationship going with this woman here.”

  “Deputy Tibbs, would you get the reverend’s possessions envelope out of the locker, please?”

  Pam gave Hackberry a look but didn’t move.

  “I think Reverend Daniels is a reasonable man and is willing to put this behind him,” Hackberry said. “I think he’ll be more mindful of his driving habits and the next time out not object to the requests of a well-meaning deputy sheriff. Is that a fair statement, Reverend?”

  “I’m not given to making promises, particularly when I’m not the source of the problem,” Cody Daniels said.

  Hackberry drummed his fingers on the apron of the food slot. “Deputy Tibbs, would you get the paperwork started on Reverend Daniels’s release?” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” she replied.

  Cody Daniels’s eyes followed her down the corridor, his gaze slipping down her back to her wide-ass jeans and the thickness of her thighs. “I guess it’s each to his own,” he said.

  “Pardon?” Hackberry said.

  “No offense meant, but I think I’d rather belly up to a spool of barbed wire. That’s kind of coarse, but you get the picture.”

  “I hope you’ll accept this in the right spirit, Reverend. If you ever sass one of my deputies or speak disrespectfully of Chief Deputy Tibbs again, I’m going to hunt around in that pile of scrap wood behind the jail until I find a long two-by-four, one with sixteen-penny nails sticking out of it, then I’m going to kick it so far up your ass you’ll be spitting splinters. Get the picture? Have a nice day. And stay the hell out of my sight.”

  ANTON LING HEARD the man in the yard before she saw him. He had released the chain on the windmill and cupped water out of the spout, drinking it from his hand, while the blades spun and clattered above his head. He was gaunt and wore a short-sleeve shirt with no buttons; his hair hung on his shoulders and looked like it had been barbered with a knife.

  “¿Qué quieres?” she said.

  “Comida,” the man replied.

  He was wearing tennis shoes. In the moonlight she could see his ribs stenciled against his sides, his trousers flattening in the wind against his legs. She stepped out on the back porch. The shadows of the windmill’s blades were spinning on his face. “You didn’t come out of Mexico,” she said.

  “How do you know?” he replied in English.

  “The patrols are out. They would have stopped you if you came out of the south.”

  “I hid in the hills during the day. I have no food.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Antonio.”

  “You are a worker?”

  “Only for myself. I am a hunter. Will you feed me?”

  She went into her kitchen and put a wedge of cheese and three tortillas on a paper plate, then covered them with chili and beans that she ladled out of a pot that was still warm on the stove. When she went back outside, the visitor was squatted in the middle of the dirt lot, staring at the moon and the lines of cedar posts with no wire. He took the paper plate from her hand and ignored the plastic spoon and instead removed a metal spoon from his back pocket and began eating. A knife in a long thin scabbard protruded at an angle from his belt. “You are very kind, señora.”

  “Where did you learn English?”

  “My father was a British sailor.”

  “What do you hunt, Antonio?”

  “In this case, a man.”

  “Has this man harmed you?”

  “No, he has done nothing to me.”

  “Then why do you hunt him?”

  “He’s a valuable man, and I am poor.”

  “You’ll not find him here.”

  He stopped eating and pointed at the side of his head with his spoon. “You’re very intelligent. People say you have supernatural gifts. But maybe they just don’t understand that you are simply much more intelligent than they are.”

  “The man you are looking for was here, but he’s gone now. He will not be back. You must leave
him alone.”

  “Your property is a puzzle. It has fences all over it, but they hold nothing in and nothing out.”

  “This was a great cattle ranch at one time.”

  “Now it is a place where the wind lives, one that has no beginning and no end. It’s a place like you, china. You come from the other side of the earth to do work no one understands. You don’t have national frontiers.”

  “Don’t speak familiarly of people you know nothing about.”

  The man who called himself Antonio lifted the paper plate and pushed the beans and chili and cheese and pieces of tortilla into his mouth. He dropped the empty plate in the dirt and wiped his lips and chin on a bandanna and stood up and washed his spoon in the horse tank and slipped it into his back pocket. “They say you can do the same things a priest can, except you have more power.”

  “I have none.”

  “I had three children. They died without baptism.” He looked toward the west and the heat lightning pulsing in the sky just above the hills. “Sometimes I think their souls are out there, outside their bodies, lost in the darkness, not knowing where they’re supposed to go. You think that’s what happens after we’re dead? We don’t know where to go until someone tells us?”

  “How did your children die?”

  “They were killed by a helicopter in front of the clinic where they were playing.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “You can baptize them, china.”

  “Do not call me that.”

  “It wasn’t their fault they weren’t baptized. They call you La Magdalena. You can reach back in time before they were dead and baptize them.”

  “You should talk to a priest. He will tell you the same thing I do. Your children committed no offense against God. You mustn’t worry about them.”

  “I can’t see a priest.”

  “Why not?”

  “I killed one. I think he was French, maybe a Jesuit. I’m not sure. We were told he was a Communist. I machine-gunned him.”