Feast Day of Fools

by James Lee Burke

“Like flies on shit. There’s another detail I ought to pass on. There was a melted cell phone in the ashes of the fire. I suspect it was the FBI agent’s. It was too deep inside the burn ring to have fallen there. Why would the shooter throw the guy’s cell phone in the fire?”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “Maybe, but he didn’t bother to pick up the brass.”

  “The day you understand Jack Collins is the day you check yourself in to rehab for the rest of your life,” Hackberry said.

  “Where do you think he’s hid out?”

  “The Unabomber lived in Lincoln, Montana, for ten years. He had no plumbing or electricity in his cabin. Forest Service personnel think he shot at their planes. The locals considered him a regular guy. Maybe Collins isn’t hiding. Maybe he’s out there in full view. It’s a sign of the times. The standards for normalcy find a new low with each passing day.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “Who said it was?”

  After Hackberry hung up, he called R. C. Bevins and Pam Tibbs into his office and told them of the conversation he’d just had.

  “I’m sorry, Hack,” Pam said.

  “There is nothing for us to feel sorry about. We honor Ethan’s memory by nailing the bastard who killed him,” Hackberry said. “R.C., I want you to go up to Brewster and get a topography map and look up the land records of every piece of property within five miles of the crime scene.”

  “What am I looking for?” R.C. asked.

  “Collins likes to take on the personae of obscure writers. Google the names on the land titles and see what pops up. Pam, you and I need to do something about Josef Sholokoff. For two years his name has been coming up in our investigation of Collins’s background. Sholokoff used Collins as a hit man, and he was also the business partner of Temple Dowling. Plus, Anton Ling says Sholokoff was mixed up with shipping arms to the Contras in the 1980s. He’s gotten a free pass for over twenty years, I think in part because he was a useful tool for some guys in the government.”

  “What do you want to do about him?” she asked.

  “He’s a Russian criminal. Maybe he needs a reminder of what life in Russia can be like,” Hackberry said.

  After Pam and R.C. had left his office, he felt no better for his rhetoric and could not rid himself of the words the sheriff in Brewster had used to describe the wounds to Ethan Riser’s body. What had Ethan said to Collins that had filled him with such animus? Collins had always been cold-blooded and methodical when he killed, not driven by emotion or impetuosity. Before dying, Ethan had gotten to him. A remark about his mother? Maybe, but not likely. Collins had no illusions about the woman who had raised him. It was something else. Something that had to do with his image of himself. What greater bane was there for a narcissist than deflation of his ego? In his mind, Collins believed himself a Titan, a warrior-angel with a wingspan that could blot out the moon. Ethan had been well read, intelligent, and con-wise and had thought of Collins as a noisy, misogynistic nuisance who would eventually be greased off the planet. Somehow, before he died, he told Collins that in the great scheme of things, Collins had the wingspan of a moth and was hardly worth the effort of swatting with a rolled magazine. With luck, Hackberry might have a chance to deliver the same insult.

  Something else was bothering him. Historians wrote of battles as epic events involving thousands of soldiers acting in concert, all of them directed by a brilliant strategist such as Alexander or Napoleon or Stonewall Jackson. But for the grunts on the line, the reality was otherwise. They took home a limited perspective, a few shards of memory, flashes of light, a name being called out, the whirring sound of a projectile flying past one’s ear. In the larger context of the battle, the individual’s perspective was little more than a sketch on the back of one’s thumbnail. The invasion at Inchon saved United Nations troops from being pushed into the sea. But Hackberry remembered only one detail from it. A group of marines under the command of a young naval lieutenant had captured a lighthouse. They were aided by Korean civilians. Had they not held the lighthouse, the peninsula would have been lost. In retaliation, the North Koreans began executing civilians. Some of the civilians armed themselves with captured weapons and fought back at a railway station, where they filled suitcases from the baggage room with dirt and barricaded themselves inside. They should have survived, but they didn’t. A shell from either a railroad gun or an offshore battery hit the depot and killed everyone inside. The shell must have contained phosphorus, because the bodies of the dead were burned uniformly black, as though they had been roasted on a slow fire, the skin swelling until it burst.

  Hackberry had never forgotten the image of the dead Koreans and their frozen posture inside the ruins of the building. Nor would he ever forget the image of Ethan Riser dying in a spray of .45-caliber bullets fired into his face by Jack Collins. People said time healed. If it did, Hackberry thought, the pocket watch he had inherited from his father must have been defective.

  “Pam?” he said through the open door without getting up.

  “Yes, sir?” she answered.

  “See if Anton Ling is home. If she is, tell her we’re on our way out.”

  “What’s up?” Pam said, standing in the doorway.

  “It’s time for Miss Anton to get honest about her past.”

  “You talking about that Air America bullshit?”

  “No, arms to northern Nicaragua, courtesy of Josef Sholokoff. Would you stop using that language?”

  Pam looked out the window at a woman coming up the sidewalk. “She must be psychic,” Pam said.

  HACKBERRY WASN’T SURE whether there was a thread of resentment or jealousy in Pam’s voice. He had given up dealing with the mysteries of eros and was sure that at some linguistic juncture in ancient times, the words “error” and “erotic” had sprung from the same root. The truth was, he could not define his own feelings about either Anton Ling or Pam Tibbs. One reminded him of his dead wife, Rie, who would always remain the love of his life. The other woman, Pam Tibbs, was as brave as Rie had been and equally protective of him, even to the point of causing him public embarrassment, and the look in her eyes always told him that she saw the young man inside him and not the man who was almost eighty. Also, she gave no quarter in either love or war, and her level of loyalty was ferocious. No man could have a better companion as a lover or friend. He could have worse problems, he thought. But damn it to hell, an old fool was still an old fool.

  Anton Ling walked past Maydeen and R.C. and Felix and a bail bondsman and Pam Tibbs and a drunk cuffed to a D-ring as though they were not there. “I just heard about Ethan Riser on the radio,” she said.

  “Chief Deputy Tibbs and I were just about to come out to your place,” Hackberry said.

  “Agent Riser called me this morning on his cell phone. I wish I’d gotten ahold of you.”

  “Called you about what?”

  “He apologized for invading my privacy. He told me to be a friend to you. He sounded like a man making his peace. I asked him if he was all right. He said if I heard from him again, that would mean he was doing just fine. Why are all these people standing around here?”

  “We work here,” Pam said.

  “Do you want to sit down, Miss Anton?” Hackberry said.

  “No.”

  “How do you know Ethan was on a cell phone?” Hackberry asked.

  “He was breaking up. Jack Collins just called me.”

  “Wait a minute. I don’t understand. Collins called to tell you Ethan was dead?”

  “No. He didn’t mention anything about Mr. Riser. He asked me if I had given the FBI his location. I told him I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. He asked if I had learned of his whereabouts from the illegals who come to my house. When I told him I had no interest in either him or the FBI, he told me I was a Jezebel. On the way into town, I heard the news report about Agent Riser on the radio.”

  “Sit down,” Hackberry said.

  “No. I have to go.”

/>   “Where?”

  “Home. Collins is insane. I have people coming tonight. He’ll take his revenge on them.”

  “I doubt it. Come in and close the door, Deputy Tibbs.”

  “You’re holding me?” Anton Ling said.

  “The sheriff in Brewster County found Ethan’s cell phone inside the ashes of a bonfire that Collins set. Collins probably threw the phone there after he recovered the list of calls Ethan had made in the last few days. That’s why Collins associated you with Ethan discovering his whereabouts. He also has a way of blaming women for most of his problems.”

  “Why were you coming out to my house?”

  “We want Josef Sholokoff in a cage,” he said.

  “Then talk to the government agencies that have let him run loose all these years,” Anton said.

  “You recognized a man outside your hospital room. He was connected with smuggling guns into Nicaragua and introducing cocaine into the United States. He was with the guy whose face you put a screwdriver in. You’ve worked intimately with Sholokoff’s people, and you have information about them that we don’t. You have to give us some leads, Miss Anton.”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “What you mean is you don’t want to give us any,” Pam said.

  “Do I look like a professional informant?” Illogically, Anton said, “Most of the people I knew years ago are probably dead.”

  “This isn’t Cambodia. We’re sick of people working out their problems at our expense,” Pam said. “It’s time to get your head out of your ass, Ms. Ling.”

  “Why don’t you get your head out of yours?” Anton said. “The electorate in this area puts people in office who belong on chain gangs.”

  “I guess that includes the sheriff,” Pam said.

  “You know what I mean,” Anton said.

  “No, I don’t,” Pam said. “We know you’re sheltering illegals. We also know you were part of an Underground Railroad that hid them in Kansas back in the eighties. But we look the other way. Maybe you should decide who your real friends are.”

  Hackberry felt a pain spreading through his head as though someone were tightening a vise on his temples. “This isn’t solving our problem,” he said.

  “The man I recognized outside my hospital room was a handler of animals,” Anton said. “Exotic animals of some kind. I didn’t like him. But I was part of the gun-smuggling operation, Sheriff Holland. I’m responsible for the deaths of innocent people.”

  “Did this guy supply exotic animals to game farms?” Hackberry asked.

  “Maybe. He talked about it. I remember his complaining about driving a truckload of them into West Texas,” Anton said.

  “Where in West Texas?” Hackberry asked.

  “This was twenty-five years ago.”

  “Where?” he said.

  She shook her head. “I don’t remember. He probably didn’t say. Wait a minute. He made a nasty joke once about a brothel in Phnom Penh. It specialized in . . . I don’t care to talk about what it specialized in.”

  “Oral sex?” Hackberry said. “Yes,” she replied. “He said he had a friend in Texas who used to hang out in this particular brothel. The friend owned a nightclub in Texas.”

  “La Rosa Blanca? The White Rose?” Hackberry said.

  “Pardon?” she said.

  “Bingo,” Pam said.

  THE ORANGE NEON sign on the roof of Joe Tex’s saloon glowed against a turquoise sky that was bottom-rimmed in the west by strips of red and black clouds. The evening could not have been more beautiful. The wind was balmy and out of the south and smelled of distant rain. An obsolete windmill was clattering by an abandoned loading pen on the hardpan, like a beneficent reminder of a grand tradition as well as the potential the land held for all those who lived humbly upon it. Even the tractor-trailers wending their way down the two-lane through compacted hills that resembled ant mounds seemed like a testimony to the industrial success of a new nation rather than harbingers of pollution and the loss of Jefferson’s agrarian vision.

  There were few patrons in the saloon when Hackberry and Pam entered through the front door. Joe Tex was stocking his beer cooler behind the bar; Rosanne Cash was singing on the jukebox; the lacquered pine logs in the walls seemed to exude a golden light like warm honey. Joe Tex was smiling when he lifted his head from his work, his hair as shiny and black as a raven’s feathers, his rolled shirtsleeves exposing his vascular arms. “My favorite sheriff and lady deputy,” he said. “What are y’all having?” He propped his arms on the bar, waiting. The top of his white cowboy shirt was unsnapped, and his chest hair was fanned out on his skin like the points of a star. His eyes were so lidless in their intensity that he seemed incapable of blinking.

  “Your name has come up in an investigation, Joe,” Hackberry said, setting his hat crown-down on the bar. “Not that you did anything wrong. We just thought you could help us figure out a thing or two.”

  “Who was the shooter on the grassy knoll?” Joe Tex said.

  “No, it has to do with the name of your saloon,” Hackberry said.

  “I remember now. Lime and soda and ice, right?” Joe Tex said. “How about you, Miss Pam?”

  “Who was the White Rose?” she asked.

  “My wife. She was a stripper in Big D. She actually worked in Jack Ruby’s old joint.”

  “We did some checking on that, Joe,” Hackberry said. “Nobody can find any record of your being married.”

  “I guess that’s their problem. My wife and I got hitched at a drive-by window in Matamoros.”

  “I heard you might have done some quasi-governmental work in Cambodia,” Hackberry said.

  “I’m not big on revisiting the past, Sheriff. I was a GI on the Mekong River. It took me to lots of places, most of them better forgotten.”

  “You fly in and out of the Golden Triangle at all?” Hackberry asked.

  “I don’t remember. I have a bunch of big blank holes in my memory when it comes to Indochina. I’ll tell you one thing, though. I’m not ashamed of anything I did over there.”

  “I’m not questioning your service to your country,” Hackberry said. “I’m interested in a man by the name of Josef Sholokoff. A man who works for him helped torture a local woman and maybe crucify Cody Daniels. That man was in the company of a guy who knows you, Joe. He used the name of your saloon. He used to deliver exotic animals to game farms. Does that ring any bells?”

  “I guess I’m tone-deaf on that one.”

  “The White Rose was a whorehouse in Phnom Penh, right?” Hackberry said.

  “Could be. Cherry Alley wasn’t an open-air fruit market in Tokyo. But that doesn’t mean I went there to find out. I got to get back to work.”

  “What you need to do is take the shit out of your mouth,” Pam said. “I pulled Cody Daniels’s feet and hands off the nails someone used to hang him on a cross inside a burning building. He was alive when his killers started the fire. With good luck, he died of smoke inhalation.”

  “I saw it on the news. You think something like that is lost on me? Years ago I knew some intelligence people. But I don’t remember anything about some guy who hauled exotic animals around. Unless y’all got a warrant, get out of my establishment.”

  “You got a meth problem, Joe?” Hackberry said.

  Joe Texas leaned across the bar. His skin was so dark that in the shadows, it looked like it had been removed from a tannery and kneaded and softened and fitted on his bones; his eyes stared out of the sockets like those of a man living inside a costume. “You don’t have a clue about what you’re dealing with,” he said. “You want to end up a bump out there in the desert? Just keep fucking with the wrong people. You’ll wish you were still drunk and humping underage Mexican whores, Sheriff. Y’all aren’t the only people with access to security files. Get a warrant. In the meantime, I’m D-D-D. That stands for ‘deaf, dumb, and don’t know.’”

  THAT NIGHT HACKBERRY went out to his barn and clicked on the interior lights. The row
of bulbs on the ceiling glowed with a chemical-like iridescence inside the humidity. Bales of green hay bound with red twine were scattered on the concrete pad that extended between the stalls located on either side of the building, and a speed bag and an Everlast rebound board were mounted on the back wall of the rear stall. Hackberry’s barn was not a bad refuge from the cares of the world. He began hitting the bag with a rotating motion, landing each blow on the heel of his fist, thudding the bag up into the circular rebound board before it could swing full-out on its cable, increasing his velocity until the bag became a blur, the rhythm as steady and loud as a drumroll.

  But he could not clean Joe Tex’s words out of his head. Hackberry had made no secret of his life as a drunk and an adulterer and a frequenter of brothels in northern Mexico. The age of the prostitutes had seemed insignificant at the time, as callous as that sounded. In daylight he would not have recognized most of them. Sometimes he went into a blackout, and when he woke sick and hungover in the morning, the only knowledge he had of the previous night came from his empty wallet and the mileage on his odometer. He suspected that the women or teenage girls who touched his body had done so with indifference if not with revulsion. The odium was his, not theirs. The man with a sprawling ranch and a Navy Cross and a Purple Heart hidden away in a seabag, the man who drove a Cadillac with fins and who had a law degree from Baylor, was the sybaritic visitor to a row of shanties built along an open sewage canal. Shame and dishonor were his flags, and self-loathing was his constant companion. His presence or his absence in the life of these girls or women was as significant as a hangnail they might clip off and drop outside into a waste bucket.

  Even knowing these things, he had repeated the same behavior over and over and hadn’t bothered to question himself about a form of immorality that went far beyond his unfaithfulness to Verisa, who’d had at least two affairs that he knew of, one with a banker in Victoria and one with an airline pilot who’d flown an F-86 in Korea. In Hackberry’s mind, his greater sin was his sexual exploitation of girls and women who had no choice in the world. There was no way to excuse or rationalize his callousness toward the deprivation and sadness that constituted their lives. The fact that his behavior was documented in a security file was of no concern to him. The fact that a man like Joe Tex could have access to it and taunt him with it was.