Feast Day of Fools

by James Lee Burke

  “I bet that’s what we’ll all be doing when somebody drops a nuclear missile on us,” the man said.

  “I never thought of it like that. I think you got your hand on it.”

  “Hope we get some rain. This is about the hottest place I’ve ever been,” the man said.

  “You know what General Sherman said when he was stationed here? He said if he owned both Texas and hell, he’d rent out Texas and live in hell,” R.C. said.

  The man tilted up his orange juice and drank it empty, swallowing smoothly, never letting a drop run off the side of his mouth. R.C. went back to eating, his long legs barely fitting under the table, his jaw filled with food, one eye on his clipboard. “This stuff is a royal pain in the ass,” he said. “I’m going back on patrol. If they want my time logs filled out, they can fill them out their own self.”

  “If I were you, I’d put the times in there somebody wants and not worry about it. That’s how organizations are run. You just got to make things look right. Why beat yourself up over it?”

  “You sound like a guy who’s been around.”

  “Not really.”

  “Where you staying at, exactly?”

  “A little vacation spot a buddy of mine has got rented. It’s just a place to go hunting for rocks and arrowheads and such.”

  “Look, is somebody coming to pick you up? You looked like you were limping.”

  “I’ll hitch a ride. People here’bouts are pretty nice.”

  “I don’t mind driving you home. That’s part of the job sometimes.”

  “No, I was in an accident a while back. I don’t like to start depending on other people. It gets to be a habit too easy.”

  R.C. picked up the remnants of his nachos and chili dog and threw them in the trash, then sat down at the table with the man, who was now feeding a Ding Dong into his mouth. “You seem like a right good fellow,” he said. “The kind of guy who don’t want to hurt nobody but who might get into something that’s way to shit and gone over his head.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “I always figured if a guy makes a mistake, he ought to get shut of it as quick as he can and keep on being the fellow he always was.”

  “That could be true, but I think you’ve got somebody else in mind.”

  “You’re not from Texas, but you’re from down South somewhere, right?”

  “Me and a few million others.”

  “But you weren’t raised up to keep company with criminals. It’s got to grate on you. I reckon that’s why you hitched a ride here today.”

  “You want a Ding Dong?”

  “Not right now,” R.C. said, and fitted one end of his handcuffs onto the man’s left wrist and snicked the ratchet into the locking mechanism. “Mind if I call you Noie?”

  “I’ve answered to worse.”

  “You have a friend who drives a Trans Am that has Michelin tires on it?”

  “Can’t say as I do.”

  “Where’s Preacher Collins at, Noie?”

  The man squinted thoughtfully and scratched at an insect bite on the back of his neck with his free hand. “Who?” he said.

  “YOU’RE NOT GOING to believe this,” Maydeen said, standing in Hackberry’s doorway.

  He looked up from his desk and waited.

  “R.C. says he’s got Noie Barnum hooked up in the back of his cruiser,” she said.

  Hackberry stared at her blankly.

  “He says Barnum walked into a convenience store down by the four-lane,” she said. “He’d hitched a ride to have lunch there.”

  “How does R.C. know it’s Barnum?”

  “He says the guy looks just like his photo, except he’s a little leaner. He’s got a limp and maybe has some broken ribs.”

  “The guy admits he’s Noie Barnum?”

  “R.C. didn’t say. He just says it’s him.”

  “What about Jack Collins?”

  “R.C. said there were Michelin tire tracks where Collins’s car was parked yesterday. I didn’t get it all, Hack. Want me to notify the FBI?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Yeah, I did. How about losing the tone?”

  He stood up from his desk, staring out the window into the brilliance of the day, at the wind whipping the flag on the pole, at the hard blueness of the sky above the hills. His right hand opened and closed at his side. “Tell R.C. to bring him through the back.”

  “Hack?”

  “What is it?”

  “You always say we do it by the numbers.”

  “What about it?”

  “Pam told me about you almost shoving a broken pool cue down a bartender’s throat in that Mexican cantina.”

  “R.C.’s life was hanging in the balance. Why are you bringing this up?”

  “I could have done the same thing to the bartender, maybe worse, and so could Pam or Felix and a few others in the department. We wouldn’t be bothered about it later, either. But we’re not you. All of us know that, even though you don’t. You go against your own nature.”

  “Where’s Pam?”

  “In the restroom, the last time I saw her.”

  “Believe it or not, Maydeen, sometimes I have my reasons for doing the things I do. We’re not the only people who want to get their hands on Noie Barnum. The less anyone knows about his whereabouts, the safer he is. You got me?”

  “Yes, sir, I expect so.”

  Hackberry looked down the street to see if R.C.’s cruiser had turned into the intersection yet. He tried to clear his head, to think straight, to keep the lines simple before he gave up his one certifiable chance to nail Jack Collins. “Fill in Pam and get the trusties out of the downstairs area. I want the prisoners in the cells at the end of the upstairs corridor moved to the tank. Barnum goes into total isolation. No contact with anyone. His food is brought to him by a deputy. No trusty gets near him. We’re in total blackout mode regarding his presence. Simply said, he doesn’t exist. You copy that?”

  “I guess that means no phone call.”

  He gave her a look.

  “Got it, got it, got it,” she said.

  Hackberry went out the back door and waited for R.C. The alleyway was empty in both directions. Think, he told himself. Don’t blow this one. Why would Barnum be in a convenience store by himself? Collins wouldn’t allow him to go wandering about on his own. They either had a fight or Barnum got sick of Collins’s ego-maniacal rhetoric and decided to take a stroll down the road and find some other company. But why had he stayed with Collins in the first place? To find Krill? To find some Al Qaeda operatives in Latin America and even the score for the death of his half sister? That made more sense than anything else.

  R.C.’s cruiser turned in to the alleyway, the flasher off. Hackberry looked at all the rear windows of the building. He saw a face at one of the windows in the upstairs corridor. A deputy or a trusty? R.C. helped his prisoner out of the backseat of the cruiser, and the face went away. The prisoner’s wrists were cuffed behind him, the tendons in his neck corded with either embarrassment or anger. In the sunlight, there were pinpoints of sweat on his forehead.

  “I’m Sheriff Holland, Mr. Barnum,” Hackberry said. “You are Noie Barnum?”

  “Your deputy called me Noie. But I didn’t tell him that was my name.”

  “Have it any way you like, sir. You’re in protective custody, but you’re not under arrest. Do you understand the difference?”

  “Yes, you’re saying I don’t have the constitutional right to a phone call or a lawyer.”

  “No, I’m saying this is a safe place for you.”

  “I think I’d just rather hike down to that café we passed and have a piece of pie and a cup of coffee and be on my way, if you don’t mind.”

  “That’s not an option, Mr. Barnum. I also need to advise you that you’re starting to piss me off.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “I’ll explain. You’re one skip and a j
ump from being charged as an accessory in several homicides, all of them involving your companion Jack Collins. I dug up nine of his female victims. When we get time, I’ll show you their postmortem photographs. The photos don’t do justice to the realities of an exhumation—the stench of decomposition and the eight-ball stare and that sort of thing—but you’ll have some sense of what a spray of forty-five-caliber bullets can do to human tissue.”

  “It’s true?” the prisoner asked.

  “What?”

  “What you just said. Jack did that?”

  Pam Tibbs had just come out the back door. “Who the hell you think did it, son?” she asked.

  The prisoner tried to hold his eyes on hers, but his stare broke, and he sucked the moisture out of his cheeks and swallowed.

  Pam and Hackberry took the handcuffed man up the steel spiral stairs to the second floor and walked him down the row of cells to the end of the corridor. Pam whanged her baton against a cell door when two men came to the bars. Hackberry unhooked the prisoner, and he and Pam Tibbs stepped inside the room with him.

  “You have a lavatory and a toilet and a bed and a chair and a window that lets you see the street,” Hackberry said. “I apologize for all the graffiti and drawings of genitalia on the walls. We repaint every six months, but our clientele are a determined bunch.”

  “The other cells have bars. Why am I in this one?”

  “The only people you’re going to talk to are us, Mr. Barnum,” Hackberry said. “I have a feeling you and Preacher were holed up down by the border or just on the other side of it. But chances are he’s taken off. Is that right? He’s way down in Coahuila by now?”

  “You call him Preacher?”

  “I don’t call him anything. Others do,” Hackberry said. “You’re a Quaker, right?”

  “A man’s religion is a private matter.”

  “You deny your faith?” Hackberry said.

  “No, sir, I don’t. As you say, I’m a Quaker.”

  “And your namesake sailed out on the Flood?”

  “Yes, sir, my christened name is Noie. Same spelling as in the King James.”

  “Can you tell me, with your background, why in the name of suffering God you hooked up with a man like Jack Collins?”

  “Because he befriended me when nobody else did. Because he bound up my wounds and fed and protected me when others passed me by.”

  “Do you know how many innocent people have been hurt or killed because they think you have the design for the Predator drone?” Hackberry said.

  “I escaped from a bunch of Mexican killers. They’d held me prisoner for weeks. How could I be carrying the design to a Predator drone? How could anyone have ideas that are that stupid?”

  “An FBI agent by the name of Ethan Riser called you the modern equivalent of the Holy Grail,” Hackberry said. “The design is in your head. You’re a very valuable man, Mr. Barnum. Ethan Riser could probably explain that to you better than I, except he’s dead. He’s dead because Jack Collins blew his face and skull apart with a Thompson submachine gun. Ethan Riser was a good man and a friend of mine. Have you ever seen anybody machine-gunned, Mr. Barnum?”

  “I found out about your friend when it was too late to do anything about it.”

  “Are you a deep-plant, sir?” Hackberry said.

  “A what?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, I was about to go public with some information about the numbers of innocent people we’ve killed in the drone program, but I went into the desert first to think about it. That’s when I got kidnapped by Krill and his friends. They found my government ID and a letter from a minister about my concerns over the Predator program, and they thought they’d sell me to Al Qaeda. Then they decided that was too much trouble and they’d sell me to some Mexican gangsters. That was when another fellow and I broke loose.”

  “You thought you were going to bring down Al Qaeda by yourself?”

  “I was aiming to get some of them, that’s for sure. But I was done helping kill third-world people. I got to say something here. I don’t know everything that goes on in Jack’s head, but somewhere inside him, there’s a better man than the one you see.”

  “Keep telling yourself that crap,” Pam said.

  “Chief Deputy Tibbs isn’t very objective about Jack, Noie. That’s because he tried to machine-gun her,” Hackberry said.

  Noie Barnum looked at her blankly.

  “What do you know about Josef Sholokoff?” Hackberry asked.

  “I don’t recall anybody by that name.”

  “He’s a Russian criminal who wants to sell you to the highest bidder,” Hackberry said. “We think he may have crucified a minister by the name of Cody Daniels. You ever hear of him?”

  “No, I haven’t,” Noie said. “A fellow was crucified?”

  “You seem blissfully ignorant of all the wreckage swirling around you. Does that bother you at all?” Hackberry said.

  “You’re damn right it does. You stop talking to me like that.”

  “There’s a ranch about six miles below the four-lane. The south end of the property bleeds into Mexico. I think that’s where y’all were hiding out. Jack is probably long gone, and he’s not driving that Trans Am anymore, either. But I need to know. Is that where y’all were holed up?”

  “Ask Jack when you catch him.”

  “We don’t abuse prisoners here,” Pam said, stepping closer to Barnum, one finger barely touching his sternum.

  “Ma’am?” he said.

  “I just wanted you to take note of that fact,” she said. “It’s why I’m not pounding you into marmalade. But you open your mouth like that one more time, and I promise you, all bets are off.”

  DOWNSTAIRS, FIVE MINUTES later, Pam came into Hackberry’s office and closed the door behind her. “I’m backing your play, Hack, whatever it is. But I think you’re taking an awful risk here,” she said.

  “We don’t owe the feds diddly-squat,” he replied. “We apprehended Barnum. They didn’t. As far as I’m concerned, they’re on a need-to-know basis. Right now I don’t figure they need to know anything.”

  “This is a national security issue. They’re going to eat you alive. If they don’t, your enemies around here will.”

  “That’s the breaks.”

  “God, you’re stubborn.”

  “I got a call from Temple Dowling. He says Josef Sholokoff believes Dowling put a hit on him.”

  “Why’s he think that?”

  “Because somebody killed a couple of Sholokoff’s men at his game farm.”

  “Why didn’t we hear anything about it?”

  “Sholokoff didn’t report it.”

  “What did you tell Dowling?”

  “To get out of town. That he was on his own,” Hackberry said.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “I was pretty hard-nosed with him. Maybe I took satisfaction in his discomfort.”

  “Dowling is a pedophile and deserves anything that happens to him.”

  “He said Sholokoff takes people apart.”

  “In what way?”

  “Physically, piece by piece,” Hackberry said.

  He realized her attention was focused outside the window. A man in rumpled slacks, wearing canvas boat shoes without socks and his shirttail hanging out, was crossing the street hurriedly, a brown paper bag folded under his arm. “What’s wrong?” Hackberry asked.

  “That guy out there. He was just released.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s a check writer. Loving and Jeff Davis counties have bench warrants on him, but they didn’t want to pay the costs for getting him back.”

  “I’m still not following you.”

  “He was waiting to be taken downstairs when R.C. brought Barnum in. I remember he was watching us move everybody down to the tank. He was at the window, too, looking down in the alley.”

  “He probably wouldn’t know who Barnum is.”

  “No, I saw his jacket. He
was in Huntsville. He got clemency on a five-bit for sending his cell partner to the injection table. He’s a professional snitch.”

  Hackberry thought about it. “Leave him alone. If he has any suspicions, we don’t want to confirm them.”

  “Sorry, I had my hands full up there.”

  “Forget it,” he said.

  She looked at him for a long time before she spoke. “You want them to come after Barnum, don’t you?”

  “I haven’t thought about it. I’m not that smart,” he said. “You think I made a target out of Temple Dowling?”

  “You’re in the wrong business, kemo sabe, but I love you just the same,” she replied.

  WHAT A DIFFERENCE a day and a change of topography could make, Temple Dowling told himself as he gazed through the lounge window of the Santa Fe hotel he and three of his men had checked in to. The evening sky was turquoise and ribbed with pink clouds, a rainbow arching across a canyon in the west, the sun an orange ball behind the mountains. The bartender brought him another vodka Collins packed with shaved ice and cherries and lemon and lime slices, and when Temple lifted it to his lips, the coldness slid down his throat like balm to his soul. Somehow his feelings of failure and humiliation at the hands of that clown Holland had evaporated during the flight to New Mexico. In fact, Temple was confident enough to smile at his foibles, as though someone else had temporarily occupied his skin and admitted his fear of Josef Sholokoff. It was nothing more than a silly lapse, Temple told himself. He had been tired, worn out by worry, beset on all sides by an army of incompetent employees and government bureaucrats and hayseed cops, Holland in particular. Why had Temple’s father ever thought that idiot could be a congressman, a man who probably couldn’t find his dork unless he tied a string on it? Temple sipped from his Collins and dipped a taco chip in a bowl of guacamole and chewed on it. Then an image he didn’t want to remember floated before his eyes—being discovered by Holland and his chief deputy in the Mexican brothel with two underage girls.

  He quickly transformed his emotion into one of righteous outrage. Temple Dowling didn’t turn them into prostitutes. Poverty and hunger did. Was that his fault? Should they starve? Would that make the world a better place? What gave Holland the right to look down on him? Wasn’t he intelligent enough to understand that most men who are attracted to children seek innocence in their lives?