Feast Day of Fools hh-10

by James Lee Burke

  Why did his mind always set traps for him? His own thoughts were more intelligent and wily than he was. Again and again, his thoughts knew how to corner and bait him, as though a separate personality were constantly probing at him with a sharp stick.

  Without thinking, without planning, as though his motor control had disconnected itself from his instincts, he removed his foot from the accelerator and depressed the brake pedal. He felt the truck slowing, the vibration in the frame diminishing as though of its own accord. Then the truck stopped as rigidly as a stone in the road. He switched off the radio and listened to the windshield wipers beating in the silence. He opened his cell phone, praying that this time the screen would show at least one bar.

  No service.

  Where was the sheriff? Where was the female deputy who had thrown him in the can? This was their job, not his. Who had dumped all this responsibility on Cody Daniels? He looked through the windshield at a long white streak of lightning that leaped from the hills into the clouds.

  You? he asked.

  No, God had more to do than concern Himself with the likes of Cody Daniels.

  How do you know? a voice said, either inside or outside his head.

  Cody put his truck into reverse and turned around in the middle of the road, wondering if the tattoo BORN TO LOSE that he had removed from his skin should have read BORN TO BE STUPID.

  Two men held Anton Ling’s arms while a third plunged her head into the water brimming over the sides of the sink. She clenched her mouth and held her breath and tried to twist away from the hand that pushed her head deeper into the water. She kicked sideways with her feet and pushed against the cabinets with her knees. All she accomplished was to drain herself of the energy and oxygen she needed to survive. After what was surely a minute, her lungs were bursting and air was bubbling out of her mouth and she knew she was only seconds away from both swallowing water and breathing it through her nostrils. Then the hand went away from the back of her neck and she reared her head above the level of the sink, gasping for air.

  “Noie Barnum must know other people around here besides you. Who would he contact?” the tall man said. His gloved right hand and sleeve were dark with water. She realized it was he who had held her head down in the sink.

  “He’s a Quaker. Other Quakers.”

  “Where do they live?”

  “There’re none around here.”

  “Wrong answer.”

  “He’s with Collins.”

  “Where’s Collins?”

  “I don’t know anything about Collins.”

  “Hold her arms tighter,” the tall man said.

  “No, wait,” she said.

  “Your time is running out, Ms. Ling.”

  “Noie has no ties here. He is wherever Collins is. How could I know where Collins is when the FBI doesn’t? You’re making me do the impossible. I can’t prove to you what I don’t know.”

  “I got to admit I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes. But you created this situation, not us. This is the way it stands: You went down the first time for exactly one minute and ten seconds. The second time you’re going down for two minutes and twenty seconds. Think you can hold your breath for two minutes and twenty seconds?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Then you’re going to die. Maybe you’ll have a heart attack before you drown, so it won’t be that bad. I’ll let you fill up with air first. Nod when you’re ready.”

  “My father flew with the original Flying Tigers. He was a friend of Claire Chennault.”

  “Who cares?”

  “If he were here, you’d have to hide.”

  He plunged her face into the water and leaned his weight heavily on his hand, driving her forehead to the bottom of the sink, his gloved fingers spreading like banana peels on the back of her head. Her skin broke against the porcelain, and blood curled around her face and rose in a smoky string to the surface. The more she struggled, the weaker she became. Her lungs burned as though someone had poured acid in them. She dug her knees into the cabinets and pushed herself backward with all her remaining strength. Then she realized that the incendiary raids she had lived through as a child, the pancake air crash she had survived on a Laotian airstrip, the ordeal she had endured at the hands of Chinese Communists, had been illusions, flirtations with a chimera who was a poseur. Death did not appear with a broad flapping of leathery wings; death came in the form of a stoppered silvery-green drain hole at the bottom of a flooded sink, while three men snapped her sinew and bones with their hands.

  But something had just happened that neither she nor her adversaries could have anticipated. Her upper body was soaking wet, and the man on her left let his grip slip for just a second. When he tried to reposition his hands, she jerked free of him and fell backward to the floor, sucking air as raggedly into her windpipe as she would a razor blade.

  The tall man reached down and grabbed the front of her shirt and pulled her to her feet. She could feel the sourness of his breath on her face. “Now, you listen,” he said. “You’re making us waste time that we don’t have. You’re vain from your hairline to the bottoms of your feet, and you know it. You’ve turned your pride into a religion and convinced a bunch of ignorant peons you’re a Catholic saint. Be assured, if you want to be a martyr, we’ll arrange that. But in the meantime, you’re going to tell us where Barnum is or prove to us you’re as unknowledgeable as you claim. If you don’t know where he is, give us the name of somebody who does. That will get you off the hook, that and nothing else.

  “If you doubt me, tell me how you feel one hour from now, after I let my associates take you back in the hills. Maybe you saw ugly things in the Orient, the kinds of things my associates are capable of doing, but you saw them, they didn’t happen to you. If they had happened to you, you wouldn’t be here today. You would be either dead or in an asylum, unable to deal with your own memories of what was done to you. My associates have insatiable appetites. When they start in on you, you will renounce everything you ever believed in just to make them stop what they’re doing for only one minute. You’ll give up your lover, your family, your religion. I’ve seen them at work. I don’t judge them for what they do. They are only satisfying the desires that to them are natural. But I never want to witness human behavior like that again. You don’t know how kind I have been to you, Ms. Ling.

  “There’s another notion I want to dispel here. People in your situation convince themselves that a miracle is going to happen, that their pain will be taken away, that angels will protect them in their last agonizing moments. But it doesn’t work that way. No God will help you, no plastic Madonna, no hallelujah choir will arrive singing the praises of Anton Ling. You’ll die a miserable death, and no one will ever know where you’re buried. Tell me what you want to do.”

  Her hair formed a tangled skein in front of her eyes and dripped water and blood on her face and shirtfront. Her eyes were crossed from shock and trauma, her bare feet slippery on the wet floor, her pajamas sticking like wet Kleenex to her skin. Her chest was still laboring with shortage of breath, her heart swollen as big and hard as a cantaloupe. “I know nothing,” she said.

  “Then enjoy your time in hell, bitch.”

  His hand reached out and settled almost lovingly on the nape of her neck. Then she twisted her body and back-kicked him with more strength and force than she thought she had.

  He wasn’t ready for it, and his upper body jacked forward with the blow, both of his hands grabbing his genitalia, a cry rising involuntarily from his throat. The man to her right tried to grab her, but she ripped her elbow into his rib cage, then kicked the tall man again, this time in the face. The third man grabbed her pajama top, tearing it down the back, but she pulled loose from him and got past the tall man and the man who had been holding her left arm. The inside of her head was roaring with noise, her hair matted with blood, her feet slipping on the floor. She felt a hand grab her neck, then fingers trying to find purchase inside the religious chain she wore.<
br />
  The drawer holding the collection of tools and wire and duct tape was half open. She got her hand inside the drawer and picked up a screwdriver, a short one with a thick stub of a handle and a wide blade and perhaps a two-inch shank. She whirled and plunged it into the face of the man whose hand was tangled in her chain. The blade pierced the fabric of his mask right below his left eye, the shank sinking all the way to the handle, the wood and fabric pressing into the wound. The man screamed once, then touched the screwdriver’s handle, his hand trembling, and began screaming again, this time without stop.

  “You shut up! You eat your pain and shut your mouth!” the tall man said.

  “I’m blind!”

  “No, you’re not. You’re in shock. Shut your fucking mouth,” the tall man said. Then he whirled around. “Get her!”

  Anton Ling ran through the enclosed back porch and crashed through the screen into the yard, falling once, getting up, then plunging across the yard toward the barn, where her pickup was parked with the keys in the ashtray.

  That was when another hooded man, even bigger than the others, a man whose breath smelled like snuff and spearmint, picked her up in the air, crushing her against his chest with his huge arms. “What do we got here?” he said, his lips brushing against her cheek through his mask. “A flopping goldfish, I’d say. We better slow you down a little bit. How about some hair of the dog that bit you?”

  He carried her kicking to the horse tank by the windmill, his big hands and wrists notched into her rib cage.

  Cody Daniels had turned the truck around in the middle of the road, his stomach churning with fear, his sweat as cold as ice water. He slowly depressed the accelerator, his right hand trembling on the gearshift, each jolt in a chuckhole like a piece of glass in his entrails. He wiped the sweat out of his eyes with his sleeve and swerved wildly around the pools of water in the road, wishing he would break an axle or tip off the shoulder’s edge into a gulley. He prayed for the dawn to come, for lightning to strike Anton Ling’s house and set it ablaze, for the FBI to descend from the sky in a helicopter. He had never been this afraid in his entire life. But why? Just because an oversize diesel-powered truck had come grinding down a hill? It was irrational.

  No, it was not. Cody knew he had a talent, and it was not one to be proud of. He was con-wise. He knew how to read iniquity in others because it resided in him. He also had a tuning fork that vibrated when he was around dangerous people. And he understood that cruelty was not an occasional vice. If it existed in an individual, it was systemic and pervasive and always looking for a new prospect. Cody knew the oversize truck was coming for Anton Ling, and inside it were men in the employ of Temple Dowling, or maybe even Dowling himself.

  The lessons he had learned in prison were simple. There were two kinds of people in the slams: screwups like himself and those who had not only gone over to the dark side but enjoyed being there and had no plans to return. The joke was the latter category was not confined to convicts. The worst people he had ever known had worn uniforms or used ballpoint pens to do damage that no burglar could ever equal. How did you recognize the Temple Dowlings of the world? That one was easy. They always mocked. It was in their voice, their use of difficult words, the way they twisted whatever came out of your mouth. They stole other people’s dignity and made them resent themselves. He and his men had invaded Cody’s home and treated him as though he were sewage, then had driven away as indifferently as if they had run over a bug.

  Where did that leave him in the mix, a man who had helped blind and disfigure a nurse in an abortion clinic? He didn’t like to think about that. His one serious fall was on a forgery charge. He had never deliberately hurt anyone. Why had he gotten mixed up with the people who had set off the bomb at the clinic? That one, too, was easy. They knew a useful loser when they saw one.

  Maybe what was waiting for him under the thunderclouds up ahead wasn’t a totally undesirable fate. Maybe this was as good a place as any to cash in. He had spent most of his life waking up with a headful of spiders, then spending the rest of the day pretending they weren’t there. He had shot over the heads of Mexicans coming out of the desert, scaring the hell out of women with infants hanging in slings from their chests and backs. He had painted the American flag on the cliff above his house but had never been in the service. He was a religious hypocrite and a peckerwood bully. His mother took off with a trucker when he was three, and his father, whom he had loved, had placed him in an orphanage when he was nine, promising to return after working a pipeline job in Alaska. But he never saw his father again or heard what happened to him, if anything. Was everything a conspiracy against Cody Daniels? Or wasn’t it more probable that he was simply unwanted and, worse, unwanted for a legitimate reason? Gravity sucked, and shit always slid down the pipe, not up.

  He felt his foot pressing on the accelerator. He had never thought so clearly about his life. The thunder rolling through the hills, the smell of the ozone, the cold tannic odor of the rain and dust, the branches of the mesquite and scrub oak bending almost to the ground all seemed like the pages of a book flipping before his eyes, defining the world and his role in it in a way he had never thought possible. Let Temple Dowling and his men do their worst. What was so bad about ending here, inside an electric storm, inside a clap of thunder that was as loud as God slapping His palms together?

  Cody had all of these thoughts and was almost free of his fear when he drove into Anton Ling’s yard and his headlights lit up the scene taking place by the windmill. Then he remembered why he had been so afraid.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Two men were holding Anton Ling by her arms. Her bare feet were bloody, her wrists duct-taped behind her. They had just lifted her out of the tank. Four other men stood close by, watching. All of the men were masked and had shifted their attention from Anton Ling to Cody. The only person not staring at him was Anton Ling, whose head hung on her chest, her wet hair wrapped around her cheeks. Cody Daniels braked and stared back at the men staring at him. He felt he had walked into someone else’s nightmare and would not be leaving it any time soon.

  He opened the door and stepped out of his vehicle, the engine still running. The ground seemed to shake with thunder, pools of quicksilver rippling through the clouds. “Howdy, fellows,” he said.

  No one answered him. Why did they look so surprised? Hadn’t they heard or seen his truck coming? Maybe the sound of the engine had gotten lost in the thunder. Or maybe Temple Dowling’s people had recognized his truck and had already dismissed his presence as insignificant. “It’s me. Cody Daniels. What’s going on?” he said.

  “Turn off your engine and lights and get over here,” a tall man said.

  “I was just doing like y’all told me. Keeping an eye on the place and all. I don’t think y’all should be doing this to Miss Anton.”

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then cut your engine and your lights.”

  “Yes, sir, I’m on it,” Cody said. He reached back in the cab and turned off the ignition and headlights. He looked at the sky in the east and the wind flattening the trees on the hillcrests and the darkness that seemed to extend to the edges of the earth. “Boy, this has been a frog-stringer, hasn’t it? Where’s Mr. Dowling at?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Motoring around and such.”

  “Motoring around?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Take out your wallet and put it on the hood of your vehicle.”

  “You don’t know me?”

  The tall man approached him. “Don’t make me repeat myself.”

  “See, I thought y’all might be the cops I called earlier. I saw the lights on down here, which didn’t seem right, so I did a nine-one-one and figured y’all were with Sheriff Holland. I expect he ought to be showing up any time now.”

  “You’re a damn poor liar, boy.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t call me that.”

 
“Get on your knees and put your hands behind your head.”

  “That woman hasn’t done anything to y’all. Why don’t you leave her alone?”

  The tall man drove his fist into Cody’s stomach, burying it to his wrist. Cody doubled over, his breath exploding from his chest, his knees collapsing in the dirt. The tall man shoved him over with his boot, then stepped on the side of his face. “Who are you?”

  “A guy who lives up in the cliffs.”

  “Who’d you call?”

  “Nobody. I didn’t call anybody. You cain’t get service out here.”

  “You know a man name of Noie Barnum?” The tall man pushed his boot tighter into the side of Cody’s face.

  “I’ve heard of him. I don’t know him.”

  “Where did you hear about Barnum?”

  “From a man name of Dowling. I thought that’s who y’all were.”

  “What did you see here this morning?”

  “Nothing,” Cody replied, his mouth mashed against his teeth.

  “Sure about that?”

  “I know better than to mess with the wrong folks.”

  The tall man did not release his foot from Cody’s face. He seemed to be looking at a diminutive man in the background, perhaps waiting for instructions. Cody could feel the lugs and grit on the bottom of the tall man’s boot biting into his cheek and jawbone. He could smell the soiled odor of the man’s foot and sock and the oil that had been rubbed into the boot’s leather. The pressure on Cody’s skull and jaw was unrelenting, as though the tall man were on the edge of cracking Cody’s facial bones apart.

  Cody was not seeing the tall man now. He saw two prison-farm gunbulls walking him from the trusty dormitory to the shed with the sawhorse standing under a bare lightbulb. They were both drunk and laughing, as though the three of them were only having fun, not unlike kids putting a friend through a harmless initiation ritual. Maybe at first that was all they had intended to do-just scare him and knock him around for sassing one of them that afternoon, what did they call it, making a Christian out of a hardhead? He knew the reality was otherwise. These were men for whom cruelty was as natural a part of their lives as eating breakfast. Their only task had been to hide their intentions from themselves, to set up the situation, then to simply follow their instincts, not unlike flinging gasoline on a fire and stepping back to watch the results. Cody would never forget the lustful cry of release in the throat of the first gunbull who mounted him. He would also never forgive himself for being their victim, accepting what they did to him as though somehow he had deserved his fate.