Feast Day of Fools hh-10

by James Lee Burke

Krill watched Negrito enter the back of the farmhouse, the rowels on his spurs tinkling, the pad of orange hair on his arms and shoulders glowing against the light that fell from the kitchen. Unconsciously, Krill rested his palm against the car trunk and felt the exhaust heat in the metal soak into his skin and leave his hand feeling scorched and dirty.

  The brothel where two SUVs with Texas plates were parked did not look like a brothel. Or at least it did not resemble the adobe houses or clusters of cribs on the far end of town where the street bled into the darkness of the desert and drunks sometimes wandered away from their copulations to bust beer bottles with their firearms out on the hardpan. The brothel frequented by the Texans was located at the end of a gravel lane and was actually an enclave of buildings that had once made up a ranch. The main house was built of stone quarried out of the mountains and had a wide terrazzo porch with large glazed ceramic urns that were planted with Spanish daggers and flowers that opened only at night. The colonnade over the porch was supported by cedar posts and covered with Spanish tile and tilted downward to direct rainwater during the monsoon season away from the house.

  There was no lighting outside the building, which helped preserve the anonymity of the patrons. The night air smelled of flowers and warm sand and water that had pooled and gone stagnant and was auraed by clouds of gnats. Pam Tibbs pulled the Cherokee to a stop and cut the ignition. “How do you want to play it?” she said.

  “We wear our badges and carry our weapons in full view,” Hackberry replied.

  “I’ve seen that purple SUV before.”

  “Where?”

  “When I broke both of its taillights in front of the cafe.”

  “ That’s Temple Dowling’s vehicle?” he said.

  “It was when I broke his taillights. You’re surprised Dowling would be here?”

  “Nothing about Dowling surprises me. But I thought the man with the hole in his face might have been working for the Russian, this guy Sholokoff.”

  “Let’s find out.”

  “You feel comfortable going in there?” he asked.

  She rested her hands on top of the steering wheel. Even in the starlight, he could see the shine on her upper arms and the sunburned tips of her hair. He could also see the pity in her eyes. “It’s not me who’s uncomfortable,” she said. “When are you going to accept your own goodness and the fact that you’ve paid for what you might have done wrong when you were young?”

  “When the mermaids come back to Texas,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “It was a private joke between my father and me. Ready to make life interesting for the shitbags?”

  “Always,” she replied.

  They got out on either side of the Cherokee and went inside the brothel. The living room was furnished with a red velvet settee and deep leather chairs and a cloth sofa and a coffee table set with wineglasses and dark bottles of burgundy and a bottle of Scotch and a bucket of ice. There was also a bowl of guacamole and a bowl of tortilla chips on the table. The only light came from two floor lamps with shades that were hung with pink tassels. Two mustached men Hackberry had seen before sat on the sofa, dipping chips into the guacamole and drinking Scotch on the rocks. A Mexican girl not over fifteen, in a spangled blue dress, was sitting on the settee. She wore white moccasins on her feet and purple glass beads around her neck. Her skin was dusky, her nose beaked, her Indian eyes as elongated as an Asian’s. Her lipstick and rouge could not disguise the melancholy in her face.

  “How are you gentlemen tonight?” Hackberry said.

  “Pretty good, Sheriff. I didn’t think you’d remember us,” one of them said.

  “You came to my office with Mr. Dowling,” Hackberry said.

  “Yes, sir, that’s us. What might you be doing here?” the man said.

  “Not a lot. Just driving around the countryside trying to find a deputy of mine who got himself kidnapped. Do you boys know anything about a kidnapped deputy sheriff by the name of R. C. Bevins?”

  The two men looked at each other, then back at Hackberry. “No, sir,” the first man said.

  Hackberry could hear the clatter of pool balls in a side room. “Is that more of your crowd in there?”

  “Yes, sir, they’re with us. We’d help you if we could, Sheriff, but I think you’ve come to the wrong place.”

  “This is the wrong place, all right, but for reasons you evidently haven’t thought about,” Hackberry said.

  “Sir?”

  “How old do you reckon that girl is?”

  “We don’t make the rules down here. Nobody does,” the second man said.

  Both men were wearing skintight jeans and snap-button shirts and belts with big silver-and-gold-plated buckles, and they both had the styled haircuts and carefully maintained unshaved look of male models in a liquor ad or on a calendar aimed at homosexuals rather than at women. The second man had a deeper and more regional voice than the first, and a formless blue tattoo, like a smear, inside the whiskers that grew on his throat.

  “Were any of y’all in a cantina earlier?” Hackberry said.

  “Not us,” the second man said.

  “We’re looking for a guy with a hole in his face. You know anybody like that?”

  “No, sir,” the first man said.

  “I see,” Hackberry said. “Is Mr. Dowling in back?”

  Neither of the men spoke. The second man glanced at Pam Tibbs, then filled a taco chip with guacamole and stuck it in his mouth and chewed it while he took her inventory.

  “What’s in back?” Hackberry said.

  “The whole menu,” the first man said.

  “You two guys go outside,” Hackberry said.

  “You’ve got no jurisdiction down here, Sheriff,” the second man said.

  “Who cares? I’m bigger than you are. You guys want trouble? I’ll give it to you in spades.”

  The two men looked at each other again, then got up from the settee. “We’ll honor your request, Sheriff Holland. We do that out of respect for you and our employer,” the first man said.

  “No, you’ll do it because if I catch one of y’all putting your hands on this little girl, I’m going to kick your sorry asses all the way to Mexico City. And if I find out you’re involved with the kidnapping of my deputy, I’m going to blow your fucking heads off.”

  Hackberry did not wait for their reaction. He walked into the side room, where two men were shooting pool inside a cone of light created by a tin-shaded bulb that hung from the ceiling. The pool table was covered with red velvet, the pockets hung with netted black leather, the mahogany trim polished to a soft glow. “You!” he said, pointing at the man about to break the rack. “Yeah, you! Put your cue down and look at me.”

  “?Hay algun problema?”

  “Yeah, you. Remember me?”

  “Yes, sir, you’re the sheriff.”

  “You were shooting pool at a cantina tonight.”

  “Maybe I was. Maybe not. So what?” There was a deep indentation below the pool shooter’s left eye, as though a piece of the cheekbone had been removed and the skin under the eye had collapsed and formed a hole a person could insert his thumb in. But the injury was an old one. It was the same wound that Hackberry had seen in the face of one of Temple Dowling’s employees when they came to his office.

  “There’s no maybe in this,” Hackberry said. “You were in the Cantina del Cazador. You were shooting pool there. My deputy saw you in there and described you to me. In very few words, you need to tell me what happened to my deputy.”

  The pool shooter’s shirt was open on his chest, exposing his chest hair and nipples and a gold chain he wore around his neck. “?Quien sabe, hombre?”

  “You sabes, bud. Or you’d better.”

  “I was in the cantina. I didn’t see anybody who looked like a deputy sheriff. What else can I say?”

  “Why’d your friends out front say you weren’t there?”

  “Maybe I didn’t tell them.”

  “I can see you
’re a man who likes to keep it simple. So how about this?” Hackberry said. He pulled his white-handled blue-black. 45 revolver from his holster and swung it backhanded across the pool shooter’s mouth. The blow made a clacking sound when the heavy cylinder and frame and the barrel broke the man’s lips against his teeth. The pool shooter dropped his cue and cupped both of his hands to his mouth, his face trembling with shock behind his fingers. He removed his hands and looked at the blood on them, then spat a tooth into his palm.

  “ Chingado, what the fuck, man!” he said.

  “You sabes now?”

  “What’s going on here?” said a voice behind Hackberry.

  Temple Dowling had come out of a bedroom down the hall. He wore slippers and a towel robe cinched around his waist. Lipstick was smeared on his robe, and his exposed chest looked pink and blubbery and his breasts effeminate. Two young girls were leaning out of the doorway behind him, trying to see what was happening at the front of the house. Hackberry could see a large man in a long-sleeve white cotton shirt and bradded jeans coming out of an office in back, a wood baton gripped in one hand.

  Hackberry put his revolver in the holster and raised his left hand, palm out, at the man with the baton. “My business is with Mr. Dowling and his associates. Mix in it and you’ll take their weight,” he said.

  “?Que dice?” the man with the baton asked one of the girls who had stepped out of the bedroom.

  “No se,” she replied.

  “ Esta bien. It’s all right, Hector,” Dowling said to the Mexican with the baton.

  “One of my deputies was kidnapped out of a cantina where your hired piece of shit with the bloody mouth was shooting pool,” Hackberry said. “He denies seeing my deputy, even though my deputy described your man to me over his cell phone.”

  “Why would one of my employees have any interest in your deputy, Sheriff Holland?” Dowling said. “Are you down here about Jack Collins?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not?” Dowling said, looking confused.

  “Why would I be looking for Collins on a street full of Mexican cathouses?”

  “He’s everywhere,” Dowling replied.

  “You’ve become a believer?”

  “I haven’t done anything to this man. I didn’t say anything about him.”

  The register in Dowling’s voice had changed, the vowels and consonants not quite holding together. The skin twitched under one eye as though a fly had settled on his skin. Hackberry wondered how many young girls had paid the price for the fear that Dowling had probably spent a lifetime trying to hide from others.

  “Have you had an encounter with Collins?” Hackberry asked.

  “I thought you knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “I put a reward on him. He killed two of my men. That’s why I put the reward on him.”

  “You put a reward on Jack Collins?”

  “For arrest and conviction. That’s all the statement says. I didn’t tell people to go out and kill him. It’s what any employer or family member would do if their employees or family members were murdered.”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “Last night there was a man outside my motel. My men tried to catch him, but he disappeared. He was wearing a dirty hat of some kind. He was in the shadows on the other side of the parking lot, under a sodium lamp. What do you call that kind of hat? A panama? It’s made of straw and has a brim that dips down over the eyes.”

  Dowling seemed to wait, hoping that Hackberry would dispel his fears and tell him that the shadowy figure, for whatever reason, could not have been Collins.

  “That sounds like Jack, all right,” Hackberry said. “Congratulations, you’ve brought down perhaps the most dangerous man in America on your head. Jack’s a real cutup. I’ve been trying to punch his ticket for over a year. Maybe you’ll be more successful. You guys have any armored vests in your vehicles?”

  “You’re enjoying this.”

  “I guess it beats hanging in an upscale cathouse that provides services for pedophiles.”

  “Don’t you dare talk to me like that.”

  “I was a whoremonger, Mr. Dowling. When I see a man like you, I want to shoot myself. I don’t know if some of the girls I slept with were under the legal age or not. Most of the times I went across the river, I was too drunk to know what universe I was in.”

  Dowling was not listening. “Did you see anyone down here who looked like him?”

  “Like Jack?”

  “Who do you think I’m talking about, you idiot?” Dowling said.

  “He paid a visit to my ranch just yesterday. He put a laser sight on me, but he didn’t pull the trigger. That tells me he has something else planned for me. In your case, I doubt you’ll see that red dot crawl across your skin. You’ll see his Thompson for a few seconds, then you won’t see anything at all.”

  A hulking Mexican woman appeared out of the back office and placed a highball in Temple Dowling’s hand. Dowling looked at the drink as though he couldn’t understand how it had gotten there. The two girls he had been in bed with were whispering under their breath, one translating to the other the conversation of the gringos, both of them trying not to giggle. “Senor, este es muy malo para los negocios,” the Mexican woman said.

  Her words of concern about her business realities had no effect on Temple Dowling. Instead, his eyes remained fixed on Hackberry’s, a lump of fear sliding down his throat so audibly that his lips parted and his mouth involuntarily made a clicking sound.

  “I don’t have any authority down here, Mr. Dowling,” Hackberry said. “But when I get back to Texas, I’ll make sure the appropriate agencies hear about your sexual inclinations.”

  “You’re a bastard, Holland.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Hackberry replied.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Enclosure of any kind had always been R. C. Bevins’s worst fear, the kind that is so great you never willingly confront it or discuss it with anyone else. Inside the darkness of the car trunk, while the gas-guzzler continued down a dirt or rock road of some kind, he tried to work his way forward and push his knees against the hatch and spring the lock. His wrists were taped together behind him, and the tape was wound around his ankles, forcing him to lie on his side, so he could not find purchase against a hard surface. There was a hole in the muffler, the engine’s deep-throated sound rising into the trunk, the smell of the exhaust mixing with the dirty odor of the spare tire that R.C. could feel against the back of his head. He was finally able to touch the hatch with the points of his boots, but he was not able to exert any viable degree of pressure. The man named Negrito had done his job well. He had probably done it well many times before, R.C. thought.

  He felt the car dip off the edge of the road and bounce heavily down an incline until it was on a flat surface again. Then he heard scrub brush raking thickly under the car frame, small rocks pinging under the fenders. R.C. strained against the duct tape, trying to stretch it to the point where he could slip one wrist free or work it over a boot heel so he could extend his legs and tear the tape off his wrists, even if he had to strip the skin from his thumbs.

  Negrito was playing the radio, listening to a Mexican station that blared with horns and mariachi guitars. The car veered sharply, thudding off what was probably an embankment into a dry riverbed, jolting R.C. into the air, knocking his head against the spare tire. The gas-guzzler rumbled over rocks and tangles of brush while tree branches scraped against the fenders and doors and oil smoke from the broken muffler leaked through the trunk floor. The car swerved again, fishtailing this time, and came to a stop that caused the car body to rock on the springs.

  Negrito waited until the song had ended, then turned off the radio and cut the engine. The night was completely silent except for the ticking of the heat in the car’s metal. The driver’s door opened with a screech like fingernails on a blackboard, and R.C. heard the tinkling of Negrito’s roweled spurs approaching the trunk.


  When Negrito popped the hatch, the sweet, cool, nocturnal smell of the desert flooded the inside of the trunk. But R.C.’s sense of relief was short-lived. Negrito’s outline was silhouetted against the stars, a. 45 auto strapped on his hip. “You okay, Tejano boy?” he asked. “I was worried about the way you was bouncing around in there. Here, I’m gonna get you out and explain our situation.”

  Negrito grabbed R.C. by one arm and the back of his belt and slid him over the bumper, letting him drop to the ground. “See, my friend Krill has got his head up his ass about a lot of things and don’t know what’s good for himself and others lots of the time. So I got to make decisions for him.”

  For no apparent reason, Negrito stopped talking and looked over his shoulder. From where he lay on the ground, R.C. could see that the car had ended up in a sandy wash, like a cul-de-sac, at the bottom of a giant hill that looked compacted of waste from a foundry. Negrito was staring into the darkness, turning his head from one side to the other. He picked up a rock and flung it up the incline and listened to it clatter back through the thinly spaced mesquite. “Maybe we got a cougar up there,” he said to R.C. “But more likely a coyote. They come around, I’m gonna shoot them. They eat carrion and carry diseases. Like some of my girlfriends in Durango. What you think of that?”

  Between Negrito’s booted feet, R.C. saw an image that made his heart sink. On a level spot at the edge of the wash were at least five depressions, each of them roughly six feet long and three feet wide, the top of the depressions composed of a mixture of soil and dirt and sand and charcoal from old wildfires, all of it obviously spaded up and shaped and packed down by the blade of a shovel.

  “See, I got to leave you here for a while and make some contacts,” Negrito said. “You’re gonna be safe till I get back. I like you, Tejano boy, but I got to make money and take care of my family. There’s only one question I got to ask you. When I was a little boy working on this turista ranch in Jalisco, there was a gringo there who looked just like you. After he shot pigeons all day, he made me pick them up and clean them for his supper. While I did that, he screwed my sister. You think maybe that was your father?”