Feast Day of Fools hh-10

by James Lee Burke

  Just as he had experienced these thoughts, someone had shouted, “Incoming!” and Hackberry had heard first one, then two, then three artillery rounds arching out of the sky, like a train engine screeching down a track and then exploding, striking the earth in such rapid succession that he’d had no time to react. From where he was sitting on top of a ditch, he saw the barrage intensify and march across the plateau, blowing geysers of dirt and buried pots of kimchi into the air.

  The North Koreans were laying waste to a field filled with buried earthen jars of pickled cabbage. Hackberry continued to stare at the rain of destruction on the most ignoble of targets, bemused as much by the madness of his fellow man’s obsession as by the bizarre nature of the event. When clouds of pulverized dirt blew into his face, he never blinked. Nor did he blink when a piece of artillery shell spun toward him like a heliograph, its twisted steel surfaces flashing with light, whipping past his ear with a whirring sound like that of a tiny propeller. He felt neither fear nor self-recrimination at his recklessness, and he did not know why, since he did not consider himself either brave or exceptional.

  His lack of fear and his whimsical attitude toward his own death stayed with him all the way to the Chosin Reservoir and his imprisonment in No Name Valley, and up until the present, he was not sure why his fear had temporarily disappeared or why it had returned. With time and age, he had come to think of mortality as the price of admission to the ballpark; but why had this road in Mexico taken him back to Korea? Was he finally about to step through the door into the place we all fear? Would his legs and his mettle be up to that dry-throated, heart-pounding, blood-draining moment that no words can adequately describe? Or would his courage fail him, as it had when he dropped a litter with a wounded marine on it and ran from a Chinese enlisted man who stood on a pile of frozen sandbags and sprayed Hackberry’s ditch with a burp gun and shot him three times through the calves and left him with years of guilt and self-abasement that he came to accept as a natural way of life?

  The flatbed truck followed the Explorer between the hills, then emerged into a green valley where a paved road lined with eucalyptus trees led due south through meadowland and cornfields and farmhouses that were built of stone or stucco or both. Finally, the Explorer turned off the road and crossed a cattle guard and passed a burned-out house and pulled into a two-story barn that was filled with wind and the sounds of rattling tin in the roof.

  Jack Collins cut his engine and got out of the Explorer and pulled his guitar case after him, then shut the driver’s door. “The sun will dip behind that mountain yonder in about four hours. If you want, you can rest up,” he said.

  “What is this place?” Hackberry asked.

  “It used to belong to a friend of mine. At least it did until the army burned him out.”

  “You’ve spent time around here before?”

  “Now and then.”

  “Working for Sholokoff?”

  “I did some contract stuff for him. I work for myself. I never ‘worked’ for Josef Sholokoff.”

  “Why the wait?” Hackberry asked. Through a side window, he could see Eladio urinating inside a grove of citrus trees.

  “You want to attack a houseful of armed men in daylight?”

  “I don’t know if Ms. Ling can afford to write off the next four hours.”

  “She hit me with a pinata stick, but I’m risking my life to save hers,” Collins said. “I don’t think she’s got any kick coming. Maybe Sholokoff will take some of the starch out of her.”

  Hackberry kept his face turned away so Collins would not see the emotion he was trying to suppress. Through the window, Hackberry saw Eladio turn his back to the barn and zip his fly, then remove a cell phone from his pants pocket. “What’s your plan?” Hackberry said.

  “I’ve arranged to have the cellar door and the French doors left unlocked on the patio. Three of us go through the French doors, and two go straight down the steps into the cellar. In the confusion, we’ll pop two or three of them before they’ll know what’s happening. The others will cut bait.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “They’re for hire. They go whichever way the wind vane turns. How do you think revolutions get won? You get the religious fanatics and idealists on your side, people with no monetary interest. What kind of weapons did you bring?”

  “An AR15, a cut-down twelve, a Beretta nine-millimeter, and our revolvers.”

  “Y’all didn’t end up with any of that Homeland Security money?”

  “Worry about your own ordnance, Mr. Collins. How far is Sholokoff’s place?” Hackberry said, his gaze wandering out the window, where Eladio was walking back toward the front of the barn.

  “Three miles, more or less,” Collins said.

  “We go in now.”

  “Impetuosity might be your undoing, Mr. Holland.”

  “It’s Sheriff Holland to you.”

  “Not here it isn’t. The only title that counts down here is the one you pay for.”

  “Is there any reason one of your men would be using his cell phone while he’s hosing down a lime tree?”

  Collins’s eyes sharpened, but they did not leave Hackberry’s face nor glance in the direction of Eladio, who had just walked through the barn’s entrance.

  “You saw that?” Collins said.

  “Ms. Ling’s life is hanging in the balance. Why would I try to throw you a slider?”

  Collins’s mouth flexed, exposing his teeth, his eyes staring at the straw scattered on the dirt floor of the barn. “You’re sure about what you saw?” he said.

  Hackberry didn’t reply.

  “All right,” Collins said, his eyelids fluttering. “We go in now. Later, I’ll clean up the problem you just mentioned. How about the woman?”

  “You mean my chief deputy?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I just said. Can she take the heat in the kitchen?”

  “You’re really a test of Christian charity, Jack.”

  “Don’t patronize me. I won’t abide it.”

  “When this is over-” Hackberry began.

  “You’ll what?”

  “Find out a way to get you into a clinical study. I think you’ll be invaluable to researchers everywhere. We’ve always wondered where the gene pool got screwed up. Some think it’s because the Neanderthal gene got mixed in with the Homo sapiens’s, but no one is sure. Your DNA may contain the answer.”

  Collins’s eyes were lifted to Hackberry’s as Hackberry spoke. “Once inside, you’ll see what the wrath of God is all about. Don’t stand in its way or you’ll feel it, too,” he said. “You listening to me, boy?”

  “Count your blessings, you piece of shit,” Hackberry said.

  Krill’s plan to get one of his warders into the cell had not worked, and now he was being forced to witness the acts they were perpetrating upon the body of the Asian woman called La Magdalena. He had not been able to pick the lock with the shaft of the spoon, so he had deliberately scratched the metal around the keyhole, hoping the scratches would be detected and a man would enter the cell in order to search for the spoon. But none of them, particularly Frank, had so far been willing to admit to Josef Sholokoff the nature of their blunder, so Krill stood at the bars, staring impotently at the silhouette of La Magdalena, who had been strung from a rafter by her wrists, the soles of her feet barely touching the floor.

  “I was mistaken about you, Senor Sholokoff,” Krill said. “I thought I had been captured by the kind of mercenaries I knew in my homeland. But this is not so. As Negrito said, you are all cobardes. A nest of cowards. You smoke your purple cigarette with the gold tip and blow smoke through your nostrils like a dragon would, but you are a small, wasted goat of a man, I suspect one that has a very small penis and cojones the size of smoked oysters. Do you torture the woman because she rejected you? I have a feeling that may well be the case. A man like you was never intended to touch a woman of quality. Look at her, then look at yourself. She is beautiful and pure, but the people w
ho smuggle your dope and know you say your whores call you a human tampon. These are not my words but Negrito’s. He has a terrible fate designed for the comunista with the perfumed cigarette. That is what Negrito calls you, Senor Goat Man.”

  Five men stood in a circle around the woman. Two of them had taken off their shirts; they both had hair on their backs and large hands and jugheads and ears, the light from the bare bulb over the stairs yellow on their shoulders. Sholokoff stood directly in front of the woman, seemingly oblivious to Krill’s taunting, sucking on his cigarette, blowing the smoke on the ash so the tip glowed a bright orange in the gloom.

  “Noie Barnum made sketches of the drone,” Krill said. “I have them hidden in Durango. I can take you to them.”

  “You missed the bus, greaseball,” Frank said.

  “Don’t abuse the woman further, Senor Sholokoff,” Krill said. “I am the one you want. I am the one who can increase your riches.”

  “How’d you like a can of Drano poured down your throat?” Frank said.

  Through the ground-level window on the far side of the cellar, Krill could see a dirt road winding through the fields and rain starting to fall on a line of white hills and a flatbed truck and another vehicle coming down the road toward the compound, a rooster tail of dust rising behind each, the electricity in the clouds flicking like snakes’ tongues, forked and sharp, without sound.

  “Senor Sholokoff, your employees have been screwing you behind your back, conspiring against you in order to hide their incompetence,” Krill said.

  “What’s he saying?” Sholokoff said to Frank.

  “Mike let the half-breed have a spoon to eat with and didn’t get it back,” Frank said. “The guy was probably working on the lock with it.”

  “Where is the spoon now?” Sholokoff said, lowering his cigarette from his mouth.

  “I don’t know, sir. He isn’t going anywhere,” Frank said.

  “You’ve decided that, have you?”

  “It’s not a big deal, sir. I’m taking care of it.”

  “Not only do you make decisions for me, you also decide whether or not I should know about them?”

  Krill could see the rain sweeping across the fields in a gray line, dimming the hills in the background, the flatbed and an SUV behind it turning off the road into an unfenced pasture, the drivers circling behind a pecan orchard.

  “You hear something?” Mike said.

  “No,” Frank said.

  “I thought I heard a car,” Mike said.

  “It’s thundering in the hills,” Frank said.

  “Senor Sholokoff, listen to me when I tell you I have the plans for the drone,” Krill said. “I can be a very valuable employee to you. Your men are worthless. Look at them. They cannot think. They hide like children from their responsibilities. I retract my insults, senor . They were said in hot blood. We are both businessmen and need to behave as such, without rancor, without pissants like these to obstruct us.”

  “You shut the fuck up,” Frank said.

  “No, it’s you who needs to be silent, Frank,” Sholokoff said, glancing over his shoulder at the ground-level window. “I heard a car or truck. Look out the window, Craig.”

  One of the men standing closest to the far wall rose on his tiptoes to see outside. “There’s a flatbed truck out by the pecan trees,” he said. “It’s probably some of your field hands.”

  “They’re not supposed to be there,” Sholokoff said.

  “It’s some peons, sir. I can see one of them,” Craig said.

  “Mike, you get the spoon back from the man in the cell,” Sholokoff said. “The rest of you come upstairs with me.”

  “Sir, the woman is about to break,” Frank said. “I got everything under control. I’ll check around outside if you want, but don’t ease up now.”

  “You received a phone call earlier. Who was that from?”

  “A gal I met in the cantina,” Frank replied. “I told her not to call while I was working.”

  “A girl from the cantina? You are always thinking about your appetites, Frank. Do you never think about the man who took you off a porn set and made a soldier out of you? Do you have no gratitude for the life I’ve given you-the women, the power, the money?”

  “Sir, I got on the cantina gal’s case. I want to prove myself to you. Leave me with the Chinese broad. Trust me, you’ll have everything you need when you come back downstairs.”

  “You have a great problem, Frank. You have never been able to hide your lean and hungry look,” Sholokoff said. “That’s because a black heart has no loyalty. You can only think in terms of your own needs. I do not believe your story about the girl in the cantina. Have you done something you shouldn’t? Do you want to confess to La Magdalena?”

  “Why do you mock me, sir? I’ve done everything you wanted, including hanging up that cowboy preacher on a cross.” Frank’s features sharpened with resentment, his cheeks sinking and pooling with shadow. “I’m surprised you didn’t have us throw dice for his clothes.”

  One of the men on the first floor opened the door that gave onto the stairwell. “Mr. Sholokoff, there’s a truck and an SUV out by them trees,” he called down the stairs. “The maid hauled freight like somebody stuck a cattle prod up her ass. I sent Toy Boy out.”

  Hackberry and Pam Tibbs and Jack Collins and Eladio and Jaime fanned out in the pecan trees as soon as they had exited their vehicles. The rain was blowing in a fine mist against a barn that stood between them, dimming out Sholokoff’s compound. Hackberry held the cut-down twelve-gauge with one hand, the barrel resting against his shoulder, and studied the main house through his binoculars. Pam was to his right, carrying the AR15 with her left forearm partially wrapped in the sling, a thirty-round magazine inserted in the frame. She had strung two pairs of handcuffs through the back of her cartridge belt and had stuffed a twenty-round magazine in the back pocket of her jeans.

  The house was massive, the walls two feet thick, built of stucco that had been painted a mauve color, the flower beds bordered with bricks and packed with soil that was as dark as wet coffee grounds, the yellow and red hibiscus and climbing roses and Hong Kong orchids trembling with rain that dripped off the roof.

  The position was bad; the angle of approach was bad; and there was too much light in the sky.

  The back door opened, and an overweight Mexican woman came into the yard and walked toward a hogpen with a heavy bucket in her hand. Then she looked once over her shoulder and dropped the bucket, full of slops, onto the grass and ran past the barn into a cornfield.

  “I think Jack’s inside contact just blew Dodge,” Hackberry said.

  “Hack, this sucks,” Pam said.

  “There’s nothing for it. We believe in what we’re doing,” he replied. “Those guys inside don’t.”

  “You and I stay together. I don’t want any one of these bastards behind me,” she said. “They’re planning to kill us. I know it.”

  Before Hackberry could answer, the back door opened a second time, and one of the biggest men he had ever seen came into the yard. His long-sleeve shirt looked like it was filled with concrete; his neck looked as stiff and hard as a fireplug; his hands were the size of skillets. But his face didn’t match the rest of him. It was too small for his head, as though it had been painted in miniature on his skin, his hair cut like a little boy’s. A MAC-10 hung from his right hand.

  The man looked at the slop bucket on the grass and walked toward the barn, looking neither to the right or left, entering the open front doors and walking steadily toward the open rear doors that gave onto the pecan orchard.

  Before he emerged from the barn, Pam Tibbs moved quickly out of the trees, throwing the AR15 to her shoulder, aiming it at the center of the large man’s face. “Drop your weapon,” she said. “If you don’t, I will kill you where you stand. Do it now. No, it’s not up for discussion. Do not have the thoughts you’ve having. Drop the weapon. No, don’t look at the others. Look at me and only me, and tell me I won’t kil
l you. I’m the only person on the planet preventing you from going straight to hell in the next five seconds. The first round will be in the mouth, the second one between your eyes. You will not know what hit you. Indicate what you want me to do.”

  The man with the miniaturized face stared woodenly at her, his skin slick with rain, his chest rising and falling, the blood draining from his cheeks, mist blowing in his face. Pam closed her left eye and lifted her right elbow, her finger tightening inside the trigger guard. “Good-bye,” she said.

  “I was just checking the yard. I got no beef with y’all,” the man said, letting the MAC-10 fall to the barn’s dirt floor.

  “Thattaboy. Now on your face. Come on, handsome, do it. You’re making the smart choice,” she said.

  As soon as he was on the ground, she handed her rifle to Hackberry and stripped a pair of handcuffs from the back of her belt and hooked up the man’s wrists, snicking the ratchets into the locking mechanisms. When she straightened up, she was breathing hard, her cheeks pooled with color. “They must know we’re here. What now?”

  “We go through the cellar door. Let Collins and the Mexicans handle the upstairs,” Hackberry said.

  She took the assault rifle from Hackberry’s hands and wet her lips. She looked over her shoulder to see where Collins and the two Mexicans were. Collins was talking to the Mexicans, all three of their heads bent together. Her breath was still coming short in her chest. “Hack, don’t let those guys get behind us. Listen to me on this,” she said.

  “We’re going to be all right.”

  “Saying it doesn’t make it true.”

  “The way you took that guy down was beautiful. You’re my champ, kid.”