James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

Pam raised her eyebrows threateningly.

“Yes, ma’am, I’m gone,” he said.

Downstairs, ten minutes later, Pam said, “Hack, what in the hell are you doing?”

“Fixing to call the FBI,” he replied.

But it wasn’t for the reasons she thought.

Pam was still staring at him when he got off the phone. “You told the feds about Dowling’s mutilation but not about Barnum?”

“That’s right,” he replied.

“Why does Barnum get a pass?”

“Because if the feds get him into custody, they’ll probably lose interest in Anton Ling. Second, Barnum isn’t a bad kid and, in my opinion, deserves another chance.”

“You have a funny way of looking at the world, Hack.”

“My father used to say, ‘The name of the game is five-card draw. You never have to play the hand you’re dealt.’ He believed everything we see around us now was once part of the Atlantic Ocean, with mermaids sitting up on the rocks, and that one day I would see the mermaids return.”

“We’d better get some breakfast, kemo sabe.”

“I told you that’s what Rie called me, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, I’m sorry, I forgot,” she said.

“Don’t say you’re sorry. You didn’t know Rie. She’d like for you to call me that. She’d like you.”

She looked at him in a strange way, her mouth slightly parted, her face suddenly vulnerable, but he did not see it. Maydeen had just come out of the dispatcher’s cage, her anger palpable. “He’s on the line, Hack,” she said.

“Who is he?”

“He just told me, ‘Put the sheriff on the line, woman.’”

“Collins?”

“I say we hang up on him. Don’t let him jerk you around like this, Hack.”

“No, I think this is the call we’ve been waiting on,” Hackberry said.

Jack Collins was sitting at a small table under a canvas tarp propped on poles next to an airplane hangar, a corked green bottle of seltzer and a glass and a saucer of salted lime slices by his hand. A clutch of banana plants grew tightly against the hangar wall, beads of moisture the size of BBs sliding down the leaves. The wind was hot, the canvas riffling above his head, the desert lidded from horizon to horizon with a layer of solid blue-black clouds that seemed to force the heat and humidity radiating from the desert floor back into the earth. The clouds crackled with electricity but offered no real promise of rain or even a moment of relief from the grit and alkali in the wind and the smell of salt and decomposition that whirled with the dust devils out of the streambeds. Jack decided there was nothing wrong with Mexico that a half-dozen hydrogen bombs and a lot of topsoil couldn’t cure.

Jack’s pilot and two hired killers, the cousins Eladio and Jaime, were waiting for him by the two-engine Beechcraft on the airstrip. The pilot was on retainer, at Jack’s beck and call on a twenty-four-hour basis. Eladio and Jaime were available for any activity that put money in their pockets, night or day; if there were any lines they would not cross, any deeds they would not perform, including a drive-by for La Familia Michoacana on a teenage birthday party in Juarez, Jack had not seen it. Their greatest problem, in his view, was the impaired thought processes that seemed to live behind the indolence in their faces. The inside of Jaime’s head could only be described as a tangled web of cruelty that was linked somehow to his stupidity and sullen nature. The more intelligent of the two, Eladio, thought that his transparent childlike deceit and attempts at manipulation were signs of sophistication. During a rare loss of restraint with the two cousins, Jack had asked Eladio if his mother had been impregnated by a bowling pin. Eladio had responded, “You are a man of knowledge, Senor Jack. But you must not misjudge simple men. We think and feel deeply about our mothers. They are the center of our lives.”

“Then why do you say chinga tu madre to each other at every opportunity?” Jack had said.

“I am not equipped to discuss abstractions with a man of your intelligence,” Eladio had said. “But my mother is eighty and still tells stories of her mother, who was a concubine of Pancho Villa and one of those who helped hide his severed head in the Van Horn Mountains. That is the level of respect we have for the women in our family.”

Jack had made a mental note about the level of stability in his employees.

At this particular moment, he was irritated with the weather, the clouds of black flies buzzing over a calf’s carcass in a nearby streambed, and the fact that the two cousins seemed incapable of doing anything right except killing people. The man who owned the airstrip and the hangar and the improvised cafe outside it had installed a jukebox just inside the hangar door, one loaded with gangsta-rap recordings that blasted through the speakers so loudly that the side of the tin hangar shook. Jack had told Eladio and Jaime to talk with the jukebox’s owner, but either the owner had ignored the warning or they had not bothered. So while he was trying to make notes in preparation for his conversation with the sheriff, his eardrums were being assailed by a level of electronic percussion that was like having a studded snow tire driven over his head.

Jack capped his pen, stuck it between the pages of his notebook, and went inside the hangar, where the owner was cleaning the concrete pad with a push broom. “Can I help you, senor?” he said.

Jack pointed to his ear, indicating he couldn’t hear.

“You got a problem with your ear?” the owner shouted.

Jack pulled the plug on the jukebox, cut the electric cord in two with his pocketknife, and set the plug on top of the casing. “No, I’m fine now. Thanks,” he said.

Then he sat down at his table under the canvas flap and drank a glass of seltzer and chewed on a lime slice, staring into space, each eye like a glass orb with a dead insect frozen inside it. He dialed his cell phone with his thumb and lifted the phone to his ear and waited, his body heat increasing inside his clothes, his pulse quickening. Why would his metabolism react to calling the sheriff? It could be anything, he told himself. Why dwell on it? Maybe it was because he had finally found a worthy opponent.

Or maybe it was something else.

What?

Don’t think about it, he told himself.

Why not? I’m supposed to be afraid of my own thoughts? he asked himself.

Maybe Holland is the father you never had. Maybe you want him to like you.

Like hell I do.

You could have taken him off the board a couple of times. Why didn’t you do it, Jackie Boy?

The situation was one-sided. There’s no honor in that. Don’t call me that name.

There was honor in the shooting of the nine Thai women?

I don’t want to talk about that. It’s over. I did my penance in the desert.

He thought he heard the hysterical laughter of a woman, someone who always hung just on the edge of his vision, ridiculing him, waiting for him to slip up, her smile as cruel as an open cut in living tissue.

When the female deputy answered, Jack said, “Put the sheriff on the line, woman.”

Whatever she said in response never registered. Instead, he heard the voice of the woman who lived in his dreams and his unconscious and his idle daytime moments and his futile attempts at joy. He heard her incessant, piercing laughter, louder and louder, and he knew that eventually, he would once again resort to the release that never failed him, an eruption of gunfire that reverberated through his hands and arms like a jackhammer and made his teeth rattle and cleansed his thoughts and deadened his ears to all sound, both outside and inside his head.

“What do you need, Mr. Collins?” the sheriff’s voice said.