James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“I know where the Asian woman is. I can take you there,” he replied.

“Where might that be?”

“Down in Mexico, way to heck and gone by car, not so far by air.”

“She’s with Sholokoff?”

“She and Temple Dowling and the ’breed known as Krill. How’s Noie doing?”

“I don’t know. I kicked him loose.”

“You did what?”

“Last time I saw him, he was walking toward the city-limits sign, whistling a song.”

“The feds aren’t going to be happy with you.”

“I’ll try to live with it. Where can we meet, Mr. Collins?”

“You ever lie?”

“No.”

“Not ever?”

“You heard me the first time,” Hackberry said.

“I’m trusting you. I don’t do that with most people.”

“Do whatever you want, sir. But don’t expect me to feel flattered.”

“I’ll give you some coordinates and see you no later than four hours from now. I suppose you’ll bring the female deputy with you?”

“Count on it. Why are you doing this, Mr. Collins?”

“Sholokoff shouldn’t have taken the Asian woman. She’s not a player.”

“There’s another reason.”

“Sholokoff tried to have me capped. I owe him one.”

“There’s another reason.”

“When you find out what it is, tell me so we’ll both know. Don’t bring anybody besides the female deputy and your pilot. A couple of my men will pick you up. If you violate any aspect of our arrangement, the deal is off and you won’t hear from me again. The Asian woman’s fate will be on your conscience.”

“If you try to harm me or my deputy, I’m going to cool you out on the spot. I’m like you, Jack-over-the-hill and out of place and time, with not a lot to lose.”

“Then keep your damn word, and we’ll get along just fine.”

Jack clicked off his cell phone. Unbelievably, the jukebox sprang to life and began blaring rap music out the door. He remembered that the cord he’d cut had both a female and a male plug and was detachable from the box. The owner of the hangar had probably replaced it and decided to prove he could be as assertive and unpleasant as an imperious gringo from Texas who thought he could come to Mexico and wipe his ass on the place.

Jack went to the plane and removed his guitar case and set it on top of the table. The wind was blowing harder, the heat and dust swirling under the canopy as Jack unfastened the top of the case and inserted plugs in his ears and removed his Thompson and snapped a thirty-round box magazine into the bottom of the receiver and went inside the hangar. The owner took one look at him and dropped his push broom and began running for the back door. Jack raised the Thompson’s barrel and squeezed the trigger, ripping apart the jukebox, scattering plastic shards and electronic components all over the concrete pad, stitching the tin wall with holes the size of nickels.

“Senor, what the fuck you doin’?” Eladio said behind him.

Jack still had the plugs stoppered in his ears and could not hear him. The only sound he heard was his mother’s laughter-maniacal, forever taunting, a paean of ridicule aimed at a driven man who would never escape the black box in which a little boy had been locked.

Krill did not know a great deal about the complexities of politics. A man owned land or he did not own land. Either he was allowed to keep the product of his labor or he was not allowed to keep it. The abstractions of ideology seemed the stuff that fools and radicals and drunkards argued about in late-hour bars because they had nothing else to occupy their time. Though Krill did not understand the abstruse terms of social science or economics, he understood jails. He had learned about them in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and he knew how you survived or didn’t survive inside them. Men in confinement all behaved and thought in a predictable fashion. And so did their warders.

Krill had a very strong suspicion that his captors did not understand how jails worked. The gringo Frank was a good example of what American convicts called a “fish.” He had not only baited a prisoner but had informed the prisoner of his ultimate fate, which in this case was death and burial in concrete, telling the prisoner in effect that he had nothing to lose. Frank had made another mistake. He had not bothered to note that when Krill was placed in the cell, he was wearing running shoes, not pull-on boots.

Krill had slept three hours on the floor, his head cushioned on a piece of burlap he had found in the corner. As the early glow of morning appeared through the window on the far side of the cellar, a man came down the stairs carrying two bowls filled with rice and beans. He was a strange-looking man, with dirty-blond hair and a duckbilled upper lip and eyes that were set too far apart and skin that had the grainy texture of pig hide. He took one bowl to the cell where Krill believed La Magdalena was being held, then squatted in front of Krill’s cell and pushed the second bowl through the gap between the concrete floor and the bottom of the door.

“I need something to eat with,” Krill said.

“This isn’t a hotel,” the man said.

“We cannot eat our food with our fingers.”

“Eat out of the bowl. Just tip it up and you can eat.”

“Hombre, we are not animals. You must give us utensils to eat.”

“I’ll see what I can find,” the man said.

“Bring me a spoon. I cannot eat rice with a fork. Bring us water, too.”

“Want anything else?”

“Yes, to use a real toilet, one that flushes with water. Using a chemical toilet is unsanitary and degrading.”

When the man had gone upstairs, Krill lowered his voice and said, “Magdalena, can you hear me?”

“Yes,” the woman said.

“Did they hurt you?”

“No.”

“Where is Dowling?”

“I think he’s dead.”

“Did they mutilate him?”

“Yes, very badly.”

“Listen to me. I must say this in a hurry. I have killed many men. I have also killed a Jesuit priest. I tortured and murdered a DEA informant. I need your absolution for these sins and others that are too many to name.”

“I don’t have that power. Only God does. If you’re sorry for what you did and you renounce your violent ways, your sins are forgiven. God doesn’t forgive incrementally or partially. He forgives absolutely, Antonio. That’s what ‘absolution’ means. God makes all things new.”

“You remembered my name.”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because everyone calls me Krill.”

“It’s a name you earned in war. You shouldn’t go by that name anymore.”

“Maybe I’ll stop using it later, Magdalena. But right now I got to get us out of here. We need a fork from the man who brought us our bowls.”

“Why?”

“There are only two ways we’re going to get out of here. I have to open the lock on my door or get a man in my cell. We need a fork.”

“I heard you ask for a spoon.”

“This man is stubborn and slow in the head. He will do the opposite of what he is asked.”

The upstairs door opened, and the man with the duckbilled mouth came down the stairs. There were two dull metallic objects in his right hand. “I got you what you wanted,” he said. “Put your bowls outside the door when you’re finished.”

Krill stuck his hand through the bars and curved his palm around the utensil the man gave him. A spoon, he thought bitterly.

“Disappointed? I was jailing when I was sixteen,” the man said. “Better eat up. You got a rough day ahead of you.”

The single-engine department plane dropped down over a ridge and followed a milky-brown river that had spread out onto the floodplain and was dotted with sandy islands that had willow trees on them. Above the plane, Hackberry could see the long blue-black layer of clouds that seemed to extend like curds of industrial smoke from the Big Bend all the way across northern Mexico. Down below, the willow trees stiffened in the wind, the surface of the river wrinkling in jagged V-shaped lines. On the southern horizon, the cloud layer seemed to end and looked like strips of torn black cotton churning against a band of perfectly blue sky.