James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“Shut up,” Hackberry said under his breath. He opened the screen door and stepped inside, removing his Stetson hat. Inside the gloom, against the back wall, he saw a man eating refried beans and strips of steak and sliced peppers from a tin plate with a fork. The man wore a blocked hat and a seersucker coat and a gray dress shirt with no buttons on the collar and trousers that were tucked into the tops of his boots. A guitar case was propped on its side against the wall behind him. For Hackberry, Jack Collins was like a figure out of a dream, not quite flesh and blood, vaporous in its dimensions, waiting like an incubus to attach itself to the fear in its victim, in the way a leech attaches itself to living tissue in order to survive.

“Have a good flight?” Collins said.

“Not really,” Hackberry said.

“Sit down. You, too, Deputy Tibbs.”

“I think I’ll stand. You don’t mind, do you?” Pam said.

“I owe you an apology,” Collins said, chewing while he spoke.

“For trying to kill me?” she said.

“If y’all had your way, you would have split me open and salted my innards and tacked me to a fence post. I figure what I did was just fair play.”

“We didn’t come here to talk past history, Mr. Collins. How far are we from our target?” Hackberry said.

Collins pushed two chairs out from the table with his boot. He was wearing a holstered thumb-buster revolver, the bluing rubbed bare around the cylinder, the cartridge loops stuffed with copperjacketed. 45 rounds. “Sit down. Have a Pepsi. The beans and meat aren’t bad. We go in at sunset. Once inside that compound, we don’t negotiate.”

“Listen to me, Collins. You don’t make the rules. I do,” Hackberry said. “We’re down here for one reason only, and that’s to save the life of an innocent woman. We don’t turn people into wallpaper. If you want to settle a personal score with Sholokoff, you find another time and place to do it.”

Collins motioned at the waiter, then looked up at Hackberry. “I bought a big bottle of Pepsi and had him put it in the icebox for y’all. Now sit down and take your nose out of the air. You, too, Deputy Tibbs.” He placed his fork on his plate and removed a folded piece of paper from inside his coat. “I’ve drawn a diagram of the compound and the entrances to it. Are y’all going to sit down or not?”

Pam Tibbs pulled back a chair and sat down, her eyes on his.

“You want to tell me something?” he asked.

“I’d like to park one in your brisket, you arrogant white trash,” she replied.

Collins looked across the table at Hackberry. “I’m not going to have this, Sheriff.”

“Show us the entrances to the compound,” Hackberry said.

“No, you need to correct the mouth on this woman.”

The waiter brought a tall plastic bottle of Pepsi and two glasses, then went away.

“We came a long way, Jack,” Hackberry said. “You’ve done a lot of harm to a lot of people, some of them friends of ours. Don’t expect too much of us.”

“You say I’ve done harm? Right now the Asian woman and the fellow named Krill are learning what harm is all about. Josef Sholokoff doesn’t know Noie is on the street. He thinks he’s still in your jail, and he’s mad as hell and sweating Ms. Ling and the half-breed because of it.”

“You’ve got someone inside?” Hackberry said.

“What do you think?” Collins asked. “They started in on Krill about four hours ago. If I know Josef, he’ll take a special interest in the woman. Why do you think he crucified Cody Daniels and set fire to his church with him hanging on the cross?”

“You tell me.”

“It wasn’t for money. It wasn’t for sheer meanness, either.”

Hackberry remained silent.

“Josef was born with the brain of a rodent and the face of a ferret, and he blames God for the pitiful little toothpick that he is,” Collins said. “For formally educated people, neither of y’all seems real bright, Mr. Holland. But I guess overestimating the intelligence of my fellow man has always been my greatest character defect.” He pushed the diagram toward Hackberry and resumed eating, his fork scraping in the grease at the bottom of the plate, his eyes as empty as glass.

They had beaten Krill in his cell and hung him from a rafter in the center of the cellar, where the Asian woman could see him hanging, and then had beaten him again. When they dropped him to the floor, his wrists roped together behind him, he had begun to slip in and out of consciousness and into a place where his children were waiting for him. They were standing outside a traveling carnival, their cheeks smeared with Popsicle juice, the carved wooden horses of a merry-go-round spinning behind them, the music of the calliope rising into the evening sky.

Frank or the man standing next to Frank poured water from a canteen on Krill’s face. Josef Sholokoff was sitting on a chair two feet away, one knee folded over the other, smoking a perfumed cigarette that was gold-tipped and wrapped with lavender paper. “Noie Barnum remained for weeks in your custody, but you never made him draw the design of the drone? You’re a businessman who kidnaps and sells valuable people, but you never try to extract information from them? You think I’m a stupid man, Mr. Krill?”

“My name is Antonio.”

“You came to see the woman for religious reasons? You didn’t know she helped transport arms to your country? It’s just coincidence that we found you at her house while you were on a spiritual mission? You are a very entertaining man, I think.”

“My women have always told me that.”

“You worked for the Americans in your country?”

“Of course. Everyone does.”

“But you planned to help Al Qaeda?”

“An American helicopter killed my children. But I know now that I am responsible for their deaths, not others.”

“Oh, I see. Because you have discovered you are powerless against the killers of your children, you blame yourself and, in so doing, become a saint. So, in our way, we are helping you with your saintliness?”

“You taunt an uneducated man whose hands are bound after you have tortured him?” the Asian woman said from her cell. “You are a very small man, Mr. Sholokoff.”

“Frank, take care of that,” Sholokoff said.

“Sir?” Frank said.

“Ms. Ling. Take care of her.”

“The only way to shut her up is to pour concrete in her mouth,” Frank said.

“Then do it,” Sholokoff said.

“Sir, we need to finish with the greaser one way or another,” Frank said.

“All I get from you are admonitions but never results. In the last forty-eight hours, we have had in our possession a defense contractor, a notorious kidnapper and coyote, and an ex-CIA operative who flew with Air America. We get nothing out of any of them. Are you successful only with a worthless man like Cody Daniels? You certainly seemed to rise to the occasion when you turned him into a living passion play. I wonder about you, Frank.”

“That was your doing, sir,” Frank said. He was standing behind Sholokoff, wearing tight leather gloves like a race-car driver might wear, his flat stomach exposed by his scissored-off T-shirt.

Sholokoff turned in his chair. “You need to explain yourself, Frank.”

“We shouldn’t have been wasting our time on the minister. It wasn’t me that had the hard-on about him. That’s all I was saying.”

Sholokoff puffed on his cigarette, his eyes warm and shiny, exhaling the smoke from his nostrils. He put out the cigarette under his foot, then picked up the butt and handed it to one of his men to dispose of. “Frank, tell me this. Why is it that Sheriff Holland is not responding to our calls? Even after we sent part of Temple Dowling to his office. Why is a man like Holland, a personal friend of Ms. Ling, seemingly detached from her fate?”