James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“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 who 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.”