James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“You have to live for your children, Antonio,” the woman said. “You have to tell others what happened to them. From this point, you live among the children of light. You become one with them. Do you understand me?”

“I think I do,” Krill said.

“No, say it.”

“I understand, Magdalena. And I will keep my word and do as you have said,” he replied.

Jack Collins pushed Eladio and Jaime ahead of him, through the patio door and into the dining room, both of them resisting and looking back at him anxiously. “Get to it, the pair of you,” Jack said. “You look back at me again, you’ll discover another side to my nature. You kill everything that moves on this floor.”

“We are campesinos, Senor Jack,” Eladio said. “We do not know tactics. We do not even know what we are doing here. What is the profit in rescuing a Chinese woman who teaches superstition to our people?”

Jack stiff-armed him between the shoulder blades, pushing him forward through the dining room, knocking over a heavy antique chair, breaking the crystal ware on a serving table. The first of Sholokoff’s men to come out of the hallway was bare-chested, his shoulders and lats stippled with body hair, an automatic in his left hand. He raised the automatic straight out in front of him, his face averted, as though staring into a cold wind and a magic wand could protect him from its influence. At the same time, Eladio shouted out, “Not me, hombre! Do not shoot. I am not one of them! This is a great mistake.”

Jack fired on Sholokoff’s man, a burst of no more than seven or eight rounds that blew away the man’s fingers from his grip on the automatic and stitched his chest and destroyed his jaw.

Eladio stared in horror at the man crashed against the wall and fell to the floor. Then he stared at Jack, his eyes seeming to search in space for the right words to use. “I froze. You saved my life, Senor Jack. We must prepare to attack the others,” he said. “They’re hiding back in the hallway. I can hear them.”

“Your fear got the best of you, Eladio,” Jack said. “This isn’t like gunning down a bunch of teenagers at a birthday party, is it?”

“Yes, I was very afraid. I was speaking insane words.”

“I wouldn’t say that. You always knew how to cover your bets.”

“Let us now go forward, Senor Jack. Tell me what you want me to do.”

“Just rest easy a second,” Jack said. With one hand holding the Thompson and the other holding Eladio’s cell phone, Jack pressed the redial number with his thumb. In the back of the house, a cell phone rang.

“You would think your bud would have enough sense to silence his phone,” Jack said. “That’s the trouble with treacherous people. Most of them cain’t think their way out of a paper sack. Your man in there sold out Sholokoff, just like you sold out me.”

“I don’t understand,” Eladio said.

“Your bud in there didn’t tell Sholokoff we were coming. Otherwise, Sholokoff would have set up an ambush. Oh, here’s your phone back.”

Jack tossed the cell phone to Eladio. When Eladio raised his free hand to catch it, Jack lowered the barrel of the Thompson and fired directly into Eladio’s chest, the shell casings bouncing off the furniture and rolling across the hardwood floor.

“Senor Collins, I do not know what is happening here,” Jaime said. “Why are you killing my cousin? Why are you turning your gun on your own people? We came here to fight your enemies.”

“You’re not my people, son,” Jack said. “Turn around and walk into the hallway.”

“No, I cannot do that.”

“Why is that, Jaime? You don’t trust your compadres in there?”

“These are not my friends. You are a deranged man. You’ve killed Eladio. You speak craziness all the time, and now your craziness has killed my cousin.”

“Pick up the cell phone and hit redial again. I want you to give somebody a message.”

“What message? That you’re killing your own people?”

“I want to tell Josef Sholokoff I’m just getting started. Can you do that for me, Jaime?”

“No, I will not do this. I didn’t have nozzing to do with Eladio’s transactions. I don’t know nobody in there. I am not responsible for what Eladio may have done.”

“‘Nozzing’ again,” Jack said. “I changed my mind about taking you to a speech therapist, Jaime. There’s no cure for certain kinds of stupidity. It’s kind of like laminitis in a horse. Instead of the hoof curling up, your kind of stupidity shrinks the brain into a walnut. We put horses down, don’t we?”

Jaime was breathing through his mouth, staring at the muzzle of the Thompson, his nose crinkling, as though he had no place to put the fear and tension coursing through his body.

“You still have your Uzi,” Jack said.

“I want to go back home.”

“That’s what everybody wants, Jaime. Even if home is just a place they made up in their minds. You know what home is? It’s a black hole in the ground where somebody shovels dirt in your face.”

Jaime swallowed. “Like Eladio, I took money from the gringo to betray you. My family lives in Monterrey. Get word to them that I am buried someplace and that my spirit will not wander, even if this is not true.”

Jack sighed and gazed out the window at the rain sweeping across the fields and the wind troweling green and gold swaths through the corn. “Damn if you guys don’t always make it hard. Leave the piece,” he said.

“You will let me go? You will not harm me when my back is turned?” Jaime said.

“Did I ever lie to you?”

“I will never tell anybody what has happened here. I will always praise your name when I hear it mentioned.”

“Time to haul freight, Jaime. I got my hands full. If I see you on the street somewhere, keep on going.”

“I do not know what that means.”

“It means some people are hopeless. Come on, there’s the door, pilgrim,” Jack said, and made a snicking sound in his cheek.

Jaime went out the French doors into the rain and crossed the patio and began running through the backyard, his head bent low. He ran past the slop bucket the maid had dropped on the lawn, past the barn and the cornfield, his clothes darkening in the rain, and was almost to the pecan orchard before he looked back at the house. His face was white and round and small inside the grayness of the afternoon. Jack watched all this from the window, simultaneously looking at the empty hallway, listening to the creaking of the house and the drumming of the rain, waiting to hear the whisper of voices or the sound of footsteps moving across the hardwood floors or perhaps a door slamming or an order being shouted. All he heard were the sounds of the wind and rain.

Jaime, maybe you’re a whole lot luckier than I thought, he said to himself.

That was when someone from a back window zeroed in on Jaime with what sounded like a fifty-caliber sniper’s rifle and squeezed off a single round and sent him crashing headlong into a tree trunk, dead before his knees struck the earth.

Hackberry had led the way from the barn and across the yard, the rain wilting his hat, driving as hard as ice crystals into his face. He could no longer see the patio and could barely make out the stairs that led down to the cellar door. When he reached the lee of the house, his clothes were wrapped around his body like wet Kleenex. Then he heard the first burst of machine-gun fire. He dropped down inside the stairwell and pulled Pam Tibbs after him.

He wiped the water off the dial of his watch. “That idiot went in early,” he said.

“I told you he has his own agenda,” she said.

He couldn’t argue with her. Trying to put himself inside the thoughts of a man like Jack Collins had been insane. Collins had a Mixmaster in his head instead of a brain.