James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“The one the Mexicans call La Magdalena.”

“The papist?”

“I’m not sure what she is. I know she’s brave and she’s kind. I think she’s a lot like you, Jack.”

“I doubt that.” Jack flipped a twig into the fire, fascinated with its fate. He pried open the blade from his pocketknife and stripped the bark from a mesquite branch and sharpened the end into a point, then speared four chunks of venison and watched them curl and brown over the campfire. His fingernails were rimmed with dirt, his shapeless trousers stuffed inside the tops of his cowboy boots. As he squatted on his heels, his buttocks looked as thin as barrel slats. He opened a can of beans and stuck them down in the coals. He poured water from a canteen into two aluminum cups and handed one of them to Noie. “You hear that sound?” he asked.

“What sound?”

“Out yonder, to the southwest, just below the evening star.”

“I don’t hear or see anything,” Noie said.

“It’s a helicopter. When it flies over, don’t look up. The light always reflects off your face. Even starlight does. Ever see ducks or geese change their flight pattern when you glance up at them? They read the propensities down below a lot better than we do.”

“Shouldn’t we put out the fire?”

“These hills and canyons and dry washes are full of fires. The people in that helicopter are looking for white men. They’re looking for us.”

“Who are you, Jack?”

“You don’t want to know.”

From his belt loops, Jack pulled the piece of rope he had been using to hold up his trousers. He dropped it in the fire and watched it spark and then dissolve on the coals like a snake blackening and curling back on itself. He uncoiled a belt he had taken from the camper shell of the parked pickup and threaded it through the loops on his trousers, working the point around his skinny hips to the buckle, totally absorbed with the task.

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” Noie said.

“Why study on a wretch like me?” Jack said. The thropping sounds of a helicopter passed overhead, the airframe silhouetting briefly against the moon like a giant predator. Jack sat motionlessly on a rock, smiling crookedly from under the brim of his panama hat, until the helicopter and the downdraft of its blades had disappeared in the darkness. He tossed Noie a tin plate. “Eat up. White-tailed venison cooked on a mesquite fire with a little pepper and salt is about as good as it gets.”

Pam and Hackberry’s investigation into the theft at the hunting camp and from the camper shell of the pickup truck went nowhere. There were no recoverable prints and no witnesses who could provide any additional information or descriptive detail about the two men who had committed the break-ins. Early Monday morning Hackberry drove by himself to the burned shack where the tramp had occasionally been seen. But he was not the first to arrive there.

Ethan Riser was standing among several men holding a conversation between two parked SUVs. Even though the morning air was soft, the sun hardly above the hills, the ground moist with night damp, all of the men were in shirtsleeves and wore shades, as though the sun were blazing in the center of the sky. Only Riser bothered to look at Hackberry when he got out of the cruiser and approached the SUVs. “Be with you in a minute, Sheriff,” Riser said.

“No, sir, I need to talk with you now,” Hackberry said.

Riser separated himself from the group and walked beside Hackberry toward the pile of ash and charcoal that had once been a shack where a nameless tramp sometimes lived. “Are you here for the same reasons I am?” Hackberry said.

“What would that be?” Riser asked.

“Don’t try to take me over the hurdles, Ethan.”

“The federal employee we’re looking for is named Noie Barnum. If this guy falls into the wrong hands, he can do enormous injury to this country. Believe me, you cannot imagine the extent of the damage. I need your cooperation, and by ‘cooperation’ I mean you have to stop intervening in our affairs.”

“Noie?”

“Yeah, like the spelling in the King James Bible,” Riser said. “People in the southern mountains pronounce it ‘No-ee.’”

“This is my county and my jurisdiction. You guys are our guests,” Hackberry said.

“That’s outrageous.”

“So is federal arrogance.”

“I have to get back to work.”

“No, you don’t,” Hackberry said. “What’s your interest in a burned-down shack?”

“That’s not your concern.”

“You think Jack Collins might have given refuge to Barnum?”

“If you’ve figured everything out, why bother asking the FBI?”

“I’m not asking the FBI. I’m asking you, man to man.”

“We never found Collins’s body. His case is still open.”

“You think he burned his shack to get rid of his prints?”

“We haven’t come to any conclusions about any of this, at least not that we can pass on.”

“ We? I asked you for an opinion about the torching of the shack. It’s not a difficult question.”

“I think you should take your mind off world events. Do that for us, and we’ll do our best to stay out of your hair.”

Hackberry gazed at the gray and black humps of ash and charcoal and scorched boards and cans of food that had exploded in the heat and the strips of rusted corrugated tin protruding from the pile. A charred Bible had been raked out on the grass. The pages, all of them burned as black as carbon paper along the outer margins, were flipping in the wind. Hackberry turned his attention back to Riser.

“You didn’t bag the Bible,” Hackberry said.

“Why should I?”

“To see if Collins’s prints are on it.”

Riser removed a ballpoint from his shirt pocket. He seemed to study it a moment; then he started clicking it. “I can never get these things to work right.”

“You already know whose Bible that is. It belongs to Collins, doesn’t it?” Hackberry said.

Riser stuck the ballpoint back in his pocket and glanced at his watch and at his colleagues by the SUVs. “I hope all this works out for everybody. Be seeing you, Sheriff,” he said.

“Something else happened here. Collins didn’t burn the shack, did he?”

“How do you know that?”

“He’s a religious fanatic. He wouldn’t burn his Bible.”

“You’re too smart for your own good. I mean that in a kindly way.”

“You guys did it.”

“No, we did not do it.”

“Or somebody from ICE or the Border Patrol or the DEA. But one of y’all did it. Tell me I’m wrong. I want you to.”

“So maybe you’re not wrong,” Riser said. “Maybe a hothead got pissed off and wanted to send Collins a message. Maybe unlike you, not everybody is always in control of his emotions.”

“You’re telling me one of your people soaked private property with an accelerant and put a match to it, and you’re telling me lawmen do this with regularity?”

“The U.S. Forest Service used to burn out squatters all the time.”

“Nobody can be this dumb. Do you realize what y’all have done?”

“The Department of Justice isn’t exactly Pee-wee Herman. We don’t quake in our shoes because we have to hunt down a self-anointed messiah who probably hasn’t changed his underwear since World War Two.”

Hackberry walked over to the group of federal agents, still gathered between the two SUVs. “Which one of you guys torched the shack?” he asked.

They stared at him blankly from behind their shades. “What shack?” one of them said.

“I dug up nine of Jack Collins’s victims, all of them Asian, all female, some of them hardly more than children. He used a Thompson submachine gun, a full drum, fifty rounds, at almost point-blank range. Then they were bulldozed over behind the ruins of a church. One of them may have been still alive when she went into the ground. A Phoenix mobster sent three California bikers to pop him. Jack bribed their chippies to set them up and then turned the three of them into wallpaper.”