James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“Collins?” Pam said behind him.

“Who else kills like this?” he said.

“I think one of them is still alive.”

“He’s brain-dead. The twitching hand doesn’t mean anything.”

“Better tell her that,” Pam replied.

He turned and saw Anton Ling on her knees next to the dying man, trying to resuscitate him, forcing her breath inside his mouth and down his windpipe, mashing on his chest with the heel of her hand. Her dress and hair and chin and cheeks were speckled with his blood. She turned his head to one side and drained his mouth, then bent over him and tried again.

“Miss Anton?” Hackberry said.

She didn’t speak or even look up.

“This fellow is gone, Miss Anton,” he said.

She stared up into Hackberry’s face. Her mouth was smeared, her eyes slightly crossed. “You gave it your best,” he said, putting his hands under her elbows, lifting her up.

“Who did this?” she said.

“The man who calls himself the left hand of God.”

“That’s an insult to God,” she said.

“Jack Collins is an insult to the planet,” Hackberry said. “But Pam and I need to get to work.”

“Are these federal agents?” Anton Ling asked.

“Maybe,” he said. His knees popping, he squatted down, wincing at the pain in his lower back. He slipped the wallet from the back pocket of the man Anton Ling had tried to resuscitate. The leather was warm and sticky, and he had to wipe his fingers on a handkerchief before he opened it. Hackberry sorted through the credit cards, driver’s license, and celluloid photo holders, then set the wallet down by the dead man’s foot. He recovered the wallet from the second victim and did the same. He got to his feet, slightly off balance. “If Collins was trying to do payback on the feds, he screwed up.”

“How?” Pam said.

“These guys worked for a security service out of Houston. My bet is they were doing scut work for Temple Dowling. He’s a defense contractor and the son of a United States senator I was a hump for.”

“I didn’t catch that.”

“I got politically ambitious back in the sixties.”

“Everybody makes mistakes,” Pam said.

“A mistake is something you do when you don’t know better.”

“What’s the guitar doing here?” she said.

“Who knows? Collins is a harlequin. He has contempt for most of the people he kills.”

Pam gazed down the incline. While Hackberry looked through the wallets of the two dead men, Anton Ling had gone back to her truck and was now walking back up the slope with a small silver bottle in her hand. She unscrewed the top and knelt by the man whose life she had tried to save. She put a drop of oil on her finger and drew the sign of the cross on his forehead.

“Miss Anton?” Pam said. “We shouldn’t mess too much with the bodies until the coroner gets here.”

“If you don’t want me to, I won’t,” Anton Ling said.

Pam looked at Hackberry and waited.

“It won’t hurt anything,” he said.

Pam watched Anton Ling kneel by the second man and make the sign of the cross on his forehead with her thumb. Then Pam went back to the Jeep and returned with an oversize United States Forest Service canteen and a roll of paper towels. She poured water on a clutch of paper sections and squatted down by Anton Ling and began to wipe her hands and her face and then her hair.

“You don’t need to do that,” Anton Ling said.

“I know I don’t,” Pam said.

“I’m quite all right,” Anton Ling said.

“Yeah, you are, ma’am. That’s exactly what you are,” Pam replied. “You’re damn straight you’re all right.”

Anton Ling looked at her quizzically.

Hackberry walked down the slope to the Jeep. He scratched idly at his cheek with three fingers and wondered why men tried to puzzle through the mysteries of heaven when they couldn’t even resolve the ones that lived in the human heart. He picked up the handheld radio from the seat of the cruiser and called R.C. and Felix and asked for their ETA. When a tree of lightning burst on the horizon, he thought he saw a solitary figure standing as starkly as an exclamation point on the deck of a house high up on a plateau. But the raindrops were striking his hat as hard as marbles, and he had to concentrate on his call to Felix and R.C., and he paid no more attention to the solitary figure or the house that resembled the forecastle of a ship, a huge American flag painted on the sandstone bluff behind it.

The Reverend Cody Daniels did not like sleep. During the waking day, he could deal with the past by constantly rebuilding his mental fortifications, alternately suppressing uncomfortable shards of memory or re-creating them so they didn’t detract from his image of himself as the pastor of the Cowboy Chapel. Sleep was another matter. Sleep was a stone jail cell without windows or light, where any number of malformed creatures could reach out of the darkness and touch him at will, their fingers as gelatinous and clinging as giant worms. Sometimes the creatures in the dream pressed their faces to his and ran their tongues along his skin, their breathing labored in his ear, the invasion of his person so complete that he felt his entrails would burst, his pelvis would split apart.

When he woke, he would have tears in his eyes and would sit on the side of the bed in the dark and beat his fists on his thighs.

Almost twenty-four hours had passed since he had looked through his telescope and had witnessed the machine-gunning of two men by a man wearing a rumpled suit and a panama hat. At first he had not believed what he was watching. The efficiency of the killer, the way he methodically hosed down his victims, blowing them all over the rocks and sand, had made Cody numb with fear and horror but at the same time had left him in awe of the shooter, a man with cheeks like emery paper and whose clothes and hat looked as though they had been stripped from a scarecrow.

Then Cody had watched the arrival of the sheriff, and the female deputy with the wide ass and big shoulders, and the Asian woman who had held his hands in hers and looked into his eyes and read his most private thoughts. But they were not witnesses. He, Cody Daniels, was. He had seen it all and could describe how the victims had raised their arms in front of their faces, their mouths pleading, their eyes squeezing shut, their coffee spilling to the ground. It was Cody Daniels who had experienced an almost omniscient oversight of events that others would have to guess at and reconstruct and debate and analyze in a laboratory. All he had to do was make one phone call, and the sheriff who had threatened to kick a nail-studded two-by-four up his hole would be treating him as a friend of the court, hanging on his words, the female deputy reduced to nothing but an insignificant functionary in the background.

Except Cody didn’t make the call.

Why?

He knew all too well the answer. It was fear, the succubus that had fed at his heart all his life.

Temple Dowling had given him a business card and had told him to report whatever happened on the Asian woman’s property. Krill and the degenerate named Negrito had weighted him with the same obligation, telling him to build a signal fire and pour motor oil on it, like he was an Indian in a loincloth in a John Wayne movie. Dowling claimed to have evidence that could send Cody to prison for the clinic bombing. Krill and Negrito’s potential was even worse. No matter which course of action Cody chose, he had become a human pinata for people he despised, the rich and powerful on one side and a pair of pepper-belly sadists on the other.

Why had all this befallen him? He had bought the oven timer; he didn’t set it. The others had said the bomb would go off in the middle of the night, that no one would be hurt, that the object was to scare the shit out of people who were killing the unborn. It was a noble cause, wasn’t it?