James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“Like the two guys Collins popped?”

“The guy in charge knew the waitress. He had on a blue suit and a silver western shirt without a tie, like he was one of the boys. After they left, I asked her who he was. She said that was Temple Dowling.”

“Forget about Dowling.”

She closed the office door and approached his desk. “It didn’t quite end there. I heard him talking in the booth. I heard him use your name.”

“We need to get to the point, Pam.”

“He called you a drunk.”

“That’s what I used to be.”

“That’s not all of it. I heard him whispering, then all of them laughed.”

“Blow it off. These guys aren’t worth talking about.”

“Then one guy said, ‘He brought clap home to his wife?’ Dowling said something I couldn’t hear, and they all laughed again, loud enough that everybody in the cafe turned around and looked at them.”

“What that man said isn’t true. But I don’t care whether he says it or not. If he does it in my presence, I’ll do something about it. In the meantime, let’s forget it and talk to Danny Boy.” Hackberry took the ring of cell keys off a peg next to his hat.

“I followed them into the parking lot,” Pam said.

“Did you hit somebody?”

“No.”

“All right, then let it go.”

“I took the motormouth aside, the one who said something about clap. He was the driver of one of the SUVs. I told him I wasn’t going to cite him for his broken taillights, but if I ever heard him slander your name again, I was going to beat the living shit out of him.”

“He had two broken taillights?”

“He did after I broke them.”

“Pam?”

“What?”

“What can I say?”

“I don’t know.”

He stepped closer to her, towering over her, and cupped his hand around the back of her neck. Her skin felt hot against his palm. He could smell the shampoo in her hair and the heat in her body and feel the hardness of the muscles in her neck. “You have to stop protecting me,” he said.

“You’re my boss, and I won’t allow white trash to tell lies about you.”

“You really know how to jump-start a man’s day,” he said.

She lifted her eyes to his. Her mouth looked like a flower that had crumpled in on itself in the shade. “Think so?” she said.

He removed his hand from the back of her neck and tried not to swallow. There was a thickness in his throat, a tightness in his chest, and a weakness in his loins that he did not want to recognize. “Why would Collins bother Danny Boy?” he said hoarsely.

“He wants to hurt you.”

“It’s that simple?”

“You bet your ass,” she replied.

They climbed up the spiral steel stairs in the back of the building and walked down the corridor to a cell whose outer wall was a checkerboard pattern of steel bands and cast-iron plates that had been painted white and were now crosshatched with scratch marks and stained by orange rust around the rivets. Danny Boy was looking out the window when they approached the cell. When he turned around, his head and neck were framed against the window, his body enveloped in shadow, so that his head seemed to rest, decapitated, upon a plate. “I don’t want out,” he said.

“Can’t lock up a man who hasn’t committed a crime,” Hackberry said.

“I’ll drink if I’m back on the street,” Danny Boy said.

“Incarceration is not the best way to find sobriety,” Hackberry said.

“I’m not like you. There’s still liquor at my house. I’ll drink it if I can get back to it. In a few days, I can go without it.”

“Was Preacher Jack Collins at your house?”

“If that’s his name.”

“Who’d he say he was?”

“He didn’t. I said ‘You’re him.’” “What did he say to that?”

“Nothing. Like it wasn’t important. Or it wasn’t important that a guy like me knew. When I told him the girls he’d killed were out there in the desert pointing at him, he told me to watch my mouth.”

“What else did he say?”

“He’s after the guy named Krill. He thought I might know where he was at.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“That I hid when that fellow was murdered.”

“You listen to me,” Hackberry said. “You think I should feel guilty because I hid from the Chinese soldiers who were trying to kill me? You remember the name of General Patton?”

“No, who is he?”

“He was a famous military leader. He said you don’t win wars by giving your life for your country. You win them by making the other son of a bitch give his life.” Hackberry tried to smile and lift Danny Boy’s spirits, but it did no good. “What else did your visitor say?” he asked.

“He’d be looking you up.”

“What else?”

“Nothing. He threw a glass of rum in my face.”

Pam Tibbs tapped her ring on the steel door in order to direct Danny Boy’s attention to her. “Jack Collins has a way of showing up in people’s lives when they’re unarmed and vulnerable,” she said. “He wants to rob people of their self-respect because he has none for himself. Don’t be his victim.”

“Listen to her,” Hackberry said. “You’re a fine man. You have an illness in you that’s not your fault. One day you’ll wake up and decide you don’t want any more of the old life. That’s when you’ll start getting rid of all the problems that kept you drunk. In the meantime, you’re going to take a shower and put on some fresh jeans and a sport shirt I have in my closet, and then you and I are going to have a steak-and-egg breakfast down at the cafe.”

“I saw the Oriental girls standing in the desert. There was nine of them. They’re waiting for him,” Danny Boy said.

“You saw them when you were drinking?”

“It don’t matter what I was doing. They were there. Collins knew about my visions. He knew what was in them. No, that’s not exactly right. He knows things don’t happen in order, like past, present, and future. He knows things happen all at the same time, all around us, people we cain’t see are still living out their lives right next to us. Not many people know that.”

“Collins is a fraud. Don’t pay attention to what he says,” Hackberry said.

“If he’s a fraud, who’s he pretending to be? You ever know anybody like him?”

Pam Tibbs looked at Hackberry and raised her eyebrows. She took the ring of keys from his hand, unlocked the cell, and swung the door back heavily on its hinges, the bottom scraping the concrete. “Time to hit the shower and get something to eat, Danny,” she said.

By eleven A.M. the sun was bright and hot outside Hackberry’s office window, the blocklike sandstone courthouse on the square stark against a blue sky, the courthouse lawn green and cool-looking under the shade trees. A church group had opened a secondhand sale on the sidewalk in front of the Luna Theater, and people were going in and out of the courthouse and the old bank on the corner much as they had in an era when the town was supported by a viable agrarian economy. It was a good day, the kind when boys used to cut school to go bobber-fishing or tubing down a river. It was not a day when he wanted to deal with the unpleasant realities of his job or the vestiges of his past. But when a black SUV pulled to the curb in front of his office and Temple Dowling got out, followed by three of his men, Hackberry knew exactly how the rest of the morning would go.

There was a class of people who always supported law and order. They believed that police officers and sheriff’s deputies and the law enforcement agencies of the United States government constituted a vast servile army with the same raison d’etre as insurance carriers, tax accountants, medical providers, and gardeners-namely, to take care of problems that busy and productive people shouldn’t be concerned with.