James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“Collins is a religious head case. He seems to have obsessions with women in the Bible,” the tall man said. “You might fit the bill. What’s your opinion on that?”

Don’t let him know you’re afraid, a voice inside her said. “I think you’re an idiot.”

The short man standing behind the others peered through the corner of the window shade into the yard. He wore heavy boots that looked like they had elevated soles and heels. She saw his head tilt upward and guessed that he was checking for the first glow of dawn beyond the ridgeline. Then she realized that the tall man was watching the man at the window shade. The tall man was not in charge. He was waiting on the man at the window to tell him what to do.

The man at the window did not speak but made a rotating motion with his index finger, as though saying either “continue” or “wrap it up.”

But which?

The tall man went to the closet and threw a robe on Anton Ling’s bed. “Put it on,” he said.

“What for?” she asked.

“Certain things have to be done. Don’t make them harder than they already are.”

“Who do you work for?”

“The country. The people who want it to remain free. You think protecting a traitor like Noie Barnum is a noble act?”

“I won’t put a robe on. I won’t move. I have no control over what you’re about to do. But I won’t cooperate with it.”

The tall man leaned down and took her wrist in his hand. His fingers went easily all the way around it, as though he were compressing a stick in his palm. “Get up.”

“No.”

“You’re making this personal, Ms. Ling. It’s unwise.”

“Don’t use my name. I don’t know you and have no intention of knowing you. Don’t you dare address me as though you know me.”

“I heard you were arrogant, a Mandarin princess or something.” He jerked her up from the bed and knotted her hair in his fist, twisting it hard, pulling her head back until her mouth fell open. “We used to call this cooling out a gook. Is that what you want? Tell me. Tell me now.” He twisted her hair tighter. “I don’t like to do this. This is all on you. I can make it worse and worse and worse, to the point I start to enjoy it. Don’t make me do that.”

When he released her hair so she could speak, she gathered all the saliva in her mouth and spat it full in his face. Then he hit her so hard with his fist that two picture frames fell to the floor when she crashed against the wall. Two of the other men picked her up and shoved her toward the doorway. She thought she heard the sound of water running in the kitchen sink.

Cody Daniels kept his truck pointed south, slamming over the ruts, water splashing up on the hood and across the windshield. He had his radio tuned full-blast to an English-language station that broadcast from across the border to avoid FCC regulations, its signal reaching all the way to Canada. Twenty-four hours a day, it provided a steady stream of country music, evangelical harangues that left the preacher gasping into the microphone, and promotions for baby chicks, tulip bulbs, bat guano, aphrodisiacs, glow-in-the-dark tablecloths painted with the Last Supper, and miracle photographs of Jesus. Late at night it was the refuge for the insomniac and the ufologist and the sexually driven and those who loved the prospect of the Rapture. But right now, for Cody Daniels, it was a source of maximum electronic noise that he hoped would pound the name of Anton Ling out of his head.

He was pastor of the Cowboy Chapel, not the overseer for Asian females in Southwest Texas. Why didn’t she go back where she came from? She had told him to get lost. All right, that’s what he was doing. Live and let live. Besides, maybe the truck with the extended cab wasn’t going to Anton Ling’s. Maybe it was the Border Patrol rounding up stray wets. The wets traveled by night. Wasn’t it reasonable for Cody to at least conclude the oversize pickup was on a government mission?

Except the Border Patrol usually operated by the numbers and didn’t use pickup trucks to round up wets or drive down hillsides through private property in the dark.

Why did his mind always set traps for him? His own thoughts were more intelligent and wily than he was. Again and again, his thoughts knew how to corner and bait him, as though a separate personality were constantly probing at him with a sharp stick.

Without thinking, without planning, as though his motor control had disconnected itself from his instincts, he removed his foot from the accelerator and depressed the brake pedal. He felt the truck slowing, the vibration in the frame diminishing as though of its own accord. Then the truck stopped as rigidly as a stone in the road. He switched off the radio and listened to the windshield wipers beating in the silence. He opened his cell phone, praying that this time the screen would show at least one bar.

No service.

Where was the sheriff? Where was the female deputy who had thrown him in the can? This was their job, not his. Who had dumped all this responsibility on Cody Daniels? He looked through the windshield at a long white streak of lightning that leaped from the hills into the clouds.

You? he asked.

No, God had more to do than concern Himself with the likes of Cody Daniels.

How do you know? a voice said, either inside or outside his head.

Cody put his truck into reverse and turned around in the middle of the road, wondering if the tattoo BORN TO LOSE that he had removed from his skin should have read BORN TO BE STUPID.

Two men held Anton Ling’s arms while a third plunged her head into the water brimming over the sides of the sink. She clenched her mouth and held her breath and tried to twist away from the hand that pushed her head deeper into the water. She kicked sideways with her feet and pushed against the cabinets with her knees. All she accomplished was to drain herself of the energy and oxygen she needed to survive. After what was surely a minute, her lungs were bursting and air was bubbling out of her mouth and she knew she was only seconds away from both swallowing water and breathing it through her nostrils. Then the hand went away from the back of her neck and she reared her head above the level of the sink, gasping for air.

“Noie Barnum must know other people around here besides you. Who would he contact?” the tall man said. His gloved right hand and sleeve were dark with water. She realized it was he who had held her head down in the sink.

“He’s a Quaker. Other Quakers.”

“Where do they live?”

“There’re none around here.”

“Wrong answer.”

“He’s with Collins.”

“Where’s Collins?”

“I don’t know anything about Collins.”

“Hold her arms tighter,” the tall man said.

“No, wait,” she said.

“Your time is running out, Ms. Ling.”

“Noie has no ties here. He is wherever Collins is. How could I know where Collins is when the FBI doesn’t? You’re making me do the impossible. I can’t prove to you what I don’t know.”

“I got to admit I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes. But you created this situation, not us. This is the way it stands: You went down the first time for exactly one minute and ten seconds. The second time you’re going down for two minutes and twenty seconds. Think you can hold your breath for two minutes and twenty seconds?”

“I can’t.”

“Then you’re going to die. Maybe you’ll have a heart attack before you drown, so it won’t be that bad. I’ll let you fill up with air first. Nod when you’re ready.”

“My father flew with the original Flying Tigers. He was a friend of Claire Chennault.”

“Who cares?”

“If he were here, you’d have to hide.”

He plunged her face into the water and leaned his weight heavily on his hand, driving her forehead to the bottom of the sink, his gloved fingers spreading like banana peels on the back of her head. Her skin broke against the porcelain, and blood curled around her face and rose in a smoky string to the surface. The more she struggled, the weaker she became. Her lungs burned as though someone had poured acid in them. She dug her knees into the cabinets and pushed herself backward with all her remaining strength. Then she realized that the incendiary raids she had lived through as a child, the pancake air crash she had survived on a Laotian airstrip, the ordeal she had endured at the hands of Chinese Communists, had been illusions, flirtations with a chimera who was a poseur. Death did not appear with a broad flapping of leathery wings; death came in the form of a stoppered silvery-green drain hole at the bottom of a flooded sink, while three men snapped her sinew and bones with their hands.