James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

But something had just happened that neither she nor her adversaries could have anticipated. Her upper body was soaking wet, and the man on her left let his grip slip for just a second. When he tried to reposition his hands, she jerked free of him and fell backward to the floor, sucking air as raggedly into her windpipe as she would a razor blade.

The tall man reached down and grabbed the front of her shirt and pulled her to her feet. She could feel the sourness of his breath on her face. “Now, you listen,” he said. “You’re making us waste time that we don’t have. You’re vain from your hairline to the bottoms of your feet, and you know it. You’ve turned your pride into a religion and convinced a bunch of ignorant peons you’re a Catholic saint. Be assured, if you want to be a martyr, we’ll arrange that. But in the meantime, you’re going to tell us where Barnum is or prove to us you’re as unknowledgeable as you claim. If you don’t know where he is, give us the name of somebody who does. That will get you off the hook, that and nothing else.

“If you doubt me, tell me how you feel one hour from now, after I let my associates take you back in the hills. Maybe you saw ugly things in the Orient, the kinds of things my associates are capable of doing, but you saw them, they didn’t happen to you. If they had happened to you, you wouldn’t be here today. You would be either dead or in an asylum, unable to deal with your own memories of what was done to you. My associates have insatiable appetites. When they start in on you, you will renounce everything you ever believed in just to make them stop what they’re doing for only one minute. You’ll give up your lover, your family, your religion. I’ve seen them at work. I don’t judge them for what they do. They are only satisfying the desires that to them are natural. But I never want to witness human behavior like that again. You don’t know how kind I have been to you, Ms. Ling.

“There’s another notion I want to dispel here. People in your situation convince themselves that a miracle is going to happen, that their pain will be taken away, that angels will protect them in their last agonizing moments. But it doesn’t work that way. No God will help you, no plastic Madonna, no hallelujah choir will arrive singing the praises of Anton Ling. You’ll die a miserable death, and no one will ever know where you’re buried. Tell me what you want to do.”

Her hair formed a tangled skein in front of her eyes and dripped water and blood on her face and shirtfront. Her eyes were crossed from shock and trauma, her bare feet slippery on the wet floor, her pajamas sticking like wet Kleenex to her skin. Her chest was still laboring with shortage of breath, her heart swollen as big and hard as a cantaloupe. “I know nothing,” she said.

“Then enjoy your time in hell, bitch.”

His hand reached out and settled almost lovingly on the nape of her neck. Then she twisted her body and back-kicked him with more strength and force than she thought she had.

He wasn’t ready for it, and his upper body jacked forward with the blow, both of his hands grabbing his genitalia, a cry rising involuntarily from his throat. The man to her right tried to grab her, but she ripped her elbow into his rib cage, then kicked the tall man again, this time in the face. The third man grabbed her pajama top, tearing it down the back, but she pulled loose from him and got past the tall man and the man who had been holding her left arm. The inside of her head was roaring with noise, her hair matted with blood, her feet slipping on the floor. She felt a hand grab her neck, then fingers trying to find purchase inside the religious chain she wore.

The drawer holding the collection of tools and wire and duct tape was half open. She got her hand inside the drawer and picked up a screwdriver, a short one with a thick stub of a handle and a wide blade and perhaps a two-inch shank. She whirled and plunged it into the face of the man whose hand was tangled in her chain. The blade pierced the fabric of his mask right below his left eye, the shank sinking all the way to the handle, the wood and fabric pressing into the wound. The man screamed once, then touched the screwdriver’s handle, his hand trembling, and began screaming again, this time without stop.

“You shut up! You eat your pain and shut your mouth!” the tall man said.

“I’m blind!”

“No, you’re not. You’re in shock. Shut your fucking mouth,” the tall man said. Then he whirled around. “Get her!”

Anton Ling ran through the enclosed back porch and crashed through the screen into the yard, falling once, getting up, then plunging across the yard toward the barn, where her pickup was parked with the keys in the ashtray.

That was when another hooded man, even bigger than the others, a man whose breath smelled like snuff and spearmint, picked her up in the air, crushing her against his chest with his huge arms. “What do we got here?” he said, his lips brushing against her cheek through his mask. “A flopping goldfish, I’d say. We better slow you down a little bit. How about some hair of the dog that bit you?”

He carried her kicking to the horse tank by the windmill, his big hands and wrists notched into her rib cage.

Cody Daniels had turned the truck around in the middle of the road, his stomach churning with fear, his sweat as cold as ice water. He slowly depressed the accelerator, his right hand trembling on the gearshift, each jolt in a chuckhole like a piece of glass in his entrails. He wiped the sweat out of his eyes with his sleeve and swerved wildly around the pools of water in the road, wishing he would break an axle or tip off the shoulder’s edge into a gulley. He prayed for the dawn to come, for lightning to strike Anton Ling’s house and set it ablaze, for the FBI to descend from the sky in a helicopter. He had never been this afraid in his entire life. But why? Just because an oversize diesel-powered truck had come grinding down a hill? It was irrational.

No, it was not. Cody knew he had a talent, and it was not one to be proud of. He was con-wise. He knew how to read iniquity in others because it resided in him. He also had a tuning fork that vibrated when he was around dangerous people. And he understood that cruelty was not an occasional vice. If it existed in an individual, it was systemic and pervasive and always looking for a new prospect. Cody knew the oversize truck was coming for Anton Ling, and inside it were men in the employ of Temple Dowling, or maybe even Dowling himself.

The lessons he had learned in prison were simple. There were two kinds of people in the slams: screwups like himself and those who had not only gone over to the dark side but enjoyed being there and had no plans to return. The joke was the latter category was not confined to convicts. The worst people he had ever known had worn uniforms or used ballpoint pens to do damage that no burglar could ever equal. How did you recognize the Temple Dowlings of the world? That one was easy. They always mocked. It was in their voice, their use of difficult words, the way they twisted whatever came out of your mouth. They stole other people’s dignity and made them resent themselves. He and his men had invaded Cody’s home and treated him as though he were sewage, then had driven away as indifferently as if they had run over a bug.

Where did that leave him in the mix, a man who had helped blind and disfigure a nurse in an abortion clinic? He didn’t like to think about that. His one serious fall was on a forgery charge. He had never deliberately hurt anyone. Why had he gotten mixed up with the people who had set off the bomb at the clinic? That one, too, was easy. They knew a useful loser when they saw one.

Maybe what was waiting for him under the thunderclouds up ahead wasn’t a totally undesirable fate. Maybe this was as good a place as any to cash in. He had spent most of his life waking up with a headful of spiders, then spending the rest of the day pretending they weren’t there. He had shot over the heads of Mexicans coming out of the desert, scaring the hell out of women with infants hanging in slings from their chests and backs. He had painted the American flag on the cliff above his house but had never been in the service. He was a religious hypocrite and a peckerwood bully. His mother took off with a trucker when he was three, and his father, whom he had loved, had placed him in an orphanage when he was nine, promising to return after working a pipeline job in Alaska. But he never saw his father again or heard what happened to him, if anything. Was everything a conspiracy against Cody Daniels? Or wasn’t it more probable that he was simply unwanted and, worse, unwanted for a legitimate reason? Gravity sucked, and shit always slid down the pipe, not up.