James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

There was no lighting outside the building, which helped preserve the anonymity of the patrons. The night air smelled of flowers and warm sand and water that had pooled and gone stagnant and was auraed by clouds of gnats. Pam Tibbs pulled the Cherokee to a stop and cut the ignition. “How do you want to play it?” she said.

“We wear our badges and carry our weapons in full view,” Hackberry replied.

“I’ve seen that purple SUV before.”

“Where?”

“When I broke both of its taillights in front of the cafe.”

“ That’s Temple Dowling’s vehicle?” he said.

“It was when I broke his taillights. You’re surprised Dowling would be here?”

“Nothing about Dowling surprises me. But I thought the man with the hole in his face might have been working for the Russian, this guy Sholokoff.”

“Let’s find out.”

“You feel comfortable going in there?” he asked.

She rested her hands on top of the steering wheel. Even in the starlight, he could see the shine on her upper arms and the sunburned tips of her hair. He could also see the pity in her eyes. “It’s not me who’s uncomfortable,” she said. “When are you going to accept your own goodness and the fact that you’ve paid for what you might have done wrong when you were young?”

“When the mermaids come back to Texas,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“It was a private joke between my father and me. Ready to make life interesting for the shitbags?”

“Always,” she replied.

They got out on either side of the Cherokee and went inside the brothel. The living room was furnished with a red velvet settee and deep leather chairs and a cloth sofa and a coffee table set with wineglasses and dark bottles of burgundy and a bottle of Scotch and a bucket of ice. There was also a bowl of guacamole and a bowl of tortilla chips on the table. The only light came from two floor lamps with shades that were hung with pink tassels. Two mustached men Hackberry had seen before sat on the sofa, dipping chips into the guacamole and drinking Scotch on the rocks. A Mexican girl not over fifteen, in a spangled blue dress, was sitting on the settee. She wore white moccasins on her feet and purple glass beads around her neck. Her skin was dusky, her nose beaked, her Indian eyes as elongated as an Asian’s. Her lipstick and rouge could not disguise the melancholy in her face.

“How are you gentlemen tonight?” Hackberry said.

“Pretty good, Sheriff. I didn’t think you’d remember us,” one of them said.

“You came to my office with Mr. Dowling,” Hackberry said.

“Yes, sir, that’s us. What might you be doing here?” the man said.

“Not a lot. Just driving around the countryside trying to find a deputy of mine who got himself kidnapped. Do you boys know anything about a kidnapped deputy sheriff by the name of R. C. Bevins?”

The two men looked at each other, then back at Hackberry. “No, sir,” the first man said.

Hackberry could hear the clatter of pool balls in a side room. “Is that more of your crowd in there?”

“Yes, sir, they’re with us. We’d help you if we could, Sheriff, but I think you’ve come to the wrong place.”

“This is the wrong place, all right, but for reasons you evidently haven’t thought about,” Hackberry said.

“Sir?”

“How old do you reckon that girl is?”

“We don’t make the rules down here. Nobody does,” the second man said.

Both men were wearing skintight jeans and snap-button shirts and belts with big silver-and-gold-plated buckles, and they both had the styled haircuts and carefully maintained unshaved look of male models in a liquor ad or on a calendar aimed at homosexuals rather than at women. The second man had a deeper and more regional voice than the first, and a formless blue tattoo, like a smear, inside the whiskers that grew on his throat.

“Were any of y’all in a cantina earlier?” Hackberry said.

“Not us,” the second man said.

“We’re looking for a guy with a hole in his face. You know anybody like that?”

“No, sir,” the first man said.

“I see,” Hackberry said. “Is Mr. Dowling in back?”

Neither of the men spoke. The second man glanced at Pam Tibbs, then filled a taco chip with guacamole and stuck it in his mouth and chewed it while he took her inventory.

“What’s in back?” Hackberry said.

“The whole menu,” the first man said.

“You two guys go outside,” Hackberry said.

“You’ve got no jurisdiction down here, Sheriff,” the second man said.

“Who cares? I’m bigger than you are. You guys want trouble? I’ll give it to you in spades.”

The two men looked at each other again, then got up from the settee. “We’ll honor your request, Sheriff Holland. We do that out of respect for you and our employer,” the first man said.

“No, you’ll do it because if I catch one of y’all putting your hands on this little girl, I’m going to kick your sorry asses all the way to Mexico City. And if I find out you’re involved with the kidnapping of my deputy, I’m going to blow your fucking heads off.”

Hackberry did not wait for their reaction. He walked into the side room, where two men were shooting pool inside a cone of light created by a tin-shaded bulb that hung from the ceiling. The pool table was covered with red velvet, the pockets hung with netted black leather, the mahogany trim polished to a soft glow. “You!” he said, pointing at the man about to break the rack. “Yeah, you! Put your cue down and look at me.”

“?Hay algun problema?”

“Yeah, you. Remember me?”

“Yes, sir, you’re the sheriff.”

“You were shooting pool at a cantina tonight.”

“Maybe I was. Maybe not. So what?” There was a deep indentation below the pool shooter’s left eye, as though a piece of the cheekbone had been removed and the skin under the eye had collapsed and formed a hole a person could insert his thumb in. But the injury was an old one. It was the same wound that Hackberry had seen in the face of one of Temple Dowling’s employees when they came to his office.

“There’s no maybe in this,” Hackberry said. “You were in the Cantina del Cazador. You were shooting pool there. My deputy saw you in there and described you to me. In very few words, you need to tell me what happened to my deputy.”

The pool shooter’s shirt was open on his chest, exposing his chest hair and nipples and a gold chain he wore around his neck. “?Quien sabe, hombre?”

“You sabes, bud. Or you’d better.”

“I was in the cantina. I didn’t see anybody who looked like a deputy sheriff. What else can I say?”

“Why’d your friends out front say you weren’t there?”

“Maybe I didn’t tell them.”

“I can see you’re a man who likes to keep it simple. So how about this?” Hackberry said. He pulled his white-handled blue-black. 45 revolver from his holster and swung it backhanded across the pool shooter’s mouth. The blow made a clacking sound when the heavy cylinder and frame and the barrel broke the man’s lips against his teeth. The pool shooter dropped his cue and cupped both of his hands to his mouth, his face trembling with shock behind his fingers. He removed his hands and looked at the blood on them, then spat a tooth into his palm.

“ Chingado, what the fuck, man!” he said.

“You sabes now?”

“What’s going on here?” said a voice behind Hackberry.

Temple Dowling had come out of a bedroom down the hall. He wore slippers and a towel robe cinched around his waist. Lipstick was smeared on his robe, and his exposed chest looked pink and blubbery and his breasts effeminate. Two young girls were leaning out of the doorway behind him, trying to see what was happening at the front of the house. Hackberry could see a large man in a long-sleeve white cotton shirt and bradded jeans coming out of an office in back, a wood baton gripped in one hand.