James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

Hackberry put his revolver in the holster and raised his left hand, palm out, at the man with the baton. “My business is with Mr. Dowling and his associates. Mix in it and you’ll take their weight,” he said.

“?Que dice?” the man with the baton asked one of the girls who had stepped out of the bedroom.

“No se,” she replied.

“ Esta bien. It’s all right, Hector,” Dowling said to the Mexican with the baton.

“One of my deputies was kidnapped out of a cantina where your hired piece of shit with the bloody mouth was shooting pool,” Hackberry said. “He denies seeing my deputy, even though my deputy described your man to me over his cell phone.”

“Why would one of my employees have any interest in your deputy, Sheriff Holland?” Dowling said. “Are you down here about Jack Collins?”

“No.”

“You’re not?” Dowling said, looking confused.

“Why would I be looking for Collins on a street full of Mexican cathouses?”

“He’s everywhere,” Dowling replied.

“You’ve become a believer?”

“I haven’t done anything to this man. I didn’t say anything about him.”

The register in Dowling’s voice had changed, the vowels and consonants not quite holding together. The skin twitched under one eye as though a fly had settled on his skin. Hackberry wondered how many young girls had paid the price for the fear that Dowling had probably spent a lifetime trying to hide from others.

“Have you had an encounter with Collins?” Hackberry asked.

“I thought you knew.”

“Knew what?”

“I put a reward on him. He killed two of my men. That’s why I put the reward on him.”

“You put a reward on Jack Collins?”

“For arrest and conviction. That’s all the statement says. I didn’t tell people to go out and kill him. It’s what any employer or family member would do if their employees or family members were murdered.”

“Have you seen him?”

“Last night there was a man outside my motel. My men tried to catch him, but he disappeared. He was wearing a dirty hat of some kind. He was in the shadows on the other side of the parking lot, under a sodium lamp. What do you call that kind of hat? A panama? It’s made of straw and has a brim that dips down over the eyes.”

Dowling seemed to wait, hoping that Hackberry would dispel his fears and tell him that the shadowy figure, for whatever reason, could not have been Collins.

“That sounds like Jack, all right,” Hackberry said. “Congratulations, you’ve brought down perhaps the most dangerous man in America on your head. Jack’s a real cutup. I’ve been trying to punch his ticket for over a year. Maybe you’ll be more successful. You guys have any armored vests in your vehicles?”

“You’re enjoying this.”

“I guess it beats hanging in an upscale cathouse that provides services for pedophiles.”

“Don’t you dare talk to me like that.”

“I was a whoremonger, Mr. Dowling. When I see a man like you, I want to shoot myself. I don’t know if some of the girls I slept with were under the legal age or not. Most of the times I went across the river, I was too drunk to know what universe I was in.”

Dowling was not listening. “Did you see anyone down here who looked like him?”

“Like Jack?”

“Who do you think I’m talking about, you idiot?” Dowling said.

“He paid a visit to my ranch just yesterday. He put a laser sight on me, but he didn’t pull the trigger. That tells me he has something else planned for me. In your case, I doubt you’ll see that red dot crawl across your skin. You’ll see his Thompson for a few seconds, then you won’t see anything at all.”

A hulking Mexican woman appeared out of the back office and placed a highball in Temple Dowling’s hand. Dowling looked at the drink as though he couldn’t understand how it had gotten there. The two girls he had been in bed with were whispering under their breath, one translating to the other the conversation of the gringos, both of them trying not to giggle. “Senor, este es muy malo para los negocios,” the Mexican woman said.

Her words of concern about her business realities had no effect on Temple Dowling. Instead, his eyes remained fixed on Hackberry’s, a lump of fear sliding down his throat so audibly that his lips parted and his mouth involuntarily made a clicking sound.

“I don’t have any authority down here, Mr. Dowling,” Hackberry said. “But when I get back to Texas, I’ll make sure the appropriate agencies hear about your sexual inclinations.”

“You’re a bastard, Holland.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Hackberry replied.

Enclosure of any kind had always been R. C. Bevins’s worst fear, the kind that is so great you never willingly confront it or discuss it with anyone else. Inside the darkness of the car trunk, while the gas-guzzler continued down a dirt or rock road of some kind, he tried to work his way forward and push his knees against the hatch and spring the lock. His wrists were taped together behind him, and the tape was wound around his ankles, forcing him to lie on his side, so he could not find purchase against a hard surface. There was a hole in the muffler, the engine’s deep-throated sound rising into the trunk, the smell of the exhaust mixing with the dirty odor of the spare tire that R.C. could feel against the back of his head. He was finally able to touch the hatch with the points of his boots, but he was not able to exert any viable degree of pressure. The man named Negrito had done his job well. He had probably done it well many times before, R.C. thought.

He felt the car dip off the edge of the road and bounce heavily down an incline until it was on a flat surface again. Then he heard scrub brush raking thickly under the car frame, small rocks pinging under the fenders. R.C. strained against the duct tape, trying to stretch it to the point where he could slip one wrist free or work it over a boot heel so he could extend his legs and tear the tape off his wrists, even if he had to strip the skin from his thumbs.

Negrito was playing the radio, listening to a Mexican station that blared with horns and mariachi guitars. The car veered sharply, thudding off what was probably an embankment into a dry riverbed, jolting R.C. into the air, knocking his head against the spare tire. The gas-guzzler rumbled over rocks and tangles of brush while tree branches scraped against the fenders and doors and oil smoke from the broken muffler leaked through the trunk floor. The car swerved again, fishtailing this time, and came to a stop that caused the car body to rock on the springs.

Negrito waited until the song had ended, then turned off the radio and cut the engine. The night was completely silent except for the ticking of the heat in the car’s metal. The driver’s door opened with a screech like fingernails on a blackboard, and R.C. heard the tinkling of Negrito’s roweled spurs approaching the trunk.

When Negrito popped the hatch, the sweet, cool, nocturnal smell of the desert flooded the inside of the trunk. But R.C.’s sense of relief was short-lived. Negrito’s outline was silhouetted against the stars, a. 45 auto strapped on his hip. “You okay, Tejano boy?” he asked. “I was worried about the way you was bouncing around in there. Here, I’m gonna get you out and explain our situation.”

Negrito grabbed R.C. by one arm and the back of his belt and slid him over the bumper, letting him drop to the ground. “See, my friend Krill has got his head up his ass about a lot of things and don’t know what’s good for himself and others lots of the time. So I got to make decisions for him.”

For no apparent reason, Negrito stopped talking and looked over his shoulder. From where he lay on the ground, R.C. could see that the car had ended up in a sandy wash, like a cul-de-sac, at the bottom of a giant hill that looked compacted of waste from a foundry. Negrito was staring into the darkness, turning his head from one side to the other. He picked up a rock and flung it up the incline and listened to it clatter back through the thinly spaced mesquite. “Maybe we got a cougar up there,” he said to R.C. “But more likely a coyote. They come around, I’m gonna shoot them. They eat carrion and carry diseases. Like some of my girlfriends in Durango. What you think of that?”