James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“All empires have their dustbins,” Hackberry said. “It’s the place we bury our sins.”

“That’s too deep for me.”

“What do I know?” Hackberry said.

“A lot more than the Bureau wants to concede,” Riser said. “They consider you a pain in the ass. Stay out of the Glass Mountains, my friend.”

Pam drove Hackberry home in the rain. The fields were sodden on either side of the road, the sky black, the long lines of cedar fence posts and barbed wire glistening in the cruiser’s headlights. “He’s going to cool out Collins?” she said.

“I think that was all rhetoric. He’s angry because he has to die. Ethan’s a straight arrow. People like him make a pact with themselves and never violate it.”

“I told you to go fuck yourself earlier.”

“Forget it.”

“No, I meant it. I just shouldn’t have put it that way.”

“I see.”

“Do you?”

“I’m old, Pam. You think it’s honorable for an old man to take advantage of a young woman’s affections? You want to become romantically involved with a man who would use a young and attractive woman, knowing eventually he would be a burden to her?”

“I think age doesn’t have crap to do with any of it. With you, it’s all about pride. You’ve never forgiven yourself for the mistakes of your youth, so you have to create a standard that’s superior to everyone else’s. It’s not a lot different from the bad guys who are always trying to convince themselves of their own humanity.”

“That’s a rotten thing to say.”

“Too bad.”

He could feel his left temple throbbing again, and he knew that in the next few seconds, a sliver of pain as cold and hard as a stalactite would slide through his eye and the muscles of his left cheek. Up ahead, he saw his house suddenly illuminated by a bolt of lightning that struck in the trees behind his office, the same trees where Jack Collins had hidden and trained a laser sight on him. “You don’t have to pull into the drive. Just drop me on the road,” he said.

“You like walking in an electric storm?”

“In this case, I do.”

“Too bad again,” she said.

She drove across a wood bridge that spanned a creek running high with rainwater, the wild roses along the bank trailing in the current; then she turned in to his driveway and stopped at the picket fence that enclosed the front yard. “You think I’m unfair?” she said.

“I don’t think anything,” he said, getting out of the cruiser.

“There’s an umbrella in the backseat.”

“I’ve got my hat,” he said, closing the passenger door.

She reached into the backseat and gathered up the umbrella and stepped out into the rain. She tried to pop it open, but the catch was jammed.

“Get back in the cruiser,” he said.

But she didn’t. She followed him up the flagstones to the gallery. She was wearing a department-issue campaign hat, and the rain was beating on the crown and the brim, rolling in rivulets down her shoulders and shirtfront. “I think I should resign, Hack. I think I should go back to Houston,” she said.

“That’s not going to happen.”

“Who the hell are you to tell me anything?”

“I’m your boss, that’s who.”

“I can’t tell you how bad you piss me off.”

He walked back down the flagstones and took the umbrella from her hand and popped it open above both their heads. He could hear the rain thudding as hard as marbles on the nylon. “You’re the most stubborn woman I have ever met. Why do you act like this?”

“Why do you think?”

“Come in.”

“For what?”

“Just come in.”

He put his arm over her shoulders and walked her up the steps and unlocked the door and held it open for her. The living room was unlit and smelled of the couch and the carpet and the drapes and the wallpaper and the polished hardwood floors; it smelled like a home; it smelled like a fine place to be while lightning flashed on the hillsides and the wind and rain blew against the windowpanes and whipped an unfastened door on the barn and bent the trees and scattered the lawn with leaves and broken flowers. He dropped the umbrella on the rug and touched her face with his fingers, and in seconds felt her against him, her feet standing on top of his boots, her loins and breasts tight against his body, her hair wet against his cheek, her arms clenched around his back, all his personal resolve and his concerns about age and mortality and honor draining like water through the bottom of a paper bag.

“Oh, Hack,” she said. “Oh, Hack, Hack, Hack.”

From his deck Cody Daniels watched the storm move out of the south and seal the sky, trapping the light between a blue-black layer of clouds and the desert floor and mesas that were pink and talc-colored and that made him think of pictures of ancient Phoenician ships he had seen. When the power outage spread across the county, he saw the reflected glow of the town flatten against the clouds and die, a surge of cool air rising from the valley floor into his face. Hailstones clattered on the hardpan and on the deck, dancing in a white haze, and in the smell of ozone and the drop of temperature, he felt as though the world were fresh and clean, as though every bad memory of his life were being washed away, every failure and personal affliction slipping over the edges of the earth.

If only things were that easy.

Cody started up his gas-powered generator and went back in the house to resume the most difficult task in his life-writing a letter to the FBI. He had attempted a half-dozen versions on his computer and had been unhappy with all of them. His language was either stilted and sounded self-serving, or it became so confused it was almost unintelligible. The last attempt was two double-spaced pages long and gave details about his recruitment into a small group of anti-abortion activists in northern Virginia. It wasn’t a bad statement, except it indiscriminately included the names of his fellow travelers, some of whom may have been unaware of the group’s ultimate goal.

He had gone out on the deck without saving the letter on his hard drive, and the power outage had wiped his screen clean. When he reentered the house, the lights burning dimly on the low wattage produced by his generator, he sat down at his desk and picked up a felt-tip pen and addressed an envelope to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C., no zip code. He put his return address in the upper-left-hand corner of the envelope. Then he wrote the following letter on a yellow legal pad:

Dear Sirs,

I am the pitiful son of a bitch who bought the oven timer for the bomb that blew up the abortion clinic outside Baltimore three years back. I thought the bomb would go off in the middle of the night. But that doesn’t help the woman who got her face blown off. I can’t give you the names of any of the other people involved. This letter is about the evil deed done by one son of a bitch and one son of a bitch only, and as I have stated, that son of a bitch is yours truly,

Sincerely,

Rev. Cody Daniels

From outside, he heard the hiss of air brakes and the sound of a tractor-trailer shifting down. He looked through the window and, in the rain-streaked fading of the twilight, saw an eighteen-wheeler parked by the Cowboy Chapel, its high beams on, the engine still hammering, and what appeared to be a lead car parked in front of it. Cody had seen the lead car before, without the clamped-on brace of yellow lights on the roof; it belonged to a musician, a man who stopped by on occasion at the Cowboy Chapel and drank coffee and ate doughnuts in the hospitality room Cody left open for truckers or travelers on their way to the Big Bend country.

Cody draped a slicker over his head and went down the wood steps to the coffee room in the back of the chapel. “Getting out of the storm?” he said to a small tight-bodied man sitting at the long table in the middle of the room, a chrome-plated guitar across his thighs.