James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“Don’t come into this county again.”

“I come through here to deliver the animals to your game ranches.”

“You need to take a vacation, Dennis. Maybe go out into the desert for a while. Here, I have some money for you. I’ll call you when it’s time to come back to work.”

Sholokoff began walking down the aisle toward the front of the church.

“I did what you wanted,” Rector said. “You shouldn’t treat me like this. I ain’t somebody you can just use and throw away.”

Sholokoff continued out the front of the church into the night without replying or looking back. Dennis Rector pinched his mouth with his hand and stared at Cody Daniels and the blood running from his feet and hands and wrists and down his forearms. He stuck Sholokoff’s wad of bills into his jeans. “I’m gonna get the gas can out of my car,” he said. “Did you guys hear me? Don’t just stand there. Take care of business.”

None of the other men spoke or would look directly at him.

Alocal rancher flying over the church saw the flames burst through the roof of the Cowboy Chapel and reported the fire before Anton Ling did. By the time she had headed up the road to the church, the volunteer fire department truck and Pam Tibbs and Hackberry Holland and another cruiser driven by R. C. Bevins were right behind her.

“Jesus Christ, look at it,” Pam said.

The building was etched with flames that seemed to have gone up all four walls almost simultaneously and had been fed by cold air blowing through all the windows, which probably had been systematically smashed out. The fire had gathered under the ceiling and punched a hole through the roof that was now streaming sparks and curds of black smoke into the wind.

“Somebody used an accelerant,” Hackberry said.

“You think it’s the same guys who broke into Anton Ling’s house?”

“Or Temple Dowling’s people.”

“You believe in karma? I mean for a guy like Cody Daniels.”

“You mean is this happening to him because he was mixed up in the bombing of an abortion clinic? No, I don’t believe in karma, at least not that kind.”

“I thought maybe you did,” Pam said.

“Who gets the rougher deal in life? Beggars on the streets of Calcutta or international-arms merchants?”

Pam’s attention was no longer focused on their conversation. “Hack, Anton Ling is getting out of her truck with a fire extinguisher.”

Hackberry saw Anton Ling run from her truck directly through the front door of the church, a ropy cloud of blue-black smoke funneling from under the top of the doorframe. Pam braked the cruiser behind the pickup, and she and Hackberry and R. C. Bevins and two volunteer firemen ran up the steps behind Anton Ling.

When Hackberry went inside the church, the intensity of the heat was like someone kicking open the door on a blast furnace. The walls were blackening and starting to buckle where they were not already burning, the sap in the cathedral beams igniting and dripping in flaming beads onto the pews below. Hackberry could hardly breathe in the smoke. Anton Ling went down the main aisle toward the stage, the fire extinguisher raised in front of her. Through the smoke, Hackberry could see a man crucified on a large wooden cross at the rear of the stage, his face and skin and bloodied feet lit by stage curtains that had turned into candles.

Hackberry caught up with Anton Ling, his arm raised in front of his face to protect his eyes from the heat. “Give it to me,” he said.

“Take your hand off me,” she said.

“Your dress is on fire, for God’s sake,” he said.

He tore the fire extinguisher from her hands and pulled the pin from the release lever and sprayed foam on her clothing. Then he mounted the stairs at the foot of the stage, the heat blistering his skin and cooking his head even though he was wearing his Stetson. He sprayed the area around the man on the cross while the volunteer firemen, all of them wearing ventilators, sprayed the walls with their backpacks and other firemen pulling a hose came through the front door and horse-tailed the ceiling with a pressurized jet of water pumped from the truck.

“Let’s get the cross down on the stage and carry it through the door,” Hackberry said. “He’s going to die in this smoke.”

But when Hackberry grabbed the shaft of the cross, he recoiled from the heat in the wood.

“Sheriff?” R.C. said.

“What?”

“He’s gone.”

“No, the wounds aren’t mortal.”

“Look above his rib cage. Somebody wanted to make sure he was dead. Somebody shot nails into his heart,” R.C. said.

The flashlights of the firemen jittered and cut angles through the darkness and smoke, the rain spinning down through the hole in the ceiling. “Nobody from around here could do something like this,” one of the firemen said.

“Not a chance, huh?” Hackberry said.

“No, this kind of thing don’t happen here,” the fireman said. “It took somebody doped out of his mind to do this. Like some of those smugglers coming through Miss Ling’s place every night.”

“Shut up,” Anton Ling said.

“If they didn’t do it, who did? ’Cause it wasn’t nobody from around here,” the fireman said.

“Give us a hand on this, bud. We need to get Reverend Daniels off these nails and onto a gurney. You with me on that?” Hackberry said to the fireman.

Outside, fifteen minutes later, Hackberry watched two paramedics zip a black body bag over Cody Daniels’s face. The coroner, Darl Wingate, was standing two feet away. The rain had almost quit, and Darl was smoking a cigarette in a holder, his face thoughtful, his smoke mixing in the mist blowing up from the valley.

“How do you read it?” Hackberry said.

“If it’s any consolation, the victim was probably dead when the nails were fired into his rib cage. Death probably occurred from cardiac arrest. The main reason crucifixion was practiced throughout the ancient world was that it was not only painful and humiliating but the tendons would tighten across the lungs and slowly asphyxiate the victim. The only way he could prolong his life was to lift himself on the nails that had been driven through his feet or ankles. Of course, this caused him to increase his own torment a hundredfold. It would be hard to invent a more agonizing death.”

“I’d like to believe this poor devil didn’t go through all that, that he died early,” Hackberry said.

“Maybe that’s the way it went down, Hack,” Darl said, his eyes averted. “Did you know I got a degree in psychology before I went to med school?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I wanted to be a forensic psychologist. Know why I went into medicine instead?”

“No, I don’t,” Hackberry said, his attention starting to wander.

“Because I don’t like to put myself into the minds of people who do things like this. I don’t believe this was done by a group. I think it was ordered by one guy and a bunch of other guys did what they were told,” Darl said.

“Go on.”

“The guy behind this feels compelled to smear his shit on a wall.”

“Are you thinking about Krill?”

“No. The perp on this one has a hard-on about religion.”

“How about Temple Dowling?”

“Stop it. You don’t believe that yourself.”

“Why not?”

“Dowling is inside the system. He’s not a criminal.”

“That’s what you think.”

“No, the problem is the way you think, Hack. You’d rather turn the key on a slumlord than a guy who boosts banks. You’ve also got a grudge against Dowling’s father.”

“Say that again about religion.”

“I have to give you an audiovisual presentation? We’re talking about a murder inside a church, on a cross. It was done by a believer.”