James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“A believer?”

“Yeah, and he’s really pissed.”

“How about Jack Collins?”

“Collins is a messianic killer, not a sadist.”

“You should have been a cop, Darl.”

“That’s what I did in the army. It sucked then and sucks now.”

“Why?”

“Because arresting these bastards is a waste of time,” Darl said.

Hackberry walked toward his cruiser, where Pam and R.C. were waiting. The hair was singed on the backs of his arms, and the side of his face was streaked with soot. The churchyard was filled with emergency vehicles, the red and blue and white flashers pulsing in the mist.

“Wrap it up here,” he said to Pam.

“You tried to save him, Hack. When you went inside, you didn’t know if the roof was coming down or not,” she said.

“Call Ethan Riser.”

“Riser is no help,” she said.

“She’s right, Sheriff. Them FBI people wouldn’t take time to spit in our mouths if we were dying of thirst,” R.C. said.

Hackberry opened his cell phone and found Riser’s number and punched it in, then walked off into the darkness and waited for the call to go to voice mail. Surprisingly, the agent picked up.

“Ethan?” Hack said.

“Yeah, who’d you expect?”

Hackberry told him what had happened. “I need everything you can get me on Josef Sholokoff. I need it by noon tomorrow.”

“Can’t do it, partner.”

“Cut this crap out, Ethan. I’m not going to put up with it.”

“There’re probably fifty agents in half a dozen agencies trying to shut down this guy. If you screw things up for the government, they’re going to drop a brick shithouse on your head.”

“Where are you?”

“In the Glass Mountains.”

“Who’s with you?”

“A friend or two.”

“I think you’re trying to take on Collins by yourself.”

“Collins is long overdue for retirement.”

“You don’t know him. I do. Let me help you.”

“I wish you’d been with me when we had bin Laden’s family on the tarmac. But this one is all mine,” Riser said.

“That’s a dumb way to think.”

“Did you ever hear of this black boxer who went up against an Australian who was called ‘the thinking man’s fighter’? The black guy scrambled his eggs. When a newsman asked how he did it, the black guy said, ‘While he was thinking, I was hitting him.’”

“Don’t hang up.”

“See you around, Hack. I’ve been wrong about almost everything in my life. Don’t make my mistakes.”

Early the next morning, as Jack Collins listened to Noie Barnum talk at the breakfast table in the back of the cabin, he wondered if Noie suffered from a thinking disorder.

“So repeat that for me, will you? You met the hikers on the trail and you did what?” Jack said.

“I wanted to try out that walking cane you gave me, and I made it down the hill just fine and along the edge of the creek out to the cottonwoods on the flat. That’s when my breath gave out and I had to sit down on a big rock and I saw the hikers. They were a very nice couple.”

“I expect they were. But what was that about the Instamatic?”

“At least I think it was an Instamatic. It was one of those cheap cameras tourists buy. They said they belonged to a bird-watching club and were taking pictures of birds along the hiking trail. They asked me to take a snapshot of them in front of the cottonwoods. It was right at sunset, and the wind was blowing and the leaves were flying in the air, and the sky was red all the way across the horizon. So I snapped a shot, and then they asked if they could take my picture, too.”

“But you’ve left something out of the repeat, Noie.”

“What’s that?”

“The first time around, you mentioned this fellow’s line of work.”

“He said he was a Parks and Wildlife man. He didn’t look to be over twenty-five, though. He said he and his wife were on their honeymoon. She had this warm glow in her face. They put me in mind of some folks I know back home.”

“And where do they live?”

“He said Austin. I think. Yeah, that was it. Austin.”

“Austin. That’s interesting.”

Jack got up from the table and lifted a coffeepot off the woodstove with a dishrag and poured into his cup. The coffee was scalding, but he drank it without noticing the heat, his eyes fastened on Noie. “You like those eggs and sausage?”

“You know how to cook them,” Noie replied. “What my grandmother would call ‘gooder than grits.’”

“You’re a card, Noie. So this fellow was from a law enforcement agency?”

“I don’t know if I’d call Parks and Wildlife that.”

“And he lives in the state capital?”

“Yep, that’s what he said.”

“And you let him take your photograph? Does that come right close to it?”

Noie seemed to reflect upon Jack’s question. “Yeah, I’d say that was pretty much it.”

In the early-morning shadows, Noie’s nose made Jack think of a banana lying in an empty gravy bowl. His long-sleeve plaid shirt was buttoned at the collar, even though it was too tight for him, and his suspenders were notched into the knobs of his shoulders like a farmer of years ago might have worn them. He was freshly shaved, his sideburns etched, his face happy, but his jug-shaped head and big ears would probably drive the bride of Frankenstein from his bed, Jack thought. Noie preoccupied himself with whittling checker pieces he kept in a shoe box, and he had the conversational talents of a tree stump. Plus, Noie had another problem, one for which there seemed to be no remedy. Even though he bathed every night in an iron tub by the barn, his body constantly gave off an odor similar to sour milk. Jack decided that Noie Barnum was probably the homeliest and most single man he had ever met.

“Did it strike you as unusual that this couple would want to photograph a man they’d known for only a few minutes?”

“My grandmother used to say people who are rank strangers one minute can turn out the next minute to be your best friends.”

“Except we’re not rank strangers to the law, Noie.”

“That brings me to another topic,” Noie said. “I know the government wants to get their hands on me, but for the life of me, I can’t figure why you’re running from them.”

“You’ve got it turned around, pard. I stay to myself and go my own way. If people bear me malice, I let them find me. Then we straighten things out.”

“I bet you give them a piece of your mind, too.”

“You could call it that.”

“You ever take your guitar out and play it?”

“My guitar?”

“You keep the case under your bed, but you never take your guitar out and play it.”

“It sounds like it was tuned to a snare drum. That’s because I tuned it.”

Noie’s expression had turned melancholy. He set down his fork and studied his plate. “That couple I met on the trail don’t mean us any harm, Jack. Particularly toward a fellow like you. I don’t know why you choose to be a hermit, but you’re the kindest man I’ve ever known, and I’ve known some mighty good ones.”

“I believe you have, Noie.”

“I worry about you because I think you’re bothered about something in your past, something you probably shouldn’t be fretting yourself about.”

Through the back window, Jack could see the rain from last night’s storm still dripping off the barn roof and dew shining on the windmill and steam rising off the horse tank. The blueness of the morning was so perfect, he didn’t want to see the sunlight break over the hill. “We’ve got us a fine spot here,” he said. “Sometimes if you listen, you can hear the earth stop, like it’s waiting for you to catch up with it. Like it’s your friend and it wants you to be at peace with it. That’s why I live alone and go my own way. If you don’t have any truck with the rest of the world, it cain’t mess you up.”