James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

Ten seconds later, she was standing in his doorway, pear-shaped, wearing a flowery western shirt with her department-issue trousers and a stitched belt and too much lipstick, her perfume flooding the room. “Are you gonna just stare at me or tell me what you want?” she said.

“If someone said to you ‘I ain’t no Judas Iscariot,’ what would you say was on his mind?”

“Did you call him a Judas?”

“ I didn’t. To my knowledge, no one did.”

“I’d say he sold out someone who trusted him, and his guilt was eating his lunch. Are we talking about the guy who hanged himself?”

“That’s the guy.”

“It seems like he had biblical stories on his mind. Like the crucifixion in particular.”

“I believe you’re right.”

“You think he knew Cody Daniels?” she asked.

“He knew Josef Sholokoff, that’s for sure.”

“You think Sholokoff crucified Daniels?”

“I think it was either Sholokoff or Krill. Except a guy like Dennis Rector wouldn’t have occasion to be mixed up with someone like Krill. So that leaves Sholokoff. Is Pam still at lunch?”

“She got a call from the Blue Bonnet Six. A guy skipped on his bill and stole the television set out of the room. Before he skipped, he tried to sell the owner something called a Dobro. What’s a Dobro?”

“A guitar with a resonator in it. It’s played with metal picks, like the ones I just put in this manila envelope.”

“The guy who hanged himself played a musical instrument?”

“Evidently. Why?”

“Musicians make poor criminals. Outside of wrecking hotel rooms, they’re amateurs when it comes to serious criminality,” Maydeen said. When Hackberry didn’t reply, she said, “Know why that is?”

“I think you’re fixing to tell me.”

“You’ll figure it out,” she said.

“Has R.C. called in yet?”

“No, sir.”

“Let me know when he does. Tell me why musicians make poor criminals.”

“They believe they have a gift, so they feel less inclined to steal. They also think they’re special and they don’t have to prove anything.”

“I never thought of it that way,” he said.

“My first husband was hung like a hamster. But after he recorded once with Stevie Ray Vaughan, you’d think he was driving a fire truck up my leg.”

“I can’t believe you just said that.”

“Said what?”

“Out, Maydeen. And close the door behind you, please.”

Hackberry walked to the saloon and ate lunch in the darkness of a back booth and tried to forget the image of Dennis Rector hanging from a barn rafter. But a larger issue than the suicide was bothering him. Hackberry believed that most crimes, particularly homicide, were committed for reasons of sex, money, power, or any combination of the three. Beginning with the murder of the DEA informant by Krill, the homicides Hackberry had investigated recently seemed to defy normal patterns. Supposedly, the central issue was national security and the sale of Noie Barnum to Al Qaeda and the compromise of the Predator drone. But that just didn’t wash. The players were all people driven by ideology or religious obsession or personal rage that was rooted in the id. It was too easy to dismiss Preacher Jack Collins as a psychopath. It was also too easy to categorize Josef Sholokoff as a Russian criminal who slithered through a hole in the immigration process during the Cold War. Something much worse seemed to have come into the lives of this small-town society down here on the border, like a spiritual malignancy irradiating the land with its poisonous substance, remaking the people in its image.

Is that too dark and grandiose an extrapolation from the daily ebb and flow of a rural sheriff’s department? Hackberry wondered. Ask those medieval peasants who were visited in their villages by the representatives of the Inquisition, he said to himself in reply.

He stared at the diamondback rattlesnake that the saloon owner kept in a gallon jar of yellow formaldehyde on the bar. The snake’s body was coiled thickly upon itself, its mouth spread wide against the glass, its eyes like chips of stone, the venom holes visible in its fangs. The rattlesnake had been in the jar at least three years; its color had begun to fade, and pieces of its body were starting to dissolve in dirty strings inside the preservative. Why leave something that ugly if not perverse on top of a bar for that long?

Because the owner was making a statement, Hackberry thought. Evil was outside of us, not in the human breast, and could be contained and made harmless and placed on exhibit. Wasn’t the serpent condemned to crawl on its belly in the dust and to strike at man’s heel and be beaten to death with a stick? What more fitting testimony to that fact than a diamondback yawning open its mouth impotently six inches from the tattooed arm of a trucker knocking back shots of Jack and chasing them with a frosted mug of Lone Star?

Hackberry made a mental note to talk with the bartender. Then his cell phone vibrated on the tabletop. He opened it and placed it to his ear. “Sheriff Holland,” he said.

“I called the office, Sheriff, but Maydeen said you were eating lunch,” a voice said. “Hope I’m not bothering you.”

Hackberry looked down at his plate of enchiladas and Spanish rice and frijoles that were growing cold. “Go ahead, R.C.”

“I did what you said. I got a range-and-township map and looked up the title of every piece of land in a five-mile radius from the spot where that FBI man was killed. I Googled all their names and got a hit on one guy, but he’s not a writer.”

“What’s the name?”

“W. W. Guthrie. Google took me to a folksinger by the name of Woodrow Wilson Guthrie.”

“That’s Woody Guthrie, R.C. He didn’t just write folk songs. He published two books. One was Bound for Glory. It was made into a film. I think you just found the hideout of Preacher Jack.”

“I’m on my way out there right now. I’ll call you back as soon as I find out anything.”

“What kind of help are you getting from the feds?”

“At the courthouse, one of them told me where the men’s room was. Another one said he thought it might rain directly. That’s the word he used-‘directly.’ Like he was talking to somebody on Hee Haw. Are they as bright as they’re supposed to be?”

“Probably.”

“They sure know how to hide it,” R.C. said.

Hackberry finished eating and left thirteen dollars on the table and used the restroom and dried his hands and picked up his hat from the booth and started toward the front door. Then he paused. “I almost forgot,” he said to the bartender.

“Forgot what?” the bartender said. He was a big, dark-haired man with a deeply creased brow who wore a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up high on his arms.

“Can you put a bag over that snake jar the next time I come here?”

“Any reason?”

“Yeah, so I don’t have to look at it while I’m eating.”

“Who lit your fuse?”

“Did you read the paper this morning?”

“Something happen?”

“If I come in here again, refuse to serve me,” Hackberry said. “I’d really appreciate that.”

Halfway to the office, his cell phone vibrated again. “Sheriff Holland,” he said.

“It’s me, Sheriff.”

“Yeah, I thought it might be you, R.C.”

“How you doin’?”

“Fine.”

“I’m parked at this cabin that’s between a creek and a bluff. You cain’t see it except from the air. Feds are all over the place, but I found something they missed. It’s a checker. They didn’t know what it was.”

“I’m not quite tracking you.”

“It’s a homemade checker, one somebody carved out of wood. I’m not explaining myself real good. The property is in the name of W. W. Guthrie, but nobody around here seems to know what he looks like or where he’s from. When the feds got here, the cabin and the house were clean. I went out to the barn and saw the same Michelin tire tracks we saw at Anton Ling’s place. Then I went inside, and this fed was looking at a little round wood button that he found behind the kitchen door. You following me?”