James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

She jerked the door open with one hand and stepped back. “Down on the ground.”

“I will not do that. I will not tolerate your abuse, either. I did nothing to deserve this.”

She was holding her. 357 with both hands again, the checkered grips biting into her palms. “This is your last chance to avoid a very bad experience, sir.”

“Do not call me ‘sir.’ You’re deliberately being disrespectful in order to provoke me. I know your kind, missy.”

She was gripping the pistol so tightly, she could feel the barrel tremble. Her temples were pounding, her scalp tight, her eyes stinging with perspiration. She stared at the driver in the silence. The skin around his mouth was bloodless, his gaze iniquitous, dissecting her face, dropping to her throat and her breasts rising and falling inside her shirt. When she didn’t move or speak, his eyes seemed to sweep the entirety of her person, noting the loops of sweat under her arms, a lock of her hair stuck on her damp forehead, the width of her hips, the way her stomach strained against her gun belt and the button on her jeans, the fact that her upper arms were as thick as a man’s. She saw a smile wrinkle at the corner of his mouth. “You seem a mite unsettled, missy,” he said. “Maybe you should be in another line of work.”

“Thank you for saying that,” she replied. She pulled her can of Mace from her belt and sprayed it in his face and jerked him out of the cab, then sprayed him again. He flailed his arms blindly, his eyes streaming tears, then he slapped at her hands as a child might, as though he were being violated. She threw him against the side of the truck, kicking his feet apart, stiff-arming him in the back of the neck, the tensions of his body coursing like an electric current through her palm.

When he continued to struggle, she slipped her baton from the ring on her belt and whipped it behind his calves. He dropped straight to his knees, as though his tendons had been cut, his mouth open wide, a cry breaking from his throat.

She pushed him facedown on the ground and cuffed his wrists behind him. His left cheek was printed with gravel, his mouth quivering with shock. He wrenched up his head so he could see her. “No hot coal will redeem your tongue, woman. You’re a curse on the race. A pox on you and all your kind,” he said.

She called in her location. “I’ve got a lulu here. Ask Hack to pull all the reports we have on somebody who was shooting at illegals,” she said.

Hackberry Holland sat behind his desk and listened to Pam Tibbs’s account of the arrest. Outside the window, the American flag was straightening and popping in the wind, the chain rattling on the pole. “What’s our minister friend doing now?” he asked.

“Yelling for his phone call,” she replied. “How do you read that stuff about a hot coal on my tongue?”

“It’s from Isaiah in the Old Testament. Isaiah believed he was a man of unclean lips who dwelled in an unclean land. But an angel placed a burning coal on his tongue and removed his iniquity.”

“I’m iniquitous for not letting him kill himself and others in an auto accident?”

“The sheriff in Jim Hogg told me about this guy a couple of months ago. Cody Daniels was a suspect in the bombing of an abortion clinic on the East Coast. He might not have done it himself, but he was at least one of the cheerleaders. He roams around the country and tends to headquarter in places where there’s not much money for law enforcement. I didn’t know he was here.”

She waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. “You think he could be the guy taking potshots at the illegals coming across the border?” she said.

“Him or a hundred others like him.” Hackberry took off his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Did he threaten you in a specific way?”

“On the way in, he told me I was going to hell.”

“Did he say he was going to put you there or see you there?”

“No.”

“Did he touch the gun on the seat?”

“Not that I saw.”

“Did he make a threatening gesture of any kind?”

“He refused to get out of the vehicle while telling me he was armed.”

“He told R.C. you hit him in the head after you cuffed him.”

“He fell down against the cruiser. What are you trying to say, Hack?”

“We don’t need a lawsuit.”

“I don’t know if I’m more pissed off by this nutcase or what I’m hearing now.”

“It’s the kind of lawsuit that could cost us fifty thousand dollars in order to be right.”

Hackberry looked up at her in the silence. Pam’s eyes were brown, with a reddish tint, and they became charged with light when she was either angry or hurt. She hooked her thumbs in her gun belt and fixed her attention outside the window, her cheeks spotted with color.

“I’m proud of the way you handled it,” he said. “You did all the right things. Let’s see if our man likes his accommodations.”

Hackberry and Pam Tibbs climbed the steel spiral steps in the rear of the building and walked down a corridor of barred cells, past the old drunk tank, to a barred holding unit that contained nothing but a wood bench and a commode with no seat. The man who had identified himself as Reverend Cody Daniels was standing at the window, silhouetted against a sky that had turned yellow with dust.

“I understand you were potting jackrabbits from your pickup truck,” Hackberry said.

“I did no such thing,” Cody Daniels replied. “It’s not against the law, anyway, is it?”

“So you were cruising down the road surveilling the countryside through your binoculars for no particular reason?” Hackberry said.

“What I was looking for is the illegal immigrants and drug transporters who come through here every night.”

“You’re not trying to steal my job, are you?”

“I go where I’ve a mind to. When I got up this morning, this was still a free country.”

“You bet. But you gave my chief deputy a hard time because she made a simple procedural request of you.”

“Check the video camera in your squad car. Truth will out, Sheriff.”

“It’s broken.”

“Pretty much like everything in this town. Mighty convenient, if you ask me.”

“What are you doing in my county?”

“Your county?”

“You’d better believe it.”

“I’m doing the Lord’s work.”

“I heard about your activities on the East Coast. We don’t have any abortion clinics here, Reverend, but that doesn’t mean we’ll put up with your ilk.”

Cody Daniels approached the bars and rested one hand on the cast-iron plate that formed an apron on the bottom of the food slot. The veins in his wrists were green and as thick as night crawlers, his knuckles pronounced, the back of each finger scarred where a tattoo had been removed. He held Hackberry’s gaze. “I have the ability to see into people’s thoughts,” he said. “Right now you got more problems than your department can handle. That’s why you select the likes of me as the target of your wrath. People like me are easy. We pay our taxes and obey the law and try to do what’s right. How many drug dealers do you have locked up here?”

“There’s a kernel of truth in what you say, Reverend, but I’d like to get this issue out of the way so you can go back to your job and we can go back to ours.”

“I think the real problem is you got a romantic relationship going with this woman here.”

“Deputy Tibbs, would you get the reverend’s possessions envelope out of the locker, please?”

Pam gave Hackberry a look but didn’t move.

“I think Reverend Daniels is a reasonable man and is willing to put this behind him,” Hackberry said. “I think he’ll be more mindful of his driving habits and the next time out not object to the requests of a well-meaning deputy sheriff. Is that a fair statement, Reverend?”