James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“It looked like it was fixing to crawl in your collar,” another man said.

Temple Dowling pulled his shirt loose from his slacks and shook it. “Did I get it?”

“Nothing fell out.”

“It wasn’t a centipede, was it?”

“It was a little round bug,” said the man with white hair on his arms.

Temple Dowling straightened his collar. “Screw it. If it bites me, I’ll bite it back,” he said. His friends grinned. He picked up a fork and turned the steaks, squinting in the smoke. “Right on this spot, before this was a country club, my father had a deer stand where he used to take his friends. I wasn’t supposed to be there, but I snuck off to it and shot a nine-point buck with my twenty-two. Except I gut-shot him. He took off running, just about where that water trap is now. I had to hit him four more times before he went down. I was so excited I pissed my pants. I showed my father what I’d done, and he dipped his hand in the deer’s blood and smeared it on my face and said, ‘Damn if I don’t think you’ve turned into a man. But we got to get you a thirty-thirty, son, before you shoot up half the county.’”

“Were you and your father pretty close, Temp?”

“Close as ice water can be to a drinking glass, I guess.”

Dowling’s companions nodded vaguely as though they understood when in fact they did not.

“My father had his own way of doing things,” he said. “There was his way, and then there was his way. If that didn’t work out, we did it his way over and over until his way worked. No man could ride a horse into the ground or a woman into an asylum like my old man.”

The others let their eyes slip away to their drinks, the steaks browning and dripping on the fire, the golfers lifting their drives high into the sunset, a skeet shooter powdering a clay pigeon into a pink cloud against the sky. At the club, candor about one’s life was not always considered a virtue.

“On your shirt, Temp,” said the man with white hair on his wrists and arms. “There. Jesus. ”

Dowling looked down at his clothes. “Where?”

One man dropped his gimlet glass and stepped away, his eyebrows raised, his hands lifted in front of him, as though disengaging from an invisible entanglement that should not have been part of his life. The two other men were not as subtle. They backed away hurriedly, then ran toward the Ninth Hole, coins and keys jingling in their pockets, their spiked shoes clicking on the walkway, their faces disjointed as they looked back fearfully over their shoulders.

Out on the county road, one hundred yards away, Felix Chavez walked from an abandoned mechanic’s shed to an unmarked car, threw a rifle on the backseat, and drove home to eat dinner with his family.

Hackberry was dozing in his chair, his hat tilted down on his face, his feet on his desk, when the 911 call came in. Maydeen and Pam and R.C. had stayed late that afternoon. Maydeen tapped on Hackberry’s doorjamb. “Temple Dowling says somebody put a laser sight on him at the country club,” she said.

“No kidding,” Hackberry said, opening his eyes. “What would Mr. Dowling like us to do about it?”

“Probably bring him some toilet paper. He sounds like he just downloaded in his britches,” she replied.

“Maydeen-”

“Sorry,” she said.

“Is Mr. Dowling still at the club?”

“He’s in his cottage. He says you warned him about Jack Collins.” She looked at a notepad in her hand. “He said, ‘That crazy son of a bitch Collins is out there, and you all had better do something about it. I pay my goddamn taxes.’”

“Is there any coffee left?” Hackberry asked.

“I just made a fresh pot.”

“Let’s all have a cup and a doughnut or two, then R.C. and Pam and I can motor on out,” Hackberry said. He stretched his arms, his feet still on his desk, and tossed his hat on the polished tip of one boot. “I’d better take down the flag before we go, too. It looks like rain.”

“You want me to call Dowling back?”

“What for?”

“To tell him y’all are on your way.”

“He knows our hearts are in the right place,” Hackberry replied.

Forty minutes later, it was misting and the clouds were hanging like frozen steam on the hills when Hackberry and Pam arrived at the club in one cruiser and R.C. in another. Temple Dowling met them at the door of his cottage, a drink in his hand, his face splotched, his eyes looking past them at the fairways and trees and the shadows that the trees and buildings and electric lights made on the grass. The wind toppled a table on the flagstones by the swimming pool, and Temple Dowling’s face jumped. “What kept y’all?” he said. “Who’s this woman Maydeen?”

“What about her?”

“She told me to fuck myself, is what’s about her.”

Hackberry stared at him without replying.

“Come inside. Don’t just stand there,” Dowling said.

“This is fine.”

“It’s raining. I don’t want to get wet,” Dowling said, his gaze focusing on a man stacking chairs behind the Ninth Hole.

“R.C., go up to the clubhouse and see what you can find out. We’ll be here with Mr. Dowling. Let’s wrap this up as soon as we can.”

“Wrap this up?” Dowling said. “Somebody is trying to kill me, and you say ‘wrap this up’?”

Pam and Hackberry stepped inside the cottage and closed the door behind them. “You say somebody locked down on you with a sniper’s rifle?”

“Yeah. Why do you think I called?”

“And Maydeen told you to fuck yourself? That doesn’t sound like her.”

Dowling’s eyes were jumping in their sockets. “Are you listening? I know a laser sight when I see one. Who cares about Maydeen?”

“Did your security guys see it?”

“If they had, Collins would be turning on a rotisserie.”

“The last time a couple of your guys ran into Jack, they didn’t do too well,” Hackberry said. “The coroner had to blot them up with flypaper and a sponge. Did you call the feds?”

“You listen,” Dowling said, his voice trembling with either anger or fear or both. He set down his drink on a bare mahogany table, trying to regain control of his emotions. The velvet drapes were pulled on the windows, the dark carpets and wood furniture and black leather chairs contributing somehow to the coldness pumping out of the air-conditioning ducts. “Collins has killed at least two federal agents. Nobody can do anything about him. Even Josef Sholokoff is afraid of him. But you have a personal relationship with him. If you didn’t, you’d be dead. I think you’re leaving him out there purposely.”

“Jack Collins tried to kill Chief Deputy Tibbs. He knows what I’ll do to him if I get the chance, Mr. Dowling. In the meantime, I’m not sure anything happened here. If Jack had wanted to pop you, your brains would be on your shirt.”

Even in the air-conditioning, the armpits of Dowling’s golf shirt were damp, his face lit with a greasy shine. He picked up his drink, then set it down again, clearing a clot out of his voice box. “I want to talk to you alone,” he said.

“What for?”

“You’ll see.”

“Pam, would you wait up at the club?”

“I love your decor, Mr. Dowling,” she said. “We busted some metalheads and satanists who were growing mushrooms inside a place that looked just like it.”

Dowling went into the bedroom and returned with a cardboard file folder secured by a thin bungee cord. He removed the cord and laid the folder flat side down on a dining room table, his chest rising and falling, as though wondering if he were about to take a wrong turn into the bad side of town. “I was going to give you this anyway,” he said. “So I’m not giving it to you as a bribe or a form of extortion or anything like that.”