James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

Jack fell to one knee. He had left his hat behind him, on the table, crown down. He seemed to look at it with longing, as though he had left behind the better part of him. Noie picked him up and helped him to the Trans Am, staring back over his shoulder at Miss Anton and the Mexicans standing in the backyard, their faces lit by the porch light and the candles flickering on the tables. Noie pushed Jack into the passenger seat. “I’ll drive,” he said.

“You’re going with me?”

“What’s it look like?”

Jack was smiling, his face threaded with blood running from his forehead. “You’re a good kid.”

“The hell I am.” Noie started the engine and headed south down the dirt road, the headlights bouncing off mesquite that grew on the hillsides.

“I know a stand-up young guy when I see one,” Jack said.

Noie accelerated, aiming over his knuckles at the road in front of him.

“Did you hear me?” Jack asked.

“Yeah, I heard you. Everything you’ve said. Night and day. I hear you. Boy, do I hear you. You killed an FBI agent and shot somebody from Parks and Wildlife?”

“They dealt the play. I didn’t go looking for them.”

Noie’s jawbone tensed against his cheek in the dash light, but he said nothing in reply.

“You picked me up out of the dirt back there even though your ribs haven’t mended. I know how much broken ribs hurt. There’re not many kinds of pain I haven’t experienced. But pain can be a blessing. It gives you fire in the belly you can draw on when need be, and it allows you to understand others, for good or bad. You hearing me on this, son?”

“I’m not your damn son.”

“Have it your way.”

“You have to help me find Krill.”

“Why rent space in your head to a half-breed rodent?”

“I want Krill in leg irons,” Noie said, looking away from the road into Jack’s face. “That’s the only reason I’m on board. You got that?”

“You believe I killed those Thai women?”

Noie’s hands tightened on the wheel, and he looked at the road again. “Did you?”

“What’s the deal with Krill?”

“He can take me to Al Qaeda. He was going to sell me to them. Then he decided to sell me to some narco-gangsters because it was easier.”

“I think I’m seeing the landscape a little more clearly. Your sister died on 9/11?”

“In the Towers.”

“If I he’p you find Krill and maybe even these asswipes from Al Qaeda?”

“I’ll stay with you. I’ll be your friend. I won’t let you down.”

“Turn east at the highway. We’re not going back to our place. I’ll show you a road through a ranch into Coahuila. Only a few wets know about it.”

“But we leave everybody else here alone? Right? We find Krill but that’s it?”

“You’re preaching to the choir,” Jack said. “All I’ve ever wanted was to be left alone. I never stole, and I never went looking for trouble. How many people can say that?”

Noie looked back at him. “I know you’ve done some dark deeds, but I can’t believe you mowed down a bunch of innocent women. I just can’t believe that.”

“Believe whomever you want. I’m tired of talking. I’ve tired of everything out there.”

“Out where?”

“There, in the dark, the voices in the wind, the people hunting and killing each other while they scowl at the likes of me. If I study on it, I have moments when I want to write my name on the sky in ways nobody will ever forget. That’s the burden you carry when you’re born different. You told me once your sister grew up bisexual or whatever in that small southern town y’all come from. Did she have a good time of it there? I think you’ve got more of me inside you than you’re willing to admit, Noie.”

“You’re wrong.”

Jack gazed silently through the front window, his forehead crosshatched with lesions, his thoughts, if any, known only to himself.

Anton Ling called in the report on Noie Barnum and Jack Collins’s visit to her property five minutes after the two men had left. Maydeen Stoltz immediately called Hackberry at his home.

“Which way did they head?” he said.

“South, toward the four-lane.”

“Get out traffic stops ten miles on either side of where they would enter the four-lane. Then call the FBI and the Border Patrol. Did Noie Barnum seem coerced?”

“Not according to Ms. Ling. She says Barnum heard her accuse Collins of murdering Ethan Riser and the Thai women, and Barnum left with him voluntarily. You think this is Stockholm syndrome or whatever they call it?”

“I doubt it.”

“No matter how you cut it, Barnum isn’t a victim?” Maydeen said.

“Not to us, he isn’t,” Hackberry replied.

“Ms. Ling says she beat the shit out of Collins with a broom handle. You want me to check the hospitals?”

“Waste of time,” Hackberry said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“What do you think his next move is, Hack?”

“He’s going to call either the department or my house.”

“What for?”

“He made a public fool of himself at Anton Ling’s,” Hackberry replied.

“I don’t get it.”

“We’re the only family he has.”

“Yuck,” she said.

The next morning Hackberry went to his office early and dug out the three-inch-thick file on Jack Collins and began thumbing through only a small indicator of the paperwork that one man had been able to string across an entire continent. The paperwork on Collins, who had never spent one day in jail, included faxes from Interpol and Mexico City, NCIC printouts, FBI transmissions, analytical speculations made by a forensic psychologist at Quantico, crime-scene photos that no competent defense attorney would allow a jury to see, autopsy summations written by coroners who were barely able to deal with the magnitude of the job Collins had dropped on them, witness interviews, crime-lab ballistic matches from Matamoros to San Antonio, and the most fitting inclusion in the file, a handwritten memo by a retired Texas Ranger in Presidio County who wrote, “This man seems about as complex as a derelict begging food at your back door and I suspect he smells about the same. I think the trick is to make him hold still long enough to put a bullet in him. But we’ve yet to figure out a way to do it.”

What did it all mean? For Hackberry, the answer was simple. The system couldn’t handle Jack Collins because he didn’t follow the rules or conform to patterns that are associated with criminal behavior. He wasn’t addicted to drugs or alcohol, didn’t frequent prostitutes, and showed little or no interest in money. There was no way to estimate the number of people he had murdered, since many of his homicides were committed across the border, but he was not a serial killer. Nor could he be shoved easily into that great catchall category known as psychopaths, since he obviously had attachments, even though the figures to whom he was attached lived in his imagination.

Preacher Jack was every psychiatrist’s nightmare. His level of intelligence and his wide reading experience allowed him to create a construct in which he shared dominion with the Olympians. His narcissism was so deeply rooted in his soul that he did not fear death because he thought the universe could not continue without his presence. He was messianic and believed he could see through a hole in the dimension and watch events play out in the lives of people who were not yet born.

With gifts like these, why should Preacher Jack fear a law enforcement agency? Like the cockroach and the common cold, he was in the fight for the long haul.

The irony was that in spite of his success in eluding the law for almost two decades, Collins shared a common denominator with his fellow miscreants: He needed law enforcement to validate who he was. Intuitively, he knew his own kind were by and large worthless and would sell him out for a pack of cigarettes if they thought they could get away with it. All career criminals wanted the respect of the cops, jailers, social workers, correctional officers, and prison psychologists whose attention gave them the dimensions they possessed in no other environment.