James Burke - Feast Day of Fools

“That’s not an option, Mr. Barnum. I also need to advise you that you’re starting to piss me off.”

“I don’t see why.”

“I’ll explain. You’re one skip and a jump from being charged as an accessory in several homicides, all of them involving your companion Jack Collins. I dug up nine of his female victims. When we get time, I’ll show you their postmortem photographs. The photos don’t do justice to the realities of an exhumation-the stench of decomposition and the eight-ball stare and that sort of thing-but you’ll have some sense of what a spray of forty-five-caliber bullets can do to human tissue.”

“It’s true?” the prisoner asked.

“What?”

“What you just said. Jack did that?”

Pam Tibbs had just come out the back door. “Who the hell you think did it, son?” she asked.

The prisoner tried to hold his eyes on hers, but his stare broke, and he sucked the moisture out of his cheeks and swallowed.

Pam and Hackberry took the handcuffed man up the steel spiral stairs to the second floor and walked him down the row of cells to the end of the corridor. Pam whanged her baton against a cell door when two men came to the bars. Hackberry unhooked the prisoner, and he and Pam Tibbs stepped inside the room with him.

“You have a lavatory and a toilet and a bed and a chair and a window that lets you see the street,” Hackberry said. “I apologize for all the graffiti and drawings of genitalia on the walls. We repaint every six months, but our clientele are a determined bunch.”

“The other cells have bars. Why am I in this one?”

“The only people you’re going to talk to are us, Mr. Barnum,” Hackberry said. “I have a feeling you and Preacher were holed up down by the border or just on the other side of it. But chances are he’s taken off. Is that right? He’s way down in Coahuila by now?”

“You call him Preacher?”

“I don’t call him anything. Others do,” Hackberry said. “You’re a Quaker, right?”

“A man’s religion is a private matter.”

“You deny your faith?” Hackberry said.

“No, sir, I don’t. As you say, I’m a Quaker.”

“And your namesake sailed out on the Flood?”

“Yes, sir, my christened name is Noie. Same spelling as in the King James.”

“Can you tell me, with your background, why in the name of suffering God you hooked up with a man like Jack Collins?”

“Because he befriended me when nobody else did. Because he bound up my wounds and fed and protected me when others passed me by.”

“Do you know how many innocent people have been hurt or killed because they think you have the design for the Predator drone?” Hackberry said.

“I escaped from a bunch of Mexican killers. They’d held me prisoner for weeks. How could I be carrying the design to a Predator drone? How could anyone have ideas that are that stupid?”

“An FBI agent by the name of Ethan Riser called you the modern equivalent of the Holy Grail,” Hackberry said. “The design is in your head. You’re a very valuable man, Mr. Barnum. Ethan Riser could probably explain that to you better than I, except he’s dead. He’s dead because Jack Collins blew his face and skull apart with a Thompson submachine gun. Ethan Riser was a good man and a friend of mine. Have you ever seen anybody machine-gunned, Mr. Barnum?”

“I found out about your friend when it was too late to do anything about it.”

“Are you a deep-plant, sir?” Hackberry said.

“A what?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I was about to go public with some information about the numbers of innocent people we’ve killed in the drone program, but I went into the desert first to think about it. That’s when I got kidnapped by Krill and his friends. They found my government ID and a letter from a minister about my concerns over the Predator program, and they thought they’d sell me to Al Qaeda. Then they decided that was too much trouble and they’d sell me to some Mexican gangsters. That was when another fellow and I broke loose.”

“You thought you were going to bring down Al Qaeda by yourself?”

“I was aiming to get some of them, that’s for sure. But I was done helping kill third-world people. I got to say something here. I don’t know everything that goes on in Jack’s head, but somewhere inside him, there’s a better man than the one you see.”

“Keep telling yourself that crap,” Pam said.

“Chief Deputy Tibbs isn’t very objective about Jack, Noie. That’s because he tried to machine-gun her,” Hackberry said.

Noie Barnum looked at her blankly.

“What do you know about Josef Sholokoff?” Hackberry asked.

“I don’t recall anybody by that name.”

“He’s a Russian criminal who wants to sell you to the highest bidder,” Hackberry said. “We think he may have crucified a minister by the name of Cody Daniels. You ever hear of him?”

“No, I haven’t,” Noie said. “A fellow was crucified?”

“You seem blissfully ignorant of all the wreckage swirling around you. Does that bother you at all?” Hackberry said.

“You’re damn right it does. You stop talking to me like that.”

“There’s a ranch about six miles below the four-lane. The south end of the property bleeds into Mexico. I think that’s where y’all were hiding out. Jack is probably long gone, and he’s not driving that Trans Am anymore, either. But I need to know. Is that where y’all were holed up?”

“Ask Jack when you catch him.”

“We don’t abuse prisoners here,” Pam said, stepping closer to Barnum, one finger barely touching his sternum.

“Ma’am?” he said.

“I just wanted you to take note of that fact,” she said. “It’s why I’m not pounding you into marmalade. But you open your mouth like that one more time, and I promise you, all bets are off.”

Downstairs, five minutes later, Pam came into Hackberry’s office and closed the door behind her. “I’m backing your play, Hack, whatever it is. But I think you’re taking an awful risk here,” she said.

“We don’t owe the feds diddly-squat,” he replied. “We apprehended Barnum. They didn’t. As far as I’m concerned, they’re on a need-to-know basis. Right now I don’t figure they need to know anything.”

“This is a national security issue. They’re going to eat you alive. If they don’t, your enemies around here will.”

“That’s the breaks.”

“God, you’re stubborn.”

“I got a call from Temple Dowling. He says Josef Sholokoff believes Dowling put a hit on him.”

“Why’s he think that?”

“Because somebody killed a couple of Sholokoff’s men at his game farm.”

“Why didn’t we hear anything about it?”

“Sholokoff didn’t report it.”

“What did you tell Dowling?”

“To get out of town. That he was on his own,” Hackberry said.

“What’s the problem?”

“I was pretty hard-nosed with him. Maybe I took satisfaction in his discomfort.”

“Dowling is a pedophile and deserves anything that happens to him.”

“He said Sholokoff takes people apart.”

“In what way?”

“Physically, piece by piece,” Hackberry said.

He realized her attention was focused outside the window. A man in rumpled slacks, wearing canvas boat shoes without socks and his shirttail hanging out, was crossing the street hurriedly, a brown paper bag folded under his arm. “What’s wrong?” Hackberry asked.

“That guy out there. He was just released.”

“What about him?”

“He’s a check writer. Loving and Jeff Davis counties have bench warrants on him, but they didn’t want to pay the costs for getting him back.”

“I’m still not following you.”