House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

“At various times.”

“I’ve been looking for one Ranger in particular. He killed several Mexican soldiers in a bordello, including a general. Splattered them all over the rocks. He also burned a hearse loaded with some merchandise of mine.”

“I hope you find him. This man sounds like a dangerous character. Probably of

low morals, too. This happened in a bordello?”

“Are you familiar with the bordello I’m talking about?”

“I try to stay out of them. I already know my son’s whereabouts, Mr. Beckman. I have recently written to him and hope to hear back soon. Thank you for the information regardless.”

“The man who burned my merchandise also stole a religious relic from me.”

“Bones and such?”

“No, a sacramental cup. The woman who ran the bordello claimed to have no knowledge about it. Her name was Beatrice DeMolay.”

Beckman’s eyes seemed to be six inches from Hackberry’s, although the two men were standing three feet apart.

“You said ‘was’?”

“Yes, I did. Does that upset you?”

“I’ve known men like you. You’re cut out of different cloth.”

“Could you back up on that? I missed the allusion,” Beckman said.

Hackberry leaned to the side and spat. “I’ve seen your handiwork. Flies are usually buzzing over it. Like a trademark.”

“I’m opening up an arms company in San Antonio and Houston and New Orleans. I’m currently buying up captured and surplus infantry weapons from all over Europe, maybe the Orient, too. I could use a man like you. Do you think you could get my relic back?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. What did you do to the woman at the bordello in Mexico?”

“What does any man do with an attractive whore? I fucked her until her brains were running out her ears.”

“I got to tend to my pumpkins.”

Beckman stuck a piece of paper in Hackberry’s pocket. “I’m staying in Austin. You have two days.”

IN THE EARLY-MORNING hours he woke to rumbling sounds he associated with dry thunder or a herd spooking on an unfenced stretch of hardpan. He looked at his bedside clock. It was 4:16. He went to the living room and stepped barefoot out on the porch. In the distance he could see a light burning in his neighbor’s house. The sky was black. A solitary bolt of lightning quivered whitely on the horizon, then disappeared. Inside the wind he could hear cattle lowing and the sweep of the trees by the river. He went back to sleep.

When he got up to fix breakfast, he glanced through the kitchen window at his pumpkin field. He stared at it for a long time, and at the slat fence on his hog pen and the barbed wire on the south end of his pasture. He poured a cup of black coffee and sat down at the kitchen table and drank it without sugar, then washed the cup under the hand pump in the sink and set it in the dry rack. Without bothering to shave, he put on his Stetson and saddled his horse and rode to the home of Cod Bishop.

He tapped on the door and waited. He could see the partially grassed-over area down by the river where, years ago, Bishop had burned the cabins of the black people living on his property, the scorched bricks and boards and sunken piles of ash still visible, as though the soil under the fire was incapable of restoring itself.

Bishop was wearing a Japanese robe when he opened the door, a monogrammed handkerchief in the breast pocket. “Why are you on my porch, Holland?”

“Arnold Beckman says you’re a friend of his.”

“He’s a business associate.”

“I never could understand the word ‘associate.’ It seems to cover everything.”

“If you’re drinking again, seek help from a physician or the temperance people. But leave.”