House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

“Down by the barbecue tent,” the man with the hose replied, not looking up. “Doin’ nothing, I suspect. They’re good at it.”

Hackberry continued down the midway, past the Ferris wheel, into a poorly lighted area where a purple-and-white-striped canopy rippled in the wind and three men sat at a table in front of an empty stage, eating barbecued ribs with their fingers. No one else was in the tent. In their peaked hats and long-sleeved cotton shirts, with their flat stomachs and tightly belted trousers, they could have been mistaken for lawmen of years ago—except for their inability to hold their eyes steadily on his as he approached their table.

“I heard y’all had some trouble.”

“No, sir, no trouble here,” one said. “Indigestion, maybe.”

Hackberry looked casually over his shoulder, back down the midway, then at the men again. “Something to do with the Missing Link act. It is an act, isn’t it? That’s not a real missing link in there?”

“Search me,” said a man with a strip of tape across his nose. “Why are you interested?”

“No reason. Is that an ax handle?”

“Possums wander in at night and chew on the electric lines. Who are you?”

“I’m a deputy sheriff over in Kerr County. I was looking for Mr. Beemer.”

“What for?” the man with the taped nose asked.

“He’s the fellow I’m supposed to see about the man y’all had to lock up.”

“Why’s Kerr County interested in a drunk man and drug addict in San Antonio?” the tallest of the three men asked. His teeth were tiny, hardly bigger than a baby’s, his whiskers grayish brown, soft-looking, like winter fur on a squirrel.

“The man you refer to as a drunk and drug addict is my son.”

The tall man lifted his face, so the colored lights from the Ferris wheel fell across it. “A woman took him away. She said she was his mother. I’d say she was a pain in the ass.”

“How’d she take him away?”

“We didn’t pay it no mind,” the same man said.

“My son got blown up in France. From my understanding, he had a pint of metal in his lower body. Why would y’all put my boy in a cage?”

“Because he fell down in a puddle of water that had a power cable running through it,” Beemer said.

“You put me in mind of the Sundance Kid,” Hackberry said. “The way you scrunch your shoulders and tilt up your chin. I knew him and Harvey Logan, both.”

“I look like the Sundance Kid?”

“Hand on the Bible. Logan was a dyed-in-the-wool killer and a five-star lamebrain. Sundance was just a lamebrain. Not even one-star.”

“We were just doing our job,” Beemer said. “Did we mention your son was stirring up nigger trouble?”

Hackberry pulled back his coat flap and hung it behind the butt of his holstered Peacemaker. “Could I see your ax handle?”

“Let’s hold on there a minu

te,” the tall man said.

“It’s a little late for that. Things get loose on you, and you look back and nobody can figure out how it went downhill so fast. It’s a dad-burned mystery.”

“We can talk this thing out,” the tall man said, his face marbled with the glow from the Ferris wheel, the skin under one eye twitching.

What Hackberry did next he did without a plan, without even heat or passion, except to ensure that Beemer received just due and the others were treated as adverbs rather than nouns. In reality, he went about the destruction of the three men as though chopping wood or breaking up old furniture or packing cases for burning. He beat them until they cowered on their knees, then he beat them some more, stomping their faces and heads into the soft dampness of the grass, spilling their half-eaten food on top of them. Then he pulled their wallets from their trousers and took a piece of identification from each man and tossed their wallets in their faces.

All three men were carrying a business card with the name of Arnold Beckman’s company on it.

“Try to make more trouble for us, and I’ll be looking you up,” Hackberry said.