House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

“I’m confused. I don’t want to talk anymore about this.”

“You are not confused about anything, Maggie. You understand the nature of power. There are two kinds of people; those who have it and those who do not. Think back on what it was like when men such as those who just left here were your clients. No, don’t put that pout on your face. The world fucked you, just as it did me. Now it’s our turn.”

“I want to see Ishmael.”

“Listen to me,” Beckman said. He lifted his chin and used one finger to trace the chain of scars that ran down his cheek and neck into his collar. “I got this in one of the early mustard-gas experiments. It involved putting the gas in an exploding shell. I also lost my sense of smell. The scientists who did this to me could not have cared less.”

“Mr. Beckman say profane words but is a visionary,” Mr. Po said.

“Time to make a choice, Maggie. You’re on board the Pequod or not. But we’re going to kill the great white whale with or without you, girl,” Beckman said. “Think back to when you were nineteen and scared to death and glad to be offered a bare mattress and a water pan in a straddle house for the kind of roach bait that just walked out of here. Did you like their hands on you, their breath on your skin, their fingers knotted in your hair?”

Her cheeks were flaming, her hands clenched in her lap, her mouth so dry and her face so tight that she couldn’t swallow or even blink.

AFTER COD BISHOP left his house, Hackberry called the sheriff and asked a favor.

“You want Darl Pickins to drive you back to San Antonio?” Willard asked.

“Somebody has got hold of my son. I need to get him back.”

“I just got two calls from the authorities in Bexar, Hack. Guess what they were about.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Three security workers at the carnival got tore up by some wild man.”

“That’s too bad.”

“The wild man who attacked them said he was a deputy sheriff in Kerr County. About six and a half feet tall. Maybe a little more. An older man. He said his son had been wounded in France.”

“These were full-grown men, I assume. Not children or paraplegics?”

“Most likely.”

“I think I know who they might be. The same ones who put my boy on display in the geek cage. I cain’t i

magine somebody putting the boots to them. That’s a heartbreaking story.”

“I swore you in as a peace officer. You don’t have permission to beat the hell out of whomever you feel like.”

“They had it coming.”

“Your badge goes in your dresser drawer today, Hack. I’ll pick it up the next time I’m out.”

“I think I did the right thing.”

“It might have been the right thing twenty-five years ago. You know what got Wesley Hardin killed?”

“A bullet through the brain. It does that sometimes.”

“It’s what his kind look for. From the day their parents throw them out with the slop jar. You’re always skirting the edge of it. That’s what I don’t understand.”

“Darl cain’t drive me to San Antonio?”

“They’re going to put you away, Hack. In Huntsville or an asylum or some other shithole you’ll never come out of. Why do you let them do it to you?”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“I give up.”