House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

Hackberry watched Andre exit the cave, stooping slightly, his suit coat tightening across his back, his hands as big as frying pans. Hackberry lifted the cup from the green velvet cushion, wrapped it in the slicker, and replaced it inside the wall, then refitted the rock in the hole.

Why do you fear me? a voice said.

I didn’t mean to give that impression. Please he’p me get Ishmael back. I don’t care what happens to me. That boy has been paying my tab all his life. It bothers me something awful. I don’t get no rest.

But the voice no longer had anything to say.

Hackberry pulled the wood plug from the spout on the fuel can and poured a zigzag pattern of coal oil along the floor of the cave, sloshing it on his chair and writing table. He threw the empty can outside the cave and heard it clatter in the rocks. “Confuse, mislead, and mystify,” he repeated to himself. He latched the rosewood box and carried it outside and set it on top of a boulder, then rolled a newspaper into a cone and popped a match alight with his thumbnail and lit the paper and tilted the cone down until the flame almost touched his fingers. Then he tossed the paper into the cave.

Black smoke corkscrewed along the ceiling through the crevice at the back of the cave, rising in curds through the natural chimney into the trees atop the bluffs. Hackberry’s chair and writing table crawled with fire, and the rats’ nests in the cave’s corners glowed and winked inside the smoke, but the flames on the floor were of low intensity and short duration, and other than blackening the walls, they had little appreciable effect.

“Why have you done all this, Mr. Holland?” Andre said.

“The men watching us are primitive people. As such, they believe that all other people act and think in the way they do. They think we’re done with the cave and whatever it contained.”

“Mr. Beckman is not a primitive man.”

“You’re wrong there, partner. Beckman is one cut above a man with a bone in his nose and a spear in his hand.”

Andre didn’t reply. Hackberry picked up the rosewood box and tucked it under his arm. “Time to hit the trail.”

“Where are your friends, Mr. Holland?” Andre said.

“Pardon?”

“Your son has been kidnapped by an evil man. I suspect these are the worst days in your life. Where are your friends? There should be many at your side. Have they all deserted you?”

“I’ve driven the best people in my life from my door. That’s not an easy fact to live with.”

“You are a man of great humility.”

“I like you, Andre. But if you don’t shut up, I’m going to shoot you.”

“Do as you wish.”

Hackberry stared at the hillside where he had seen the sunlight flash on a reflective surface. But the only living thing he saw there was a cow walking out of the shade, a bell clanging under her neck.

“Andre, I’m beset by a great fear,” he said. “No matter how this plays out, I think Beckman plans to kill my boy. A man like that never leaves a debt unpaid. That evil son of a bitch is going to kill my Ishmael.”

“There are other ways to deal with this problem, Mr. Holland. You are a man of restraint. I am not.”

Hackberry looked into the Haitian’s eyes. What he saw there made him blink.

MAGGIE BASSETT DID not know what to do with her anger, or where to place it, or how to stop it from ulcerating her stomach. Ruby Dansen had punched her in the face and knocked her on her rump in her own house. Her puffed lip and the swelling in one nostril made her face look like it had been scissored in half and glued together unevenly. No man had ever done something like this to her, much less a woman.

She sat in her kitchen and held a piece of ice wrapped in a towel to her face, and reveled in one revenge fantasy after another about Ruby Dansen. And in so doing, she transferred more and more power to Ruby, a busybody waitress who thought she knew more about economics than the owners of U.S. Steel.

The thought of it made Maggie move the piece of ice from her mouth to her forehead. Again and again she saw Ruby’s fist coming unexpectedly out of nowhere, landing like a set of brass knuckles in the center of her face, jarring her eyes in their sockets, rendering her helpless as she fell backward on the floor, afraid that more blows were coming.

Afraid? Of Ruby Dansen? She couldn’t believe she’d just had that thought. That was impossible. She must never have it again. It was absurd. She had dealt with the likes of Harvey Logan and spent a week in Denver’s Brown Palace Hotel with Harry Longabaugh. She’d even had a fling with Butch Cassidy. She knew that Butch was still alive, that he hadn’t died in the shoot-out down in Bolivia. She had been the consort of the most famous outlaws in America. How many people could say that? Afraid of Ruby Dansen? How silly.

When she realized how foolish and revealing her thoughts were, she wanted to cry. Except no one was there to commiserate with her. She could almost hear Arnold’s mocking voice as she told him of Ruby’s visit. He would cherry-pick his way through every detail of her pain, stirring the pot, his eyes gleeful while he analyzed her weaknesses. When he tired of the game, he would offer to have someone visit Ruby at her hotel in the late hours, or escort her off the sidewalk into an alley. And after Arnold had dispatched the mess she had made, he would remind Maggie repeatedly of her ineptitude and her dependence upon him.

No, that was not going to happen, she told herself. When Maggie Bassett got even, she got even. For Maggie, the word “restitution” was a misspelling of “retribution.” She did not believe in an eye for an eye, either; Maggie paid back with interest. And the beauty of her revenge was that she never told anyone about it, like a badge of honor you carried but never showed anyone. Her refusal

to comfort her father on his deathbed, to even touch him, was not an act of vengeance. It was simply how she felt. Why pretend? He was not a loving father and had blamed her for her mother’s death. She was supposed to get all weepy because he was dying? How stupid could people be? He didn’t need her when she needed him. What was wrong with letting him check out on his own?

The real expression of her feelings toward her father came two years later, when she journeyed by train to the graveyard where he was entombed next to his wife under a huge slab of Italian marble, safely beyond her reach. It was sunset on a Sunday, the dogwood in bloom. A few families were picnicking on the grounds, the children flying kites against a magenta-tinted sky. Maggie removed a bottle of wine from a straw basket on her arm and sipped from it until the bottle was empty. Then she set it down and gathered up her skirts and urinated on the slab while the picnickers stared at her, aghast.