House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

He’p you how? What’s wrong?

It’s dark here. It smells like leaves and wet stone. The voices around me belong to bad men.

Son, this is driving me crazy. Tell me where you are.

Hackberry reached out to touch him, but Ishmael’s image withered away like a sand effigy caught inside a windstorm.

THE MAN ASSIGNED to watch and take care of him was named Jessie. That much Ishmael knew. The rest was a puzzle, other than the fact that Jessie didn’t like his assignment. Ishmael’s eyes were sealed with cotton pads and adhesive tape, shutting out any glimmer of light from the match he heard Jessie strike on a stone surface to light his cigarette. He could hear water ticking from a pump into a bucket, and he could smell the coldness in the stone or bricks or concrete that surrounded him, and he could smell an odor like wet leaves in winter, but he guessed the bucket was made of wood, perhaps oak, and the odor of a cold woods on a January day was a self-manufactured deception because he did not know what his four captors, all of whom seemed to have names that began with the letter “J,” were about to do to him.

“You really a war hero?” Jessie said.

“No,” Ishmael said, turning his padded eyes in the direction of Jessie’s voice. He could hear Jessie draw in on his cigarette, the paper crisping.

“My friends say you’re a war hero. You calling them liars?”

“Most of the heroes I knew are still on the Marne.”

“They say you commanded nigra infantry.”

“That’s correct.”

“Teddy Roosevelt said he had to force them up San Juan Hill at gunpoint.”

“Double-check your information. Colored troops saved the Rough Riders’ bacon.”

Ishmael heard the cigarette paper crisp again, then felt Jessie blow the smoke across his face.

“Not a good time to be a smart aleck,” Jessie said.

“What do you get out of this?”

“How much do I get paid?”

“Yes.”

“My reg’lar pay for doing my job. It’s called company security. Not that much different from being a watchdog for Uncle Sam.”

“You work for Arnold Beckman, don’t you?”

“Me? I wish. We call ourselves private contractors.”

“What is it that Beckman wants so bad?”

“You don’t listen, do you, boy?”

Ishmael felt the heat from the cigarette close to his cheek. Then the heat went away. He heard Jessie sucking his teeth.

“My father will catch up with you,” Ishmael said. “He has a way of leaving his mark.”

Jessie was sitting close to him now, breathing through his nose, his breath crawling across Ishmael’s face. “From what I hear, he’s not the fathering kind. You’re lucky he didn’t strangle you with the umbilical cord.”

Ishmael felt encased in a sarcophagus. He was strapped to a bunk bed, his ankles bound with rope, his wrists cuffed to a wide leather belt buckled around his waist. He kept his head still, his eyes pointed at the ceiling, as though he could see through the cotton pads. He said nothing.

“Did I call it right?” Jessie asked.

“How do you know anything about my father?”

“My uncle by marriage was Harvey Logan. In case you don’t know who that is, he rode with the Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy. He said your father was a derelict he gave a dollar to so he could go to the bathhouse.”