House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

“Cut off Beckman’s fingers and make him eat them one at a time.”

Darl’s face went white.

“That’s a joke,” Hackberry said. “Trust me, everything will be all right. Let’s get out of the car and find out where they’ve got my boy.”

“I don’t believe you,” Darl said, opening the door. “Look yonder. There’s a red light shining through that mission. What have we got ourselves into, Mr. Holland?”

“JUST PUT ONE foot after another,” Jeff said, leading Ishmael along a stone wall, his eyes still taped. “Now turn left into this little room. There you go, buddy. Sit down in the chair. Let’s take off those eye pads so we can talk while I fix some grub. Well, lookie there.”

“Look at what?” Ishmael said.

Jeff pulled the adhesive tape from Ishmael’s brow and cheeks and the bridge of his nose and lifted the pads from his eyes. “See? It’s kind of like the Northern Lights. Nature doesn’t follow its own rules sometimes. Here, stand up and take a look.”

“Can you take off the manacles?”

“That’s up to Mr. Beckman. Stand up.”

There was one window in the room, ground-level and narrow, like a slit in a machine-gun bunker. Ishmael could see a massive bank of black clouds in the west and, at the bottom of the sky, a red ember burning inside a blue patch behind the Spanish ruins.

“It’ll go away directly,” Jeff said. “Those kinds of sunsets give me the willies. I cain’t tell you exactly why. They put me in mind of my father for some reason. He’d start preaching while he was whaling the tar out of us. I flat hated that son of a bitch. Even after one of my brothers pushed him off a cliff, I’d dream about him and have these funny feelings, like time had run out and the whole earth was fixing to be consumed in a fire. Know what I mean?”

“No, not at all.”

“You probably had a different kind of upbringing. Why you got that look on your face?”

“I didn’t know what you looked like.”

The walls were plastered and painted white. A wood cookstove stood in one corner, a tin pipe leading up through the ceiling. Jeff began stuffing kindling and newspaper into the hob. His beard was rust-colored and as stiff as wire, his eyes many-faceted, undefinable, as impervious as agate.

“When are you going to do it, Jeff?” Ishmael said.

“Do what?” Jeff said, concentrating on his work, a grin at the corner of his mouth.

“Kill me.”

“I wouldn’t do that. I like you.”

“You’re full of it, bub.”

“Wish you wouldn’t talk to me like that.”

“My father will hang your hide on a nail.”

Jeff swung his fist backward across Ishmael’s face, knocking him into the chair, Ishmael’s wrists hooked to the leather restraining belt. Jeff opened and closed his hand and shook it in the air, as though slinging water off his fingers. “Sorry about that. I got triggers in me people shouldn’t mess with. You all right?”

“No.”

“It’s the breaks of the game, kid. None of this is personal. We each got a job. One guy wins, one guys loses. Down the track everybody ends up in the same place, with a shovel-load of dirt raining down in his face.”

“I’ve already done that. On the Marne, buried alive. I told you about calling me ‘kid.’ Jeff, I hate to tell you this, but you piss me off.”

Jeff struck a match and dropped it in the hob. He tried to fan the kindling alight, then gave up and closed the hob and watched a single puff of white smoke rise from one of the stove lids. “Let’s go.”

“Where to?”

“Back to your cot and the blindfold. On your feet.”

Ishmael bent forward, his head hanging down, his arms stretched behind him. “I don’t think I can do it.”