Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“I did.”

“It’s an honor to meet you.”

Minutes later, outside in the wind, Pam Tibbs’s throat was still bladed with color, her back stiff with anger.” ‘An honor to meet you’?” she said. “What the hell is that? She’s a horse’s ass.”

“Look at it from her point of view.”

“She doesn’t have one.”

“She stands up for people who have no power. Why not give the devil her due?”

Pam went inside the stucco cottage, then came back out, letting the screen slam behind her. “Check it out. There’s a mattress in there soaked in blood, and bandages are scattered all over the floor. The blood is still sticky. I bet that guy was here while we were talking in the house. What was that stuff about Claire Chennault’s airline?”

“It was a CIA front that became Air America. They supplied the Laotian resistance and flew in and out of the Golden Triangle.”

“They transported opium?”

Hackberry removed his hat and knocked a dent out of the crown and put it back on. He felt old in the way people feel old when they have more knowledge of the world than they need. In the south the sky was blackening in the sunset, and dust was rising off the hills. “I think it’s fixing to blow,” he said.

KRILL SQUATTED ON the edge of the butte and looked out at the desert and at the red sun cooling on the horizon. The sky had turned green when the wind drove the rain from the west, and dust devils were spinning across the landscape below, the air blooming with a smell that was like wet flowers and chalk. He had washed his body with a rag and canteen water, and now his skin felt cool in the breeze and the layer of warm air that had risen from the desert and broken apart in the evening sky. His eyes were a milky blue, his expression composed, his skin dusky and dry and smooth and clean inside his wind-puffed shirt. As often happened in these solitary moments, Krill thought about a village in a country far to the south, its perimeter sealed by jungle, a dead volcano in the distance. Across the road from the house where he had lived, three children played in a dirt yard in front of the clinic that had been constructed by East Germans and burned by the army. In Krill’s reverie, the children turned to look at him, their faces lighting with recognition. Then their faces disappeared, as though airbrushed from his life.

“What we gonna do now, jefe?” Negrito said, squatting down next to him. He wore a greasy leather flop hat pushed back on his head, his hair curling like flames from under it.

Because Negrito was of mixed blood and his first language was bastardized English, he believed he and Krill were brothers in arms. But Krill neither liked nor trusted Negrito, whose facial features resembled those of an orange baboon that had fallen into a tub of bleach.

Krill continued to gaze at the desert and the way the light pooled in the clouds even though the sun had already set.

“Don’t believe that stuff about La Magdalena. She ain’t got no power, man,” Negrito said. “You know what they say about puta from over there. It’s sideways. That’s the only difference.”

Krill’s expression never changed, as though Negrito’s words were confetti falling on a flat stone. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Negrito leaning forward, dangerously close to the edge of the bluff, trying to earn his attention.

“Why’s this guy so important?” Negrito asked. “He got a lot of dope hid someplace??

?

“See down there below?” Krill said. “That’s a coyote den. See in that creek bed? Those are cougar tracks. The cougar has to kill fifty fawns to feed just one kitten. Except there aren’t fifty fawns around here. That means the coyote’s pups have to die instead.”

Negrito’s eyes went back and forth as he tried to puzzle through Krill’s statement. In the fading spark of sun on the horizon, his face was as rosy as a drunkard’s, his jutting forehead knurled, his mouth ringed with whiskers. “I’ll get it out of her. You say the word, jefe. She’ll be asking for knee pads,” he said.

Krill stared into Negrito’s face. “I’m not your chief. I’m nobody’s chief. You follow me or you don’t follow me.”

Negrito brushed one hand on top of the other, the horned edges of his palms rasping like sandpaper, his gaze avoiding Krill’s. He rocked on his heels, the points of his cowboy boots inches from the edge of the bluff. “You need a woman. It ain’t natural to be out here long without a woman. We all need a woman. Maybe we ought to go back to Durango for a while.”

Krill stood up and looked at the other men, all of whom were cooking pieces of jackrabbits they had killed and dressed and speared on sticks above a fire they had built inside a circle of stones. He picked up his rifle and put it across his shoulders and draped his arms over either end of it, creating a silhouette like that of a crucified man. “In the morning,” he said.

“We get out of here in the morning?” Negrito said. “Maybe to Durango?”

“You heard me, hombre.”

“Where you going now?”

“You’ll hear one shot. It’ll be for the cougar. You hear more than one shot, that means I found some real pissed-off gringos out there.”

“Because of what we done to that cop?”

“He worked for the DEA.”

“Man, you didn’t tell us that.”