Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“Want me for anything else?”

“Nope, but I’ll tell you when I do.”

“I’m just passing on the conversation.”

“Got it,” he said.

A half hour later, Ethan Riser called again. “Why wouldn’t you talk to me a while ago?” Hackberry asked.

“I had an incoming call from Washington. I thought I explained that to your dispatcher.”

“Evidently not. Did your lab get some prints for us?”

“Come down to the saloon. I’ll buy you a drink.”

“You’re in town?”

“Yeah, I have to be over in Brewster tonight. But I like the saloon and café you have here. It’s quite a spot.”

“I’m glad you were able to find time to visit. You have a reason for not coming to my office?”

“Can’t do it, partner. That’s the way it is,” Riser said.

“I see. My dispatcher is named Maydeen Stoltz. If you run into her, just keep going.”

“Care to explain that?”

“You’ll figure it out.” Hackberry hung up the telephone without saying good-bye. He got up from his desk and went into Pam Tibbs’s office. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

When they entered the saloon, Riser was eating a hamburger and drinking beer from a frosted mug in a back booth. His gaze slipped from Hackberry’s face to Pam’s, then back to Hackberry’s. “Order up. It’s on the G,” he said.

Pam Tibbs and Hackberry sat down across from him. The saloon was dark and cool and smelled of beer and pickled sausage and ground meat frying in the kitchen. The floor was built from railroad ties that had been treated with creosote and blackened by soot from prairie fires, the heads of the rusty steel spikes worn the color of old nickels. The mirror behind the bar had a long fissure across it, shaped like a lightning bolt, so that the person looking into it saw a severed image of himself, one that was normal, one that was distorted, like a face staring up from the bottom of a frozen lake. Riser drank from his beer, a shell of ice sliding down his fingers. “I like this place. I always stop here when I’m in the area,” he said.

“Yeah, it’s five stars, all right. How about losing the charade?” Hackberry said.

“I do what I have to do, Sheriff.”

“I’m not sympathetic.”

“Okay,” Riser said, setting down his beer, pushing away his food. “The guy who ate off that paper plate doesn’t have prints on file in the conventional system. But you knew that or you wouldn’t have given it to us. You were trying to use us, Sheriff.”

“I gave you the paper plate because I had a professional obligation to give it to you,” Hackberry said.

“Deputy Tibbs, can you go up to the bar and get whatever you and Sheriff Holland are having and bring another beer for me?” Riser said.

“No, I can’t,” she replied.

Riser looked at her out of the corner of his eye. He finished his beer and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “This guy Krill is in the computer at Langley. Before 9/11 we didn’t have access to certain kinds of information. Now we do. A couple of decades back, our administration had some nasty characters working for us in Central America. Krill was one of them. He was of low-level importance in the big scheme of things but quite valuable in the bush.”

“What’s his real name?” Pam asked.

“Sorry?” Riser said.

“Are you hard of hearing?” she asked.

“Sheriff, we have a problem here,” Riser said.

“No, we don’t have a problem,” Pam said. “The problem is you treat us like we’re welfare cases you keep at bay with table scraps. Sheriff Holland has treated you and the Bureau with respect. Why don’t you and your colleagues pull your heads out of your asses?”