Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“I think one of them is still alive.”

“He’s brain-dead. The twitching hand doesn’t mean anything.”

“Better tell her that,” Pam replied.

He turned and saw Anton Ling on her knees next to the dying man, trying to resuscitate him, forcing her breath inside his mouth and down his windpipe, mashing on his chest with the heel of her hand. Her dress and hair and chin and cheeks were speckled with his blood. She turned his head to one side and drained his mouth, then bent over him and tried again.

“Miss Anton?” Hackberry said.

She didn’t speak or even look up.

“This fellow is gone, Miss Anton,” he said.

She stared up into Hackberry’s face. Her mouth was smeared, her eyes slightly crossed. “You gave it your best,” he said, putting his hands under her elbows, lifting her up.

“Who did this?” she said.

“The man who calls himself the left hand of God.”

“That’s an insult to God,” she said.

“Jack Collins is an insult to the planet,” Hackberry said. “But Pam and I need to get to work.”

“Are these federal agents?” Anton Ling asked.

“Maybe,” he said. His knees popping, he squatted down, wincing at the pain in his lower back. He slipped the wallet from the back pocket of the man Anton Ling had tried to resuscitate. The leather was warm and sticky, and he had to wipe his fingers on a handkerchief before he opened it. Hackberry sorted through the credit cards, driver’s license, and celluloid photo holders, then set the wallet down by the dead man’s foot. He recovered the wallet from the second victim and did the same. He got to his feet, slightly off balance. “If Collins was trying to do payback on the feds, he screwed up.”

“How?” Pam said.

“These guys worked for a security service out of Houston. My bet is they were doing scut work for Temple Dowling. He’s a defense contractor and the son of a United States senator I was a hump for.”

“I didn’t catch that.”

“I got politically ambitious back in the sixties.”

“Everybody makes mistakes,” Pam said.

“A mistake is something you do when you don’t know better.”

“What’s the guitar doing here?” she said.

“Who knows? Collins is a harlequin. He has contempt for most of the people he kills.”

Pam gazed down the incline. While Hackberry looked through the wallets of the two dead men, Anton Ling had gone back to her truck and was now walking back up the slope with a small silver bottle in her hand. She unscrewed the top and knelt by the man whose life she had tried to save. She put a drop of oil on her finger and drew the sign of the cross on his forehead.

“Miss Anton?” Pam said. “We shouldn’t mess too much with the bodies until the coroner gets here.”

“If you don’t want me to, I won’t,” Anton Ling said.

Pam looked at Hackberry and waited.

“It won’t hurt anything,” he said.

Pam watched Anton Ling kneel by the second man and make the sign of the cross on his forehead with her thumb. Then Pam went back to the Jeep and returned

with an oversize United States Forest Service canteen and a roll of paper towels. She poured water on a clutch of paper sections and squatted down by Anton Ling and began to wipe her hands and her face and then her hair.

“You don’t need to do that,” Anton Ling said.