Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“He called you a drunk.”

“That’s what I used to be.”

“That’s not all of it. I heard him whispering, then all of them laughed.”

“Blow it off. These guys aren’t worth talking about.”

“Then one guy said, ‘He brought clap home to his wife?’ Dowling said something I couldn’t hear, and they all laughed again, loud enough that everybody in the café turned around and looked at them.”

“What that man said isn’t true. But I don’t care whether he says it or not. If he does it in my presence, I’ll do something about it. In the meantime, let’s forget it and talk to Danny Boy.” Hackberry took the ring of cell keys off a peg next to his hat.

“I followed them into the parking lot,” Pam said.

“Did you hit somebody?”

“No.”

“All right, then let it go.”

“I took the motormouth aside, the one who said something about clap. He was the driver of one of the SUVs. I told him I wasn’t going to cite him for his broken taillights, but if I ever heard him slander your name again, I was going to beat the living shit out of him.”

“He had two broken taillights?”

“He did after I broke them.”

“Pam?”

“What?”

“What can I say?”

“I don’t know.”

He stepped closer to her, towering over her, and cupped his hand around the back of her neck. Her skin felt hot against his palm. He could smell the shampoo in her hair and the heat in her body and feel the hardness of the muscles in her neck. “You have to stop protecting me,” he said.

“You’re my boss, and I won’t allow white trash to tell lies about you.”

“You really know how to jump-start a man’s day,” he said.

She lifted her eyes to his. Her mouth looked like a flower that had crumpled in on itself in the shade. “Think so?” she said.

He removed his hand from the back of her neck and tried not to swallow. There was a thickness in his throat, a tightness in his chest, and a weakness in his loins that he did not want to recognize. “Why would Collins bother Danny Boy?” he said hoarsely.

“He

wants to hurt you.”

“It’s that simple?”

“You bet your ass,” she replied.

They climbed up the spiral steel stairs in the back of the building and walked down the corridor to a cell whose outer wall was a checkerboard pattern of steel bands and cast-iron plates that had been painted white and were now crosshatched with scratch marks and stained by orange rust around the rivets. Danny Boy was looking out the window when they approached the cell. When he turned around, his head and neck were framed against the window, his body enveloped in shadow, so that his head seemed to rest, decapitated, upon a plate. “I don’t want out,” he said.

“Can’t lock up a man who hasn’t committed a crime,” Hackberry said.

“I’ll drink if I’m back on the street,” Danny Boy said.

“Incarceration is not the best way to find sobriety,” Hackberry said.