Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

The lessons he had learned in prison were simple. There were two kinds of people in the slams: screwups like himself and those who had not only gone over to the dark side but enjoyed being there and had no plans to return. The joke was the latter category was not confined to convicts. The worst people he had ever known had worn uniforms or used ballpoint pens to do damage that no burglar could ever equal. How did you recognize the Temple Dowlings of the world? That one was easy. They always mocked. It was in their voice, their use of difficult words, the way they twisted whatever came out of your mouth. They stole other people’s dignity and made them resent themselves. He and his men had invaded Cody’s home and treated him as though he were sewage, then had driven away as indifferently as if they had run over a bug.

Where did that leave him in the mix, a man who had helped blind and disfigure a nurse in an abort

ion clinic? He didn’t like to think about that. His one serious fall was on a forgery charge. He had never deliberately hurt anyone. Why had he gotten mixed up with the people who had set off the bomb at the clinic? That one, too, was easy. They knew a useful loser when they saw one.

Maybe what was waiting for him under the thunderclouds up ahead wasn’t a totally undesirable fate. Maybe this was as good a place as any to cash in. He had spent most of his life waking up with a headful of spiders, then spending the rest of the day pretending they weren’t there. He had shot over the heads of Mexicans coming out of the desert, scaring the hell out of women with infants hanging in slings from their chests and backs. He had painted the American flag on the cliff above his house but had never been in the service. He was a religious hypocrite and a peckerwood bully. His mother took off with a trucker when he was three, and his father, whom he had loved, had placed him in an orphanage when he was nine, promising to return after working a pipeline job in Alaska. But he never saw his father again or heard what happened to him, if anything. Was everything a conspiracy against Cody Daniels? Or wasn’t it more probable that he was simply unwanted and, worse, unwanted for a legitimate reason? Gravity sucked, and shit always slid down the pipe, not up.

He felt his foot pressing on the accelerator. He had never thought so clearly about his life. The thunder rolling through the hills, the smell of the ozone, the cold tannic odor of the rain and dust, the branches of the mesquite and scrub oak bending almost to the ground all seemed like the pages of a book flipping before his eyes, defining the world and his role in it in a way he had never thought possible. Let Temple Dowling and his men do their worst. What was so bad about ending here, inside an electric storm, inside a clap of thunder that was as loud as God slapping His palms together?

Cody had all of these thoughts and was almost free of his fear when he drove into Anton Ling’s yard and his headlights lit up the scene taking place by the windmill. Then he remembered why he had been so afraid.

CHAPTER TEN

TWO MEN WERE holding Anton Ling by her arms. Her bare feet were bloody, her wrists duct-taped behind her. They had just lifted her out of the tank. Four other men stood close by, watching. All of the men were masked and had shifted their attention from Anton Ling to Cody. The only person not staring at him was Anton Ling, whose head hung on her chest, her wet hair wrapped around her cheeks. Cody Daniels braked and stared back at the men staring at him. He felt he had walked into someone else’s nightmare and would not be leaving it any time soon.

He opened the door and stepped out of his vehicle, the engine still running. The ground seemed to shake with thunder, pools of quicksilver rippling through the clouds. “Howdy, fellows,” he said.

No one answered him. Why did they look so surprised? Hadn’t they heard or seen his truck coming? Maybe the sound of the engine had gotten lost in the thunder. Or maybe Temple Dowling’s people had recognized his truck and had already dismissed his presence as insignificant. “It’s me. Cody Daniels. What’s going on?” he said.

“Turn off your engine and lights and get over here,” a tall man said.

“I was just doing like y’all told me. Keeping an eye on the place and all. I don’t think y’all should be doing this to Miss Anton.”

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then cut your engine and your lights.”

“Yes, sir, I’m on it,” Cody said. He reached back in the cab and turned off the ignition and headlights. He looked at the sky in the east and the wind flattening the trees on the hillcrests and the darkness that seemed to extend to the edges of the earth. “Boy, this has been a frog-stringer, hasn’t it? Where’s Mr. Dowling at?”

“What are you doing here?”

“Motoring around and such.”

“Motoring around?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Take out your wallet and put it on the hood of your vehicle.”

“You don’t know me?”

The tall man approached him. “Don’t make me repeat myself.”

“See, I thought y’all might be the cops I called earlier. I saw the lights on down here, which didn’t seem right, so I did a nine-one-one and figured y’all were with Sheriff Holland. I expect he ought to be showing up any time now.”

“You’re a damn poor liar, boy.”

“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t call me that.”

“Get on your knees and put your hands behind your head.”

“That woman hasn’t done anything to y’all. Why don’t you leave her alone?”

The tall man drove his fist into Cody’s stomach, burying it to his wrist. Cody doubled over, his breath exploding from his chest, his knees collapsing in the dirt. The tall man shoved him over with his boot, then stepped on the side of his face. “Who are you?”

“A guy who lives up in the cliffs.”