Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“Walk out here where I can see you, Reverend.”

“Did you bring the ambulance?”

“Do what I say, please.”

“Yes, sir, I’m coming,” Daniels said, walking into the dining room. “They beat up Miss Anton and almost drowned her. We got to get her to the hospital. Sometimes people get pneumonia when they almost drown.”

Hackberry still held his revolver, his eyes roving around the house’s interior, searching over Cody Daniels’s shoulder. “Where’s Collins?”

“Is that his name?”

“Will you answer the question?”

“You’re talking about the guy who killed all those Thai women, right? He didn’t give us his name. He just asked who did this to Miss Anton. I told him I didn’t have a clue.”

Hackberry holstered his revolver and went into the bedroom. Anton Ling lay on a mattress that had been pulled off the bedsprings. Her dresser drawers had been dumped and her clothes pulled from the hangers in the closet. There was blood on her pillow, her clothes were drenched, and her eyes had the lack of focus that accompanies brain concussion. He knelt beside her. “Who did this to you, Miss Anton?”

“They all wore camouflage masks. Only one man spoke.”

“What was Jack Collins doing here?”

“The man in the suit?”

“Yes, what did he say to you?”

“He wanted to know who the men were. He said he and I were on the same side. He touched my face with his hand. Cody told him not to do that, and for a minute I was afraid for Cody’s life.”

“Cody?”

“If it weren’t for him, I’d be dead.”

Hackberry looked over his shoulder at Cody Daniels and said, “Where’s the guy from the power company, the one named Marvin?”

“The guy in the suit threw his keys on the roof and told him to hoof it. So that’s what he did,” Cody Daniels replied.

“The ambulance will be here in a few minutes, Miss Anton,” Hackberry said. “I need to talk with the reverend, but I’ll be right outside.”

“I think I heard someone speak in Russian,” she said. “But I can’t be sure.”

“You’re pretty sure of that?” Hackberry said.

“Yes, I’d almost swear it was Russian, or at least East European.”

As Hackberry got to his feet, tentacles of pain wrapped around his lower back and his buttocks, sinking into his viscera and then disappearing. He walked Cody Daniels toward the kitchen. “What were you doing out here?” he said.

“I wanted to see if she was all right. Then I left. That’s when I saw this gray truck with an extended cab come down from the hills behind her fence line. It had a smokestack on it, one sticking up by the cab. The only guy I talked to had a mouth full of chewing tobacco and smelled like it, too.”

“What time did you arrive on her property?”

“It was dark. I didn’t note the time.”

“You were looking in her windows?”

“I don’t do things like that.”

“You just drive out to other people’s property in the middle of the night?”

“Yeah, in this case, that’s what I did. I got a better question for you. When’s that dadburn ambulance coming?”