Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“You don’t got to tell me. I’ll get the shovel and take care of it. But it’s a big waste of opportunity, man. And going out in the desert is a double waste of time and gas and effort. The others ain’t gonna like this. We ain’t been making no money, Krill. Everything we do is about your dead kids and getting even with the Americans ’cause their helicopter killed them. But how about us, man? We have needs and families, too.”

Krill waited for Negrito to finish before he spoke, his face neutral, his white cotton shirt filling with air in the wind. “See, what you don’t understand, my brother in arms, is that the Texan hasn’t done anything to us. You fill the big wood canteen with water and put it in the car, and you put a sack of food with it. Then you drive the Tejano at least fifty kilometers into the desert and turn him loose. Later, you meet us in La Babia. With luck, all this will pass. If you hurt or sell the Texan, we will have no peace. Do you understand that now, my brother?”

“If that’s what you say,” Negrito replied.

“Good.”

“And after La Babia?”

“Who knows? The Quaker belongs to us. We have to get him back. If you want to get paid, that’s how we will all get paid. Then you can entertain all the chicas in Durango and Piedras Negras and Chihuahua. You will be famous among them for your generosity.”

“You’ll sell the Quaker to the Arabs but not the Texan to our own people?”

“The man Barnum has made machines that kill from the air, no matter what kind of conversion he claims to have gone through. All the gringos are makers of war and the killers of our people. Let them lie together in their own waste and eat it, too.”

“I ain’t never gonna understand you.”

Krill watched Negrito enter the back of the farmhouse, the rowels on his spurs tinkling, the pad of orange hair on his arms and shoulders glowing against the light that fell from the kitchen. Unconsciously, Krill rested his palm against the car trunk and felt the exhaust heat in the metal soak into his skin and leave his hand feeling scorched and dirty.

THE BROTHEL WHERE two SUVs with Texas plates were parked did not look like a brothel. Or at least it did not resemble the adobe houses or clusters of cribs on the far end of town where the street bled into the darkness of the desert and drunks sometimes wandered away from their copulations to bust beer bottles with their firearms out on the hardpan. The brothel frequented by the Texans was located at the end of a gravel lane and was actually an enclave of buildings that had once made up a ranch. The main house was built of stone quarried out of the mountains and had a wide terrazzo porch with large glazed ceramic urns that were planted with Spanish daggers and flowers that opened only at night. The colonnade over the porch was supported by cedar posts and covered with Spanish tile and tilted downward to direct rainwater during the monsoon season away from the house.

There was no lighting outside the building, which helped preserve the anonymity of the patrons. The night air smelled of flowers and warm sand and water that had pooled and gone stagnant and was auraed by clouds of gnats. Pam Tibbs pulled the Cherokee to a stop and cut the ignition. “How do you want to play it?” she said.

“We wear our badges and carry our weapons in full view,” Hackberry replied.

“I’ve seen that purple SUV before.”

“Where?”

“When I broke both of its taillights in front of the café.”

“That’s Temple Dowling’s vehicle?” he said.

“It was when I broke his taillights. You’re surprised Dowling would be here?”

“Nothing about Dowling surprises me. But I thought the man with the hole in his face might have been working for the Russian, this guy Sholokoff.”

“Let’s find out.”

“You feel comfortable going in there?” he asked.

She rested her hands on top of the steering wheel. Even in the starlight, he could see the shine on her upper arms and the sunburned tips of her hair. He could also see the pity in her eyes. “It’s not me who’s uncomfortable,” she said. “When are you going to accept your own goodness and the fact that you’ve paid for what you might have done wrong when you were young?”

“When the mermaids come back to Texas,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“It was a private joke between my father and me. Ready to make life interesting for the shitbags?”

“Always,” she replied.

They got out on either side of the Cherokee and went inside the brothel. The living room was furnished with a red velvet settee and deep leather chairs and a cloth sofa and a coffee table set with wineglasses and dark bottles of burgundy and a bottle of Scotch and a bucket of ice. There was also a bowl of guacamole and a bowl of tortilla chips on the table. The only light came from two floor lamps with shades that were hung with pink tassels. Two mustached men Hackberry had seen before sat on the sofa, dipping chips into the guacamole and drinking Scotch on the rocks. A Mexican girl not over fifteen, in a spangled blue dress, was sitting on the settee. She wore white moccasins on her feet and purple glass beads around her neck. Her skin was dusky, her nose beaked, her Indian eyes as elongated as an Asian’s. Her lipstick and rouge could not disguise the melancholy in her face.

“How are you gentlemen tonight?” Hackberry said.

“Pretty good, Sheriff. I didn’t think you’d remember us,” one of them said.

“You came to my office with Mr. Dowling,” Hackberry said.