Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“Nothing.”

“That’s right. Nothing. And that’s why you’re gonna start to dig. Or maybe I’m gonna start shooting you in various places that will hurt more than you can believe.”

“I done told you, I ain’t gonna do it. So you’d better kill me, ’cause somewhere down the road, I’m gonna catch up with you. You damn betcha I will.”

Negrito’s eyes were rheumy, his face dull with fatigue, his mouth caked. He made a snuffing sound and rubbed his nose with the back of his wrist. “Release the shovel and get in the trunk of the car.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“I got to dig your hole. That makes me very mad. You are lucky I am a merciful man.”

R.C. let the shovel fall to the ground and started toward the gasguzzler, glancing warily over his shoulder, then tripping and stumbling. He heard Negrito pick up the shovel.

“Look up there,” Negrito said.

“At what?”

“The preacher up there in the rocks. See, against the moon. He wants to be your friend. The sacerdote who eats his own mierda has come to your rescue. Or maybe it’s the sheriff you work for. Maybe this is your lucky day.”

R.C. stared at the clumps of brush in the arroyos and at the layers of rock exposed by erosion in the hillside and at the tailings of a mine that spilled like rust down to the wash. He saw a shadow move across the moon. “That’s a coyote,” he said.

He turned around just as Negrito whipped the shovel with both hands through the air and almost flattened the concave steel blade on the back of R.C.’s head.

“I think you was right. It was just a coyote,” Negrito said, staring up the hill.

JACK COLLINS LAY below the crest of the hill, his belly and loins and legs stretched out on a flat rock that had ripples in it like water, his hat beside him, his eyes raised just above a pile of crumbling stone. Behind him, the two Mexican informers, cousins who did murders for hire, were talking quietly to each other, sometimes glancing up in his direction. They were restless men and did not like either indecision or complexity and often found themselves caught between their own self-protective instincts and their hesitancy to challenge the strange ways of the gringo loco whose lethality was a legend in Coahuila and Chihuahua. Finally, the one named Eladio approached the unshaved and unwashed American who dressed in rags and wore a heavy revolver on his hip, squatting down so as not to silhouette against the sky. “Señor Jack?” he said.

“Be patient,” Jack said, peering down the opposite slope.

“Why don’t we just go down there in the streambed and kill Negrito? I’ll do it without no charge.”

Jack looked back over his shoulder and grinned. “You boys were supposed to give me the man named Krill. We didn’t come out here to hunt an orange ape.”

“I thought Krill would be at the farmhouse. He’s a very hard man to catch, boss. This is the place Negrito sometimes uses to bury his victims. It is fortunate that I knew that.”

“So we’re saved from your incompetence by the intervention of the fates, and that should make me feel good?”

“You talk too fast for me to understand sometimes, boss.”

Jack worked his way backward on the rock until he was well under the level of the hillcrest, then got to his feet. He dusted off his knees and the elbows of his suit coat and fitted on his hat, glancing at the strips of black cloud across the moon. He gestured for the other cousin to join him and Eladio. But minutes seemed to pass before he spoke. In the silence, he glanced at one man, then the other, and then into space, as though viewing two different screens in his head. “I pay you boys enough?” he asked.

“Sí,” both of them said, nodding.

“Krill has done great injury to a friend of mine. The one down the slope, the ape, isn’t even a cipher.”

“What is this ‘cipher’? These kinds of words don’t mean nozzing to us, boss,” Eladio said.

“The fact you boys were raised up poor and ignorant isn’t your fault. Most of y’all’s mothers would have had you aborted if they’d had the money. But today there’s no excuse for ignorance in an adult. People in mud huts watch CNN. The Internet is available in a street-corner café. You boys have access to the same knowledge a university professor does. I suggest y’all start showing a little more initiative regarding your self-improvement.”

“We seek to please you, not to upset you, Señor Jack,” Eladio said.

“You did very well following Temple Dowling for me. You did well learning of the machinations of Negrito with the young lawman. But you haven’t given me Krill. Krill is the objective, not his monkey. Are y’all listening?”

“We ain’t perfect, boss,” the cousin said. His name was Jaime, and of the two Mexican killers, he was the less intelligent and the more recalcitrant.

Eladio looked angrily at his cousin, then turned his attention back to Jack, trying to undo any damage his cousin might have caused. “We can take Negrito alive and entertain him in ways he’ll understand,” Eladio said.

“Is he the kind of man who gives up reliable information when he’s in pain?” Jack said. “Or does he lie and tell you what you want to hear?”