Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“No one cares. They didn’t care then, they don’t care now. It was The Washington Post and The New York Times that debunked the story.”

“Do you know the names of the guys you saw outside your room?”

“No, but I think they were here to wipe the slate clean. The man I recognized was a connection between the Contras and some dope mules in California.”

“Do you know the name Josef Sholokoff?”

“I do. He was part of the drug deal with the Contras. There’s no end to this,” she said.

“To what?”

“To the grief I’ve caused others.”

“People like us don’t make the wars, Miss Anton. We just get to fight in them,” he said. “I’ve lost a deputy sheriff down here in Mexico. For all I know, he’s dead now. When I catch the guys who did this, I’m going to cool them out proper and not feel any qualms about it.”

“I think you’re not served well by your rhetoric.”

“I’ve got a flash for you, Miss Anton. The only real pacifists are dead Quakers. Ambrose Bierce said that when reflecting on his experience at Shiloh.”

“It’s also cheap stuff. Good-bye.” She broke the connection.

“Look up ahead,” Pam said, steering down into the streambed. “There’re tire tracks in the sand. They go through the backyard of that adobe house. This has to be the hill the bartender was talking about.”

Hackberry turned on the spotlight mounted on the passenger side of the Jeep and shone it through the darkness. A yellow dog with mange on its face and neck, its sides skeletal, its dugs distended, emerged from the shell of the house and stared into the brilliance of the beam before loping away.

“You want to try the switchback up the hill or go around?” Pam asked.

“We take the high ground. Park behind the house. We’ll walk over the hill and come down on top of them.”

“Back there in the cantina, I saw a side of you that bothers me, Hack,” she said.

“I don’t have another side, Pam. You stand behind your people or you don’t stand behind your people. It’s that simple. We get R.C. back from this collection of cretins. When I was at Inchon, I was very frightened. But a line sergeant told me something I never forgot. ‘Don’t think about it before it happens, and don’t think about it when it’s over.’ We bring R.C. home. You with me on that?”

“I’m with you in everything. But my words mean little to you,” she replied. “And that bothers me more than you seem able to understand.”

He didn’t speak again until they had parked the Jeep behind the adobe house, and then it was only to tell her to walk behind him when they went over the crest of the hill.

THE MAN WEARING the hat and holstered thumb-buster squatted on his haunches, eye level with R.C. His breath was as dense and tannic as sewer gas. Two Mexicans wearing jeans that looked stitched to their skins stood stiffly on either side of him, like bookends fashioned from wire. “You have a bad moment or two down there?” the man asked.

R.C. nodded, meeting the strange man’s eyes briefly.

“Enough to make you wet your britches?” the man asked.

“No, sir, I didn’t do that.”

The man lifted his chin and pinched the loose flesh under his throat. He was unshaved, and his whiskers looked as stiff as pig bristles. “What’s it like under the ground, with a mask on your face and a lifeline anyone can pinch off with the sole of his boot?”

“Dark.”

“Like the inside of a turnip sack, I bet.”

“That comes right close to it.”

“Your heart start twisting and your breath start coming out of your windpipe like you swallowed a piece of glass?”

“That pert’ near says it,” R.C. replied.

“I can sympathize.”