Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“You been buried alive?”

“Not in the way you have.”

“You either have or you haven’t.”

“When I was a little boy, my mother would stick me eight or nine hours inside a footlocker. I’d pretend I was on the spine of a boxcar, flying across the countryside under the stars. Did you have fanciful notions like that? Then you opened your eyes and thought somebody had poured an inkwell inside your head.”

“Maybe your soul can go somewhere else. That’s the way I figure it. That’s how come people don’t go crazy sometimes,” R.C. said. Then he added, as though he were in the presence of a confidant, “I got wrapped up in a rubber sheet when I was a little baby and almost suffocated. My mother was in the yard and looked through the window and said I’d already turned blue. She ran inside and saved my life.”

“You saying you had a real mother but mine was cut out of different cloth, maybe burlap?”

“No, sir, I didn’t say that,” R.C. replied, looking away.

“I wouldn’t care if you did. Do you think I care about your opinion of my mother?”

“No, sir.”

“What’s the nature of your relationship with Sheriff Holland?”

“Sir?”

“You deaf?”

“I’m his deputy. My name is R. C. Bevins. I grew up in Ozona and Del Rio and Marathon. My daddy was a tool pusher in the oil field. My mother was a cashier at the IGA till the day she died. She went to work one day and never came home.”

“Why should I care what your parents did or didn’t do?”

“’Cause I know who you are. ’Cause I know what happens to people when you get your hands on them. So if you do the same to me, I want you to know who I am, or who I was.”

“Who do you think I am?”

“A stone killer who don’t take prisoners.”

“For somebody who was just dug up from a grave, maybe you should take your transmission out of overdrive.”

“Maybe you should have practiced a little self-inventory before you murdered all them Asian girls.”

r /> “You’re ahead of the game, boy. Best respect your elders.”

“I ain’t the one trying to get inside somebody else’s thoughts, like some kind of pervert.”

“You were in the whorehouse to play the piano?”

“If that’s what it was, I was there because I blew out my tire. So don’t go belittling me.”

The man in the hat glanced up at the two Mexicans, his eyes amused, the soles of his boots grating on the gravel. “You thirsty?”

R.C. swallowed but didn’t reply.

“You ever kill a man?”

“I never had to,” R.C. said.

“Maybe that’s waiting for you down the pike.”

“If I got choices, it ain’t gonna happen.”

“You want a drink of water or not?”