Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“Maybe I don’t feel good about it.”

“My leg hurts. I don’t want to listen to this no more.”

“I want to go to California and get clean and start over. Give me one of the eggs. I got the information you want.”

Danny Boy looked at the attendant for a long time, his eyes going dull with fatigue. “My duffel bag is on the floor.”

“You’re doing the right thing, man. But I got to ask you something. Why you want to help this guy Barnum?”

“’Cause I got to make up for something.”

“Like what?”

“I was there when Barnum escaped from some killers. I saw the killers torture a man to death.”

“For real?”

“Where’s Noie Barnum?”

“I don’t know the exact place, but when I gave the man in the desert the medical supplies, he looked at the north and said, ‘It’s fixing to rain snakes and frogs up yonder.’ I go, ‘Where up yonder?’ He says, ‘In the Glass Mountains. You ought to come up there and stand in front of a gully washer. It’d flat hydr

ate all that dope out of your system, make a man out of you.’” The attendant looked into space. “He’s got a special way of making people feel small.”

Danny Boy didn’t reply.

“He made you feel the same way, didn’t he?” the attendant said.

“Not no more he cain’t,” Danny Boy said.

IT RAINED THAT night. To the south, a tropical storm had blown ashore on the Mexican coast, and the air smelled as dense and cool and laden with salt as seawater, almost as if a great displaced ocean lay just beyond the hills that ringed the town. Before Hackberry Holland and Pam Tibbs arrived at the hospital to interview Danny Boy, a bolt of lightning knocked out the power all over the county. Flashes of white electricity flickered inside the clouds, and Hackberry thought he could smell tropical flowers and dried kelp in the wind and gas inside the trees on the hospital lawn. He was sure these were the musings of a self-absorbed old man, one who could not stop thinking about the past and the ephemerality of his life.

He and Pam Tibbs interviewed Danny Boy before he went into surgery, then tried unsuccessfully to find the ambulance attendant. Hackberry and Pam and their deputies and the surgeons and the other hospital personnel all did their jobs throughout the power outage, not thinking, just doing, never taking the time to wonder if any of it mattered or not. You did your job and you let the score take care of itself. How many times a day did Hackberry offer that same tired workhorse counsel to himself? Was that how one ended his days? Probably, he thought. No, there was no “probably” about it. If you thought about mortality in any other fashion, you’d go insane or put a gun in your mouth.

After the power came back on, he and Pam drove two blocks to a café on the courthouse square and had coffee and a piece of pie. Through the window, Hackberry could see the trees on the courthouse lawn and the mist blowing across the lawn and the streetlights shining on a bronze statue of a World War I doughboy, his ’03 Springfield gripped in one hand, his other hand raised above his head as though he were rallying his comrades.

“You look tired,” Pam said.

“You mean I look old.”

“No, I don’t mean that at all.”

“I’m fine. I’ve never been better.”

“Pray that liars aren’t kept a long time in purgatory.”

“Pam, you should have been a low-overhead dentist, someone who does fillings and extractions without the extra cost of Novocain.”

She gazed out the window at the rain and at the drops of water beaded on the glass. Her eyelashes were reddish brown against the glow of the streetlamp; a wet strand of hair curved against her cheek. He couldn’t tell if she was thinking about the two of them or all the events of the past few days. She seemed to read his thoughts. “Why does a mass killer make himself vulnerable to arrest by buying stolen medicine from a junkie in order to take care of a stranger?” she said.

“That’s what every one of them does.”

“Every one of who does what?” she said.

“All sociopaths. They do good deeds as a tribute to their own power and to convince others they’re like the rest of us.”

“You don’t think Collins has any feelings about Noie Barnum?”

“I think the only genuine emotion he’s capable of is self-pity.”