Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

Cody went into the coffee room and filled a small pitcher with tap water. His head was pounding, his breath short, but he didn’t know why. Was it just fear? Krill may have been a killer, but he was no threat to him. Krill was totally absorbed with the status of his children in the afterlife. What about Negrito? No, Negrito was not a threat, either, not as long as he was under Krill’s control. So what was it that caused Cody’s heart to race and the scalp to shrink on his head?

This was the first time he had ever done anything of a serious nature as a minister. And he was doing it at a time when he was about to flee his church and home and become a fugitive, just like the road kid who had forged checks and ended up on a county prison farm. He walked back into the chapel, knocking against a worktable he had fashioned from two planks and sawhorses, spilling a nail gun and a claw hammer to the floor.

Krill had opened the top of the wood box and was standing expectantly beside it, his gaze fixed on Cody. “How do you want to do it?” he asked.

Cody hadn’t thought about it. The images that went through his mind were too bizarre to keep straight in his head. He looked into the box and swallowed. “Put them on the edge of the stage,” he said.

“They’re watching,” Krill said.

“They’re watching?”

“From limbo. They want to be turned loose. That’s what you’re going to do.”

“Listen, I don’t know about those kinds of things,” Cody said. “Don’t make me out something I’m not.”

“You have cojones, hombre. I misjudged you.” Krill placed his children, one after another, on the apron of the stage. The oldest child could not have been over four when he died. The younger ones might have been three or two. All three were wrapped tightly in cloth and duct tape. Only their faces were exposed. Their eyes were little more than slits, their skin gray, their tiny cheekbones as pronounced as wire. There was no odor of decomposition. Instead, they smelled like freshly turned dirt in a garden, or like damp shade in woods carpeted with mushrooms.

“What are you waiting for?” Krill said.

“I feel like I’m doing something that’s dishonest,” Cody said.

“Your words make no sense. They are the words of a man with thorns in his head instead of thoughts.”

“Your children are innocent. They never hurt anybody.”

“Do not make me lose my patience, hombre. Do what you need to do.”

Cody poured water from the pitcher on the thumb and the tips of his fingers and made the sign of the cross on each child’s forehead. “I baptize these children in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

“That’s good. I’m proud of you, man,” Krill said.

“But it’s me and these two men who need absolution, Lord. These children didn’t commit any sin,” Cody said. “I left a woman blinded and maimed for the rest of her life, and the two men standing beside me are covered with blood splatter. We’re not worthy to touch the hem of Your garment. We’re not worthy to baptize these children, either, particularly the likes of me. But You’re probably used to hypocrites offering up their prayers, so I doubt if two or three more liars in Your midst is gonna make a lot of difference in the outcome of things.”

“You better shut your mouth, gringo,” Negrito said.

“I’m done. I’m sorry for what happened to your children, Krill. If y’all are fixing to kill me, I reckon now is the time.”

He walked into the coffee room, his back twitching. Out the window, he could see the deck of his house glimmer in a bolt of lightning, like the bow of an ark sliding out of a black wave. He sat down in a folding chair, his back to the doorway that gave onto the chapel. A phone was on the counter by the sink, and for a moment he thought about picking it up and dialing 911. But what for? If Krill planned to kill him, he would do it before a sheriff’s cruiser could arrive. Also, Cody would eventually have to tell the sheriff or one of his deputies about the clinic bombing, and Cody had no intention of going back to jail, or at least no intention to actively aid and abet his own imprisonment.

One minute clicked on the clock mounted on the wall, then two, then three. He heard Krill’s and Negrito’s boots walking across the chapel floor. He closed his eyes and clasped his hands between his thighs. He could hear his breath rasping in his throat. His fingers were trembling, his sphincter constricting. Then he heard the front door of the chapel swing open and felt a rush of air sweep through the pews. A moment later, he heard the gas-guzzler start up and drive away.

Cody opened his eyes and got up from the chair and began stacking dirty cups and saucers and plates in the sink and wiping down the long table in the center of the room. He had never thought the act of cleaning up a coffee room could be so pleasurable. Why had he spent so much of his life concentrating on every problem in the world rather than simply enjoying the small pleasures that an orderly life provided? Why did wisdom come only when it was too late to make use of it?

He poured a cup of coffee and put a small teaspoon of sugar in it and gazed out the window at the rain blowing off the hills and mesas in the west. Tumbleweed was bouncing as high as a barn, smacking his church, skipping through the yard, embedding under the stairs that led to his deck. A storm was a fine and cleansing thing, he thought, not to be feared or avoided but welcomed as one would a cool finger touching one’s brow.

He heard the front door open a second time, and the wind cut through the chapel and blew a stack of hymnal sheets fluttering in the air. He set down his coffee cup but remained seated at the table. “I told y’all we were done,” he called into the chapel.

A small, muscular man appeared in the doorway. “Brought some friends with me,” Dennis Rector said. “You met them before, but they had masks on. Look, I’m just making a buck. Don’t take this as personal.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

ANTON LING OPENED the back door of her house to let in her cat and smelled the smoke inside the rain. She looked up into the bluffs and, in the blackness of the storm, saw a fire burning as bright and clean as the red point of flame on an acetylene torch. She dialed 911 and reported the fire, then got into her truck and headed down the dirt road for Cody Daniels’s house, a fire extinguisher bouncing on the passenger seat.

CODY DANIELS KNEW his fate was not up for discussion when he saw that the men who had followed Dennis Rector into the chapel had not bothered to mask their faces. What he had not anticipated was the severity of design they were about to impose on his person. They pulled back the velvet curtain on the stage in the chapel and lifted him above their heads, as college kids might at a fraternity celebration, trundling him on their extended arms and hands to the wood cross he had constructed for a passion play that had never become a reality. They were smiling as though Cody were in on the joke, as though it were a harmless affair after which they would all have a drink.

The man actually in charge was not Rector but a diminutive man who spoke in an accent that sounded like Russian. His chin was V-shaped, his teeth the color of fish scale, his nose beaked, his cheeks and neck unshaved, his maroon silk shirt unbuttoned on a chest that looked almost skeletal. He wore three gold chains on his neck and a felt hat cocked jauntily on his head. He had the face of either a goat or a pixie, although the purple feather in his hatband suggested a bit of the satyr as well.

“Have you seen my good friend the Preacher lately?” he asked.