Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“You don’t think much of us, do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“I don’t blame you. I want to tell you a couple of things, Ms. Ling. We have a file on you that’s three inches thick. I’ve tapped your phones and photographed you from a distance and looked with binoculars through your windows and invaded every other imaginable aspect of your privacy. Some of my colleagues have a genuine dislike of you and think you should have been deported years ago. The irony is you worked for the CIA before a lot of them were born. But my issue is not with them, it’s with myself.

“I want to apologize for the way I and my colleagues have treated you. I think you’re a patriot and a humanitarian, and I wish there were a million more like you in our midst. I think Josef Sholokoff was behind the invasion of your home. I also think we’ve failed miserably in putting his kind away. In the meantime, we’ve often concentrated our efforts on giving a bad time to people such as yourself.”

“Maybe you’re too hard on yourself, Mr. Riser.”

“One other thing: Be a friend to Sheriff Holland. He’s a lot like you, Ms. Ling. He doesn’t watch out for himself.”

“Sir, are you all right?”

“You might hear from me down the track. If you do, that’ll mean I’m doing just fine,” Riser said.

ETHAN RISER CLOSED his cell phone and continued up a deer trail that wound along the base of a butte with the soft pink contours of a decayed tooth. He passed the rusted shell of an automobile that was pocked with small-caliber bullet holes and beside which turkey buzzards were feeding on the carcass of a calf. The calf’s ribs were exposed and its eyes pecked out, its tongue extended like a strip of leather from the side of its mouth. The air was still cool from the storm, the scrub brush and mesquite a darker green in the shadow of the butte, the imprints of claw-footed animals fresh in the damp sand along the banks of a tiny stream. Ethan was sweating inside his clothes, his breath coming short in his chest, and he had to sit down on a rock and rest. Behind him was a young man dressed in pressed jeans and a white shirt with pockets all over it and canvas lug-soled shoes. He wore an unpretentious black-banded straw hat with the brim turned down and a western belt with a big, dull-colored metal buckle that fit flat against his stomach.

When the young man reached the rock where Ethan was sitting, he unslung a canteen from his shoulder and unscrewed the cap and offered Ethan a drink before drinking himself. “I got to be honest with you. I think this is a snipe hunt,” he said.

“Hard to say,” Ethan said, blotting his face with a handkerchief.

“That fellow was standing in the shade and wearing a hat when I took his picture. He could be anybody.”

“That’s why I want you to go back now. I’ve wasted enough of your time.”

“You shouldn’t be out here by yourself.”

“It beats twiddling my thumbs in a motel.”

“Let me treat you to lunch.”

“What’s farther up?”

“Jackrabbits and open space and some more hills. A game ranch or two, maybe one guy running cows. A gun club has a couple of leases where some oil-and-natural-gas guys bust skeet and drink whiskey. I think there might be a cabin that somebody uses during deer season.”

“Who might that be?”

“Not somebody anyone ever paid much mind to. Ethan, you don’t look well. Let’s go back.”

“I got no reason to. You’re the one on his honeymoon.”

“I shouldn’t have ever told you about that fellow we ran into. On the homely scale, he was just this side of a mud fence. About as harmless-looking, too. If this guy is a threat to national security, we’re all in deep doo-doo.”

“You also said he talked like he had a mouthful of molasses. Noie Barnum is from northern Alabama.”

“A Quaker from Alabama?”

“I grant you he’s a strange duck. But compared to Jack Collins, he’s as normal as it gets.”

“My folks have always lived here’bouts, and they haven’t heard any talk about hermits wandering around with Thompson machine guns.”

A single-engine plane passed overhead, its shadow racing across the treetops and boulders on the sunny side of a hill.

“It’s a fine day to be out and about, isn’t it?” Ethan said.

“I cain’t argue that.”

“Help me up, will you?”