Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

Jack Collins thumbed the goggles off his face and threw them aside. He reached behind the boulder and lifted up the Thompson and pointed it at Caleb’s midsection. “Why’d you wander in here, boy? Why’d you let the FBI use you?”

Caleb felt the muscles in his face flex, but no words came out of his mouth.

“You have cuffs or ligatures on you?” Jack Collins said.

“No.”

“Where’s the agent?”

“In a cool place out of the sun. Let him be.”

“What’s his name?”

“Riser.”

“Ethan Riser?”

“You know Ethan?” When Collins didn’t answer, Caleb said, “You killed the biker?”

The bumps and knots and sallow skin and unshaved jowls that constituted the face of Jack Collins seemed to harden into a mask, as though his breathing and all the motors in his head had come to a stop. His eyes became lidded, without heat or anger or emotion of any kind. Then his chest began to rise and fall. “Sorry to do this to you, kid,” he said.

“Buddy, before you—”

“Don’t talk.” Jack Collins’s eyes closed, and his mouth formed into a cone, as though he were devolving into a blowfish at the bottom of a dark aquarium, a place where he was surrounded by water that was so cold he had no feeling at all.

ETHAN WAS SITTING on a flat rock inside an alcove that had a sandy floor and was protected on the north side by a big sandstone boulder. He heard an abrupt sound inside the wind, like a burst of dirty thunder, and for a moment thought the plane with the sputtering engine had returned or the dirt biker had cranked up his machine and was gunning across the hardpan. Riser stood up and stepped from behind the boulder. Out of the white haze, he saw a figure walking toward him, a man wearing a leather vest with a panama hat slanted on his head, his face swollen with lumps that looked like infected insect bites, his trousers stuffed into the tops of his cowboy boots. The man was holding a Thompson submachine gun with his right hand. “Need to talk,” he said.

Riser stepped back quickly behind the boulder and pulled his semiautomatic from the holster on his hip.

“You hear me? It doesn’t have to end the way you think,” the man called out.

Ethan inched forward and looked around the edge of the boulder. The man with the Thompson was gone, probably up in the rocks from which he could follow a deer trail over the top of the alcove or remain where he was and wait for Ethan to come out in the open.

“You sick down there?” the man said from somewhere up in the piñon trees.

“Come down here and find out,” Ethan said.

“You’re not calling the shots, Mr. Riser.”

“Other people know where I am.”

“No, I think you’re out here on your own hook.”

“Where’s Caleb?” Ethan said.

“He’s not here.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s somewhere else.”

“You killed him?”

“I’m going to ask you a question. You need to think carefully before you answer. If you lie, I’ll know it. Are you the agent who burned me out?”

“No. What did you do to Caleb?”

“Did you order my house burned?”